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At My Buddy's Birthday Cookout Last June I Grabbed My End of a Cooler Full of Ice. It Did Not Move. I'm going to write this the way I would tell it. I'm not a writer. I drove a truck for 28 years. I write the way I talk. If you want flowery, this isn't the letter for you. If you want plain, keep reading. I'm 61. I'm a retired UPS driver. Started in 1996. Retired three years ago. I live in a small town in central Illinois with my wife Sue. We've been married 38 years. We have one daughter, one son-in-law, two grandkids, and a 13-year-old Australian shepherd named Buster. I'm on no prescription medications. I take a multivitamin. I take a low-dose aspirin my doctor told me I might as well take starting at 55. That's it. My bloodwork at my annual physical is what my doctor calls "boringly fine." I am, on paper, a healthy 61-year-old man. The paper has been lying to itself for about two and a half years. I want to tell you what was going on with me before the cooler, because the cooler doesn't make sense without it. I'm going to do it as a list. I think in lists. The UPS clipboard was a list. 1. The yard. I have about a third of an acre. I mowed it every Saturday from May to October for 22 years. It used to take me an hour and ten minutes. By the time I retired at 58, it was taking me an hour and forty. By the spring of the year I turned 60, it was taking me two hours and fifteen minutes. I started splitting the yard into two halves and doing the front Saturday and the back Sunday. 2. The shoveling. We get about 35 inches of snow a winter. I'd been shoveling our driveway since 1991. The winter I turned 60, I bought a snowblower. I told Sue it was because my back was bothering me. My back was fine. The shoveling was bothering me. 3. My hands at breakfast. For two winters by the time the cooler happened, I'd been wrapping both hands around my coffee mug at the kitchen table. Sue had noticed. She didn't say anything. I'd noticed too. I told myself it was the kitchen being cold. The kitchen wasn't cold. 4. The dog walk. We walk Buster twice a day. He's 13. He doesn't go fast. I had started cutting our route from a mile and a quarter to three quarters of a mile. I told Sue it was because Buster was getting old. Buster was fine. 5. The recliner. I started falling asleep in the recliner after dinner. Every night. I had not been a falling-asleep-in-the-recliner man at 56 or 57 or 58. By 60 I was a falling-asleep-in-the-recliner man. 6. My doctor. Dr. Banerjee had been telling me for two years that my bloodwork was fine. He kept reminding me I had driven a truck for 28 years and was 60 now, and that bodies recover from a working life on their own schedule. He wasn't wrong. He also wasn't telling me everything I was experiencing. He was telling me what he could see on the printout. He couldn't see the cooler coming. OK. The cooler. Vern Lambert turned 60 on a Saturday in June. Vern and I have been friends since 1987. He drove for a different package company. We met at a softball game where his team beat my team and we drank a beer after. His wife Carol threw him a birthday cookout. Their backyard. About 30 people. Burgers, dogs, three kinds of potato salad. The works. I got there at 1:30. The party was already going. Around 3 in the afternoon Vern came out of the garage carrying one end of a big plastic cooler. The kind that holds about 80 cans plus ice. It was full of beer and soda and ice from the gas station. He was carrying his end alone, with his back bent over and his face red. Carol called out: "Vern, get someone to help you with that!" I was the closest guy. I was 12 feet away. I said: "Vern, I got the other end." I walked over. I crouched down. I put my hands under the handle on my end. I lifted. Or — I tried to lift. What happened was this. I pulled up with my hands. The cooler did not move. I felt my back round forward and my shoulders come up and my hips not commit to the lift. I stood there in a kind of half-crouch. I looked at Vern. Vern was three months older than me. Vern had also driven a truck for 30-plus years. Vern's back had been worse than mine since the late nineties. Vern was holding his end and waiting on me. I stood up the rest of the way without lifting the cooler. I put my hand on the picnic table. I said: "Vern, hang on a second." He set his end down. He said: "You alright, Bob?" I said: "Yeah, just gimme a minute. Beer's heavier than it used to be." He laughed. Other people laughed. I went inside to use the bathroom. I stood at the bathroom sink for five minutes with the door locked. I looked at myself in the mirror. I'm a guy who lifted boxes for 28 years. I had just failed to lift a beer cooler at my buddy's birthday party. Sue had not seen it. Vern would not bring it up again. Nobody at the party was going to think about it twice. I was going to think about it for the rest