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Every era has its health fads. In the 1920s, extreme calorie restriction got an assist from cigarettes. Buns of Steel VHS tapes sold like hotcakes in the late ‘80s. Just a few years ago, wellness went in a whole new, strangely amorphous direction, in which guilty pleasures could easily be excused under the guise of “self-care.” But we are now witnessing a sea change on the health scene, thanks largely to Dr. Peter Attia’s bestseller Outlive, which investigates the “science and art to longevity.” This year, when it comes to wellness, looking good is coming in second to lowering our biological age. Washboard abs are not the point; they are the byproduct of defying death. 

Yet, the basic rules of health haven’t changed. Doctors still advise us to eat clean, exercise regularly, and take care of our mental health. It’s just that the game has become more sophisticated. We can invest in wearables—Oura rings to help us understand our sleep patterns or continuous glucose monitors to track our blood sugar levels. We can even scan our bodies from head to toe to detect disease. But should we? That is one of the questions we asked as we sought out Dallas health experts to help us understand how we can live our best lives, for as long as humanly possible.

A couple straight out of an ’80s John Hughes movie walks hand-in-hand back to their car after an intense workout. Wearing matching white polos with pastel sweaters loosely (but expertly) tied around their shoulders, they dab sweat from their brows with white towels. They walk in slow motion—not because time is slowing down to make their matching haircuts blow perfectly in the wind but because Herb has that knee thing that’s been acting up. Here in the Cooper Aerobics Center parking lot, they’re still the “cool kids,” albeit in their 60s now.

You’ve mindlessly passed this manicured landscape countless times as you sped down Preston on your way to sit in LBJ bumper-to-bumper. In addition to the medical buildings, there are a number of other facilities on the clinic’s campus—the Cooper Fitness Center, a hotel, a restaurant, a spa, tennis courts, a pond frequented by Canadian geese—that make it look more like a country club. But the Cooper Aerobics Center has been in the business of health and wellness for more than 50 years. Today, the center includes six health and wellness companies and one nonprofit. 

Cooper Aerobics Center offers breast health testing, preventive and cosmetic dermatology, 24/7 concierge medicine, gastroenterology and cardiology specialists, optometry evaluations, sleep medicine, and a broad range of nutrition services. Patients can receive test results, an in-depth picture of their health, and an action plan to improve it, all in the same day. Staff want you to “reach and sustain the best health possible.” 

But the most fascinating part of my tour of the Cooper campus by far was the Cooper Fitness Center. The golden-years gym rat culture is unmatched. The reason: a lot of the AARP crowd have been Cooper Fitness Center members since the clinic opened, in 1970. Their children and grandchildren are now members, too. 

The BMW Dallas Marathon is back once more to take over downtown and East Dallas. And although the forecast is predicting a rainy Friday and Saturday, the marathon has a full roster of heats, dashes, and runs all weekend long. If you’re participating, have fun and stay safe out there. If you’re not much of a runner, don’t forget about all the road closures. Either way, we all have things we need to know about marathon weekend. 

At 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday, every inch of Einstein’s Bagels in Colleyville was filled with beaming faces. People dressed in workout attire lined up to place orders while others shuffled chairs around to form little groups throughout the space. Children were laughing above the buzzing sound of light chatter. This large gathering of strangers and friends had just finished a run along a nearby trail, a small act done weekly that has changed lives.

This is the Dallas Muslim Running Club, or DMRC, a community of more than 100 North Texans that meets every Saturday morning to do what the name says: run. People of all ages are welcomed and trained by coaches certified by the Road Runners Club of America. This helps even the field among seasoned runners, people who may be running for the first time, and everyone in between.

After a quick 15 minute warm-up at 8 a.m, attendees split into three groups with total mileage tiering down. Once an hour flies by, all groups gather to cool down and stretch. Some members leave to go about the rest of their day, but most gather for breakfast or brunch. This routine happens weekly.

“I think people are so happy with this gathering in a very communal sense. Sometimes even the people who don’t really want to run just come to run,” said Lema Sbenaty. 

Sbenaty, a Syrian American optometrist and co-founder of DMRC, has a deep passion for marathons and running. She and co-founder Ariel Del Fierro came up with the idea over dinner. They were discussing how immigrants are so focused on surviving and integrating into the country that they weren’t paying enough attention to their health. They want DMRC to fill that void.

