Beer necessity: can a fit lifestyle include beer?

Men's Fitness, Feb, 1999 by Michael Bane

First, a quick scene:

I'm eating dinner at a trendy Atlanta watering hole, maybe 10 people sitting around the table. Among them are Pete Slosberg, creator of Pete's Wicked Ale; Charlie Papazian, the world's greatest home-brewer; and a host of other professional craft brewers. There are also a dozen pitchers of beer on the table (maybe a few more - things are a little vague here) and I'm listening to multiple lectures on malts, hops, degrees of carbonation, bitterness as measured on the ABU scale and other minutiae of craft brewing.

For my part, I'm trying very hard to keep from passing out into my plate of seafood pasta. I'm not even a full week back from mountain climbing in the Third World, living off tubes of sport gel and mole sauce, so my metabolism is confused. These guys drink beer like, well, water - lite water at that. The most I can contribute to the conversation is an occasional nod and a thoughtful grunt. As I drift toward unconsciousness, I detect slightly lifted eyebrows and expressions of disdain from the group. I know what they're all thinking: Are you sure he's a Beer Guy?

I am, in fact, a card-carrying Beer Guy - the editor of Zymurgy, the foremost magazine devoted to home brew, and pretty knowledgeable on the subject of that particular beverage. As country singer Tom T. Hall once crooned, I like beer.

I used to hate the stuff, but then I fell into triathlons. In Florida, where I began racing, all the races seem to be sponsored by beer companies. And triathletes don't have all that traditional "hale and hearty" baggage that seems to go with bicycle racing and running. Combine that with the heat, and you get a beer truck about five steps from the finish line at each race. Heck, at some of 'em, you could cross the finish line and collapse from heat prostration under a beer tap, which someone would obligingly turn on.

After one race, one of the companies brought in a darker beer, something out of the ordinary. I staggered across the finish timer, took three steps and got in line. That beer was a revelation - it had flavor, depth, complexity and thirst-quenching ability without being weak. Of course, I'd been going fiat-out for about 2 1/2 hours in 90-degree heat and probably would have found swamp water mixed with industrial runoff tasty.

After that, I became a hopeless beer experimenter - warm English ales, mud-brown stouts, obscure Central American beers, Italian beer that tasted suspiciously like old sweat from Tour de France riders, Belgian beers reeking of cranberries, German brews that could strip paint. My training partners came to dread the obligatory post-hammer trip to the bar. "Here he goes again," they'd say to the bemused barkeep. "Just bring him something that leaves a ring around the glass."

Granted, sometimes it gets a little hard to reconcile my fitness lifestyle with my beer lifestyle. I remember completing a cross-Florida bike ride, 170 miles in brain-killing heat, as part of a team of five riders. I was sitting on the curb with a bottle of suds, trying to remember how to get the cap off, when one of the other team riders walked over.

"After this healthy thing you've just done," he said, "how can you rationalize poisoning your body?"

"Good question," I replied, finally succeeding in getting the bottle open and taking that first cold sip.

I think my rationale bears repeating here: It's a question of balance. When I first started triathlons, I lived, ate, slept and breathed the sport. I raced every other weekend for four months a year, trained like a crazy person, kept a meticulous training log, got plenty of sleep and ate only things that were good for me. The net result was that I was frustrated and angry all the time. The longer I raced, and the more I shifted to other, higher-risk sports such as mountaineering and cave diving, the more I came to realize that my focused, type-A lifestyle wasn't causing the problem - it was the problem. I knew if I didn't find some kind of balance in my life, inevitably - on some cold, windswept rock or at the edge of a hard, black abyss - I would push myself that one extra step too far. And I wouldn't even see it coming.

These days, I can equally appreciate both the latest in carbon-fiber bicycle technology and the newest release from any one of Colorado's zillions of microbreweries. A hard day's hammering and savoring a couple of bottles of designer beer aren't mutually exclusive. You can train and race and still have a life.

Plus, I'm now privy to an array of worthless beer trivia. Did you know, for example, that there's a school of thought that holds beer responsible for all of civilization? Forget what they taught you in high school: Our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't give up their wanderings and become farmers to grow grain for bread - they needed that grain for beer. Plus, being a Beer Guy gives me something to think about when I race. At last year's Escape from Alcatraz triathlon, the only thing that got me through the last two miles of the run was visualizing a tall, cold glass of Anchor Steam, San Francisco's indigenous ale, waiting for me just a few more steps away.