of my life. I came out of the bathroom. I got a paper plate of food. I sat at a picnic table and ate. Vern and his nephew — a kid maybe 25 — carried the cooler over together about ten minutes later. I watched. I did not say anything for the rest of the party. I sat on the cooler thing for about ten days. I didn't tell Sue. I didn't tell my doctor. I didn't tell anybody. I just thought about it. I'd been telling myself for two years that I was a 61-year-old man with a bad back and a working life behind him. I was looking at it different now. A guy with a bad back can still lift a cooler. I had not been able to lift a cooler. A week and a half after the cookout, Sue's brother Dave stopped by on a Sunday afternoon to drop off tomatoes from his garden. Dave is 64. He's my brother-in-law. He's also one of my closest friends. He's been married to Sue's sister Linda for 41 years. Dave was a union electrician for 38 years. He retired two years ago. He's the kind of guy who shows up with tomatoes and stays for two hours. We sat on my back porch with a beer. I don't know why I told him about the cooler. I think I was tired of carrying it around alone. I told him. The whole thing. The pulling up. The not committing. The bathroom sink. The five minutes. He listened all the way through. Then he said: "Bob, can I tell you something?" I said: "Yeah." He said: "About two years ago I started feeling something pretty close to what you're describing. Not the same — bodies aren't the same. But close. My yard was taking too long. My hands were cold at breakfast in July. I had a thing happen at a job site where I had to ask a 28-year-old apprentice to carry a spool of wire I'd carried a thousand times. He didn't make a thing out of it. I sat in my truck for ten minutes after the job thinking about it." He took a sip of his beer. He said: "Linda's cousin Maureen had been telling me for about a year before that about a beetroot capsule she'd been taking. Maureen's husband had been doing something pretty close to what you're describing — slowing down, not bouncing back the way he used to. He'd added the capsule after a friend of his started taking it. He'd checked with his GP first. Maureen had been after Linda to mention it to me for a while. Linda hadn't because Linda doesn't like to push." He set his beer down. He said: "Bob, I'll tell you what I did. I went home from that job site and looked it up. The research on the compound in beets — they call it betalains — was real and was decades old. It wasn't a fad. I called my GP. The nurse came back and said the doctor said it was a sensible thing to add and would not interact with anything I was taking. I ordered a bottle. I've been taking it for two years now." I asked him the brand. He said: "Rosabella. The processing matters. The compound is sensitive to heat and most companies cook it off. Rosabella cold-presses at low temperatures. The beets are grown on small farms in Lancaster County. That's the one I take." He paused. He said: "I'm not telling you it'll fix your cooler problem. I'm telling you that the yard isn't taking me too long anymore and my hands aren't cold at breakfast and I lifted a spool of wire two weeks ago I was pretty sure I couldn't lift. I don't know what's done what. But that's what's true at my house." He drank the rest of his beer. He said: "Talk to your doctor first. That's the deal. You don't add a thing without that." I said: "Yeah." He left me a half a bag of tomatoes. I sat on the porch for another half hour after he drove off. I called Dr. Banerjee's office the next Tuesday. Not Sue. Me. I told the nurse what Dave had told me. I told her I was thinking about adding a beetroot capsule. I told her about the multivitamin and the aspirin and that those were the only things in my system. She put me on hold for four minutes. She came back and said: "Dr. Banerjee says beetroot has good research behind it for antioxidant support and for supporting healthy circulation. He says it's a sensible thing for you to add. He'd like you to keep doing what you're doing — the walking, the diet, what's there — and not change anything else. He'd like to see you at your next regular physical and hear how you're feeling. No interaction concern with the aspirin or the multivitamin." I thanked her. I sat at our kitchen table on Wednesday night after Sue went to bed and I read about beetroot for about an hour and a half. I'm not a research guy. I went where Dave had gone. The compound. The research. The processing. I ordered a bottle Thursday morning. It came Monday. I started taking two with my coffee on Tuesday. I didn't change anything else. I didn't tell Sue for the first month. OK. What I noticed. I want to be careful here because this is the part where guys writing letters like this start sounding like they're selling something. I'm not selling anything. I'm telling you what happened. I cannot tell you