On the avenue where I grew up, I liked to dam the water in the gutters. A neighboring photographer had a darkroom in his garage; the trickle from his hose was my riparian source. If I had a crew of other boys helping me, we could dam the entire street. When our fathers came home at sunset, our dams failed anticlimactically under their tires.

I did not become a civil engineer; I’m a lawyer, engineering solutions to disputes I often might have stoked. But I have always found dams interesting. When my law firm went remote and much of Dallas shut down, I vowed to ride my bicycles to, on, over, down, and around our dams.

The early lockdown rides were cold. Then, infernal. And now, a year into this daily habit, this monastic ritual, freezing once more. My attire has ranged from layers and beanies to just some shorts.

Audio and video calls continued, but with more diverse background noise or view, my mute listening skills increased, and, over time, I shrank. As any cyclist will, I fell a time or two, on crushed limestone and hopping a rushing grate. I learned to see things better, smell a little keener, and I stopped falling.

Living and working in Dallas since 1991, I have run or ridden around White Rock Lake hundreds of times, but besides whizzing over Lake Lewisville or Ray Hubbard on interstate highways or seeing Lake Grapevine as I descended into DFW Airport, the rest of our reservoirs were a mystery to me.

All three of my bikes are graded for mountains, which helps when ascending bumpy earth-layered dams and concrete spillways, navigating surprising horse trails, and evading dogs patrolling pastured fields. But I was around water. Vast. Blue. If not deep, at least wide. Here, in North Texas. Wind-swept by noon; weirdly still in the early morning. It was not always easy to find the lakes. Much of our lakeshore is privately owned. I learned to start with the dam, ride up and down and along it, reconnoiter the area, and then branch out, riding through pastures or trailer parks.

Dallas has a water problem. We always have. Perhaps we always will. We keep growing. Our ground and surface water does not. But here we are, thirsty as ever.

The Spanish explorer Alonso de Léon named this inauspicious river La Santísima Trinidad, or the Most Holy Trinity, in 1690. Perhaps it was. Not now. Most muddy and stinky, maybe.

Knotted up in a Cowtown mediation once, the mediator proposed the lawyers hit one golf ball each over their Trinity to break the impasse. It is a very easy half-wedge, if you care to know. But let’s be honest: in the Trinity’s 700-mile traverse from near the Red River to Galveston Bay, there may not be a less attractive stretch than the straight line of its diverted, fabricated run through Dallas. For years, I’ve run on and inside the levees, and the only thing I don’t look at is the lonely, silty river, flanked by weeds and detritus.

Still, we sit in a fertile flood plain. The four forks of the Trinity River—West, Clear, Elm, and East—have been dammed into lovely lakes, refuges of wildlife and fresh air; after each dam lies a stretch of riverine utopia, a relic of what might have been.

My rides took me to impounded waters like Eagle Mountain Lake, Lake Weatherford, Benbrook, the newish Ray Roberts Lake, the difficult Lake Lewisville, and the strange Lake Ray Hubbard, which is surprisingly (to me) owned by Dallas Water Utilities, providing water to millions.

My quest took me to pump stations, too. It turns out DWU has seven in the downtown Dallas area alone, animating the flow of precious water along almost 5,000 miles of water mains, with almost 20 pressure zones, keeping showers pleasantly hard-hitting. But I found it tricky to find or approach many of the pump stations, and my true holy grail: the pipelines tracking from places like Lake Tawakoni. The headwaters of the Sabine River were subsumed into Tawakoni in 1960. Here, the locals were inquisitive about my bike.

“Hey,” said a taciturn man who owned a store I visited one day.

“Hi.”

“You got disc brakes on your bicycle?”

“I do.”

“That’s pretty cool,” he said.

The bridge that cuts across Tawakoni is an absolute cyclist’s dream: wide shoulder, minimal roadkill, and low guardrails, affording a full lake view.

Riding the border forests around 1943 vintage Lake Texoma can be spectacular, dwarfing 926,000-acre-foot Tawakoni; triple the capacity. While the Red River does not carry a large volume of water at normal flow, it is clearly a real border.

On a bike, you can find quicksands near trails; you can see the changing channels and quick shifts from bank to bank: a great dividing line of history.

Strictly distant from humans, I formed friendships with animals: mules, stallions, bulls, lambs, and cows. I cannot be certain, but it seemed as if some remembered me and even ran to give greetings. The dogs upstream are real dogs; territorial and ready to race a man on a bike. There is a fine line between a playful chase and that moment when you are up on your pedals, finding that extra gear, and feeling a Rottweiler at your calves.

