About Me

In 1967 Bill Zucker began making a remarkable transformation. Back then Bill was thirty years old. He’d packed 210 pounds on his five-foot-ten-inch frame, partly through entertaining clients at one of the plush Manhattan restaurants where the company he worked for had an expense account. Bill would order a big, thick steak, swimming in its juices. He’d have mashed potatoes, with plenty of salt and pepper, and a towering slice of German chocolate cake for dessert. Later on, he’d stop by a bakery and get a cheese Danish for a late-afternoon snack. He was, in the words of the old saying, digging his own grave with a knife and fork.

The year before, in 1966, Bill’s father died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven. Bill’s doctor told him that if he wanted to live to see his three kids grow up he needed to make some major changes, right away. Bill wasn’t a smoker, which was good. He wasn’t a big drinker, like some of the clients he entertained during the heyday of the three-martini lunch. He was, however, sedentary. His doctor suggested taking up a new sport that was beginning to catch on: jogging. Fifty-two years later, Bill remembers the doctor’s exact words: “You rest, you rust.”

So he got moving. He bought a pair of Adidas, laced them up, and hit the streets of Queens, where he lived at the time, jogging as if his life depended on it. He kept it up, running in the first New York City Marathon in 1974. He finished a respectable 193 in a field of 450. By then he’d moved to New Jersey. That’s where he added road bicycling to his routine. He’s still at it, at age eighty-two. He’s a lean, fit 150 pounds and rides an average of 4,700 miles a year. He considers himself a success story, having been scared fit. He wants you to be scared fit, too.