Crossing county lines and train tracks and deep creeks in between the northern lakes revealed the arbitrary nature of district lines and regulation. I even found spaces in between counties and states. The Trinity River forms the boundary lines of 13 counties, but they’re not clear boundaries.

I made a diversion to lakes Granbury and Possum Kingdom. Out west, it is easier to imagine what the early pioneers in their cumbersome wagons saw: water for oxen and horses and themselves. The settler simply could not deviate far from water in this tough, new country. Traveling at a rate of 3 or 4 mph all day, and camping at night near grass and water, these avatars had to cross fords or ferry the rivers. If you could find a safe place to cross, you had located gold, or chalkstone (Dallas) and limestone (Fort Worth) fords across a fickle prairie river.

Thus, we see the paradox. It was because the crossing was easier, in the dry summer or winter, in shallow water, with a compacted riverbed and less severe banks, that Dallas was chosen by the early settlers and the Native peoples before them.

The first settlement in Dallas was located by a spring. Then, from 1837 to 1914, water was pumped out of basins and boiled for purification. In 1914, a Turtle Creek filtration plant was built. We will continue to pump, and impound, and elevate, and draw, and pipe in our water. We are a great city on the plains, sited at the crossroads of land routes rather than waterways. The Caddo, Wichita, and Bidai tribes trod this watershed.

A trading post in a riparian corridor so wildly unpredictable that all the Army Corps’ horses and engineers are still puzzling over the pieces, trying to put us together again. The old Commerce Street ferry and the long viaduct foretold airports and distribution centers. Early Dallas was led by wild promoters, not pessimistic farmers, change artists who dreamed of a watery future. But by the late 19th century, mayors called the Trinity “our dead river.” And the flood of 1908 ended all dreams.

After the deluge, the river crested at more than 50 feet deep and almost 2 miles wide. Sheds, barns, outhouses, pigs, and cows floated by for days; Oak Cliff was reachable only by boat. Embarrassment is too mild a word for how Dallas felt.

After all debate was settled, the Houston Street Viaduct opened in 1912 to 58,000 spectators. Dallas went further, as we know, changing the course of the river, and putting up levees in 1932, which mostly did their job (with tests in 1935, 1941, 1990, and recently). The old riverbed became known as the Trinity Industrial District (later renamed the Design District, rebuilt by aptly named developers PegasusAblon).

In 1973, the citizens of Dallas finally put a nail in the canal coffin: 56 percent voted against a Trinity shipping corridor. Dallas would go forward without a beloved or usable or important river, joining an odd list of major cities: Tehran, Milan, Jerusalem, Indianapolis, Orlando, and Bangalore.

The Trinity is pretty before it arrives in Dallas, but it is easily distracted, diverted, and even drained. Part of the problem is how fecund the Trinity is. Ride alongside it and you will see thick hardwood forests of burl walnuts and live oaks, elms, sycamores, willows, junipers, and mesquites. They drop trunks and brush into tributaries and the clogged wetlands along swales and rivulets. It is a subtle, uneasy landscape, this swath of Texas.

Every mile north of LBJ, the water grows a bit clearer.

We all know that bonds have evaporated like the mists of Texoma, the Trinity River Corridor Plan was reborn as the Balanced Vision Plan, and horse parks and toll roads and wildlife refuges and whitewater kayak parks have been tossed around like a political football by philanthropists and the best urban planners in the world, to no avail. The river is still too straight to be a river, but rebending it would be very expensive, because the scale is massive. The Trinity watershed is gargantuan. Only a ride or hike up and down the earthen dams reveals it.

Have we grabbed the tail of a tiger? Do we know when to stop? In 1961, the Texas Board of Water Engineers delivered a wonky report named “A Plan for Meeting the 1980 Water Requirements of Texas.” It concluded Texas had adequate water to meet 1980’s needs but would require far more than the 14 reservoirs under construction at that time. The board called for 45 new reservoirs. Reading the old report, I realized we could change the dates, multiply by three, and it would all still be true.

We can keep building ridges, eddies, wetlands, and ponds; a toy kingdom of topography. For us to believe in the latest, greatest plan for our silty, sultry river, we are required to engage in what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the suspension of disbelief. The Trinity Park Conservancy has my donations, because I have taken their “semblance of truth” about the 200-acre Harold Simmons Park, and I have dived into Michael Van Valkenburgh’s fantastic tale, just as I dammed the wet roads of Cape Town where I grew up. I have suspended judgment on the implausibility of the narrative of a playful and egalitarian gathering place in our vast flood plain.

For a year or more, I have explored this trickling, flooding, ambivalent watershed, and if we decide we want to add cafes and performance spaces, I will enjoy the spectacle, but I will carry in my mind the dammed reservoirs upstream and wonder about the scale of what we can do, and ought to do.

First and foremost, we need to get outside and move along our waterways and understand where we live and what was done for us to be here.

A Riparian To-Do List

We will never have our blue Danube or tranquil Thames, but if the Trinity is aptly named, we can have three rivers in one: a cleaner stretch in the shadow of downtown, a better-visited series of dams upstream, and a wilder southern stream in a byzantine wood wonderland. Intricate investment schemas are needed, but so are connections to the actual physical place we live.

1. We need a cleaner Trinity with less bacteria. When I was in Copenhagen and Stockholm, I learned you could drink the water as you swam in the harbor. Before scoffing, why not?
2. We’ve got to keep pumping. The water that we see does not predominantly flow within the banks of the Trinity. Our creeks and channels and groundwater arrive all at the same time, and we would be underwater without our massive pumping systems. Three new pump stations, at a cost of about $400 million, are being added to a system lagging since the ’60s.

   

3. We need to shore up our dams. As I rode down a dozen embankments, I was mindful that clay and sand shrink and swell with our volatile weather. Living a daily bike life, I was struck by the extremes of our climate. Even as a boy, damming our avenue, I realized when the top gets heavier than the bottom, gravity wins. And these mounds of earth hold back over 2 billion tons of water. Seepage and uplift are the risks; a rapid rise in the reservoir can exploit the risk of erosion and structural distress. A cavity will form. A sand boil, or whirlpool in boggy weeds, is the first clue. If it forms a “pipe,” we are in high-danger situation. Just as I did as a boy, we would have to build a cofferdam, a dam to save the dam.
4. We need to expand the state parks in the watershed: Piney forest hikes, shoreline trails, beaches and paddleboard stands, and, yes, bicycle paths. Commerce has never had a problem thriving in our crossroads city. But we need green spaces to connect us. On a non-lake day, I rode down Lamar, turned left on Al Lipscomb Way, across Cesar Chavez, left again on Malcolm X Boulevard, and north to Deep Ellum. On a bicycle, the distance from the casual abundance of Uptown to the south side is huge: a million miles in one.
5. We should preserve the ribbons of trees along the river and rivulets, shore up the tributaries, and add access for cyclists. We pedalers tend to stop at some point and buy tacos and a cold drink, easily distanced from each other and tied to fresh air. A bicycle fosters connection a car or mere feet cannot; traveling 20 miles is feasible without being in marathon shape, but you don’t miss details when cruising at 20 mph.

This story originally ran in the April issue of D Magazine with the title “Finding Another Gear.” Harry Jones is a senior shareholder in the Dallas office of the international labor law firm of Littler Mendelson. Write to [email protected].

When COVID-19 first arrived in Dallas and the shelter-at-home order took effect, all of North Texas’ scheduled blood drives were canceled. As a result, the American Red Cross experienced an unprecedented shortage of blood. We urged you, our readers, to consider donating once you felt safe to do so. Now, we’re urging you again.

This February, record-breaking temperatures and winter storms forced the cancelation of over 10,000 blood and plasma drives nationwide. The American Red Cross is asking all healthy North Texans–especially those with type O blood–to help replenish our local supply. Without donations, many of our medically vulnerable neighbors won’t receive the lifesaving care they need.

Dallas Yoga Center has long been a favorite of ours. The 30-year-old Lemmon Avenue studio has been named a D Best several times. The studio temporarily closed its doors in March due to city mandates, and its founders quickly pivoted from a weekly schedule of more than 70 in-person classes to about 40 virtual classes.

Soon after the shelter-in-place order took effect, the studio saw a dire need for mental health resources in our community. Dallas Yoga Center’s founders decided to give back by helping essential workers decompress with yoga and meditation. On May 6, Dallas Yoga Studio launched its CARE4 Initiative to give these workers free access to its online class library. The initiative is directly funded by the studio’s loyal members, who kept their memberships even when the physical location was closed.

Driving south on the Dallas North Tollway, approaching Oak Lawn, a cluster of Jeffersonian-style redbrick buildings stands to the left. One of the northernmost buildings houses the international headquarters of Gold’s Gym, a global chain with 700 locations in 29 countries. The fitness giant was forced to permanently close both of its local gyms — in Uptown and Preston Center — on April 15.

“As our global community continues to navigate these difficult and uncertain times, we want to provide consistent updates regarding the impact of COVID-19 on our gyms,” wrote Adam Zeitsiff, president and CEO of Gold’s Gym, to its members across the globe. “Today this includes sharing the news that the COVID-19-related closures have caused us to reassess the viability of some company-owned Gold’s Gym locations and make the difficult decision to permanently close about 30 gyms across the United States.”

All Gold’s Gym locations, whether corporate-owned or franchised, have been temporarily closed in accordance with directions from local and state governments and public health officials. Gold’s Gym froze all membership dues at no cost to customers, which, no doubt, caused serious issues concerning financial solvency. (This presumably forced the closures.) 

As Dallas-Fort Worth focuses on preventing the spread of coronavirus, the nation’s blood supply is at an all-time low due to blood drive cancelations. The result could be catastrophic.

“This is really an unprecedented situation,” says Jan Hale of The American Red Cross. “The continued impacts on our blood supply in the coming weeks may lead to delays in essential medical care.”

Highly vulnerable patients are most at risk, such as those who have sustained life-threatening injuries, are undergoing surgeries, or are in treatment for long-term medical conditions. Though community blood drives are being canceled, you can donate independently at a blood donation facility. Blood drives are considered ‘essential infrastructure’ under the new Shelter in Place mandate.

“We are highly recommending that donors make appointments,” says Hale. This helps the facilities prepare for each drive and control the number of donors in the space.

Last weekend, before Dallas banned dining inside of restaurants and drinking at bars, it was business as usual at the Midnight Rambler. The subterranean craft cocktail salon at Tim Headington’s Joule Hotel downtown was open until it wasn’t, which left its staff wondering about next steps. Sources tell D Magazine that leadership left employees mostly in the dark with little communication.

It is one of more than 15 concepts owned and operated by Headington Cos. that will be permanently or temporarily closed as Dallas enacts public health measures aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus. According to multiple sources, as many as 400 employees have been laid off or furloughed. The news was first reported last week by Central Track.

Employees like Jose Gonzales, the lead bartender at Midnight Rambler, suspected something like this may have been on the horizon. “It would have helped a lot as far as having a little more clear view of what was going on,” he says. “Until somebody tells us anything we still act like everything’s normal and that was the case, they just didn’t budge…they acted like everything was normal which is definitely very ominous. … You kind of start kind of realizing it’s getting closer.”

It is all the more startling considering the years that Headington spent making downtown his own cultural playground, first by turning 1927’s Dallas National Bank Building into the Joule Hotel. From there came restaurants and upscale retail department stores, most notably Forty Five Ten, which Headington purchased in 2015. He extended his reach into the Design District, commissioning a sculpture from artist Daniel Arsham to link the Italian restaurant Sassetta and the upscale sports bar Wheelhouse. He demolished a century old building across from the Joule during a Cowboys game and replaced it with a giant eyeball designed by the Chicago artist Tony Tasset. Every year, the Dallas Art Fair is bookended by a highly programmed bash in the courtyard in front of that sculpture.

Headington was an early bettor on a post-Recession downtown Dallas that had not yet seen an influx of new residents, remodeled hotels, and pricy bars. You could love or hate it, but Headington had a vision for the city. That vision is now gone in a flash. 

No surprise that air pollution is bad for your lungs and heart. But how about your waistline? UNT drops some new knowledge:

Amie Lund, a cardiovascular toxicology researcher with the University of North Texas, has found that exposure to certain air pollutants may cause weight gain, especially when coupled with a high-fat diet.

Lund is investigating how pollution from automobile exhaust affects the growth and signaling of fat cells called adipocytes. She determined car exhaust can trigger responses in the body that can lead to increased adipocyte growth and inflammation, which are associated with obesity and cardiovascular disease.

“When people think of the root causes of obesity they often think of genetics and diet,” Lund said. “But, there are external factors, such as environmental pollutants, that stress the systems of our body constantly and may play a role in contributing to diseases like obesity.”

Inhaling automobile and diesel exhaust alters signals generated and received by the fat cells. This can cause these cells to grow 12 to 25 percent larger in size or even increase in number, according to Lund’s research.

“Cells in the body talk,” Lund said. “The signals sent and received govern the basic activity of cells in the organ systems of the body. These signals are chemicals, and like all forms of communication, they can be distorted.”