the capsule fixed anything. I'm not a doctor. I'm not in healthcare. I drove a truck for 28 years and I'm 61 years old and I'm telling you what I noticed, the way Dave told me what he had noticed. Three weeks in. The yard. First Saturday in August I mowed the whole yard — front and back — in an hour and fifty minutes. It had been taking me two halves of two days. I sat on the back porch with a glass of water after I finished. I looked at the lawn. I'd done it in one go. I didn't think about it again until Sunday morning, when I realized I didn't have a yard to finish. Six weeks in. The dog. Early September I came back from the morning walk and Sue said: "You guys were gone a while." We had done the full mile and a quarter. Both of us. Buster had been fine. I had been fine. I had not done the full route in over a year. Two months in. My hands. A morning in mid-October. Cold morning, maybe 38 degrees. I had the kitchen window open a crack for the dog. I was drinking my coffee. I had one hand on the mug. The other hand was holding the newspaper. I had not held a coffee mug with one hand in two winters. Three and a half months in. The cooler. We had a thing at Vern's house in mid-November. Carol's mother's 85th birthday. About 20 people. Vern was carrying a big covered roaster from his kitchen to the garage where the buffet was set up. It was full of mashed potatoes for 20 people. He was struggling with it. I said: "Vern, I got the back." I walked over. I grabbed the back handles. I lifted my end. It wasn't light. It was a roaster full of mashed potatoes for 20 people. It was heavy. I lifted it. I walked with my end out to the garage. I set it down on the buffet table without making a face. Vern set his end down. He looked at me. He said: "Bob, you been hitting the gym?" I said: "No." He said: "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it." Four months in. Sue. I told Sue about the bottle on a Sunday morning in December. I told her about Dave and the beer cooler and the bathroom sink and the call to Dr. Banerjee. She didn't say anything for a minute. Then she said: "Bob. I noticed the yard in August." I said: "Yeah?" She said: "I noticed the dog walks in September. I noticed your hands in October." I said: "How come you didn't say anything?" She said: "Because you didn't. I figured you'd say something when you were ready." She put a hand on top of mine on the kitchen table. She said: "Can I take it too?" I said: "Yeah." She started the next morning. Six months in. The annual physical. I saw Dr. Banerjee in January. He looked at the bloodwork. He looked at me. He said: "Bob, the picture this year is in better shape than I've seen in a couple of years. The numbers are good. The other markers I track are good. Whatever you've added, keep doing it." I told him. He said: "That's reasonable. Keep at it. Keep walking. Eat your vegetables. Come see me in a year." He paused. He said: "I'll be honest with you. I've been telling you for two years that some of what you were noticing was just the way bodies age after a working life. I want to be straight that I'm not entirely sure why this year is different. But it is. So don't change what you're doing." I drove home. I sat in the driveway for a couple of minutes before I went inside. I thought about Dave on the porch. I thought about Vern at the buffet table. I thought about a beer cooler in a backyard in June. A year later. Vern. Vern turned 61 last week. Carol threw him another cookout. Same backyard. Some of the same people. Vern came out of the garage around 3 in the afternoon carrying his end of the same plastic cooler. I said: "Vern, I got the other end." I walked over. I crouched down. I lifted. I walked the cooler from the garage to the picnic area with my buddy. We set it down together on the patio. Vern stood up. He looked at me. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. I went and got us both a beer out of it. P.S. If you're a guy somewhere in your fifties or sixties and your version of the cooler has happened to you — and you know what I mean by your version of the cooler — the first thing to do isn't to order a bottle of anything. The first thing is to call your doctor. Tell them what's going on. Let them rule out what needs ruling out. Some of what's happening might be exactly what they've been telling you. Some of it might not be. You won't know until somebody who can look at the whole picture hears what you're describing. P.P.S. If you decide to try Rosabella, do what Dave told me to do. Call the doctor's office first. One phone call. Four minutes. Most nurses will get you an answer the same day. Then take two capsules with water in the morning. Don't change anything else. Just add this one thing. Give it a few weeks before you decide anything. Some guys notice something in the first two or three weeks. Some take longer. Bodies are different. Be patient with yours. P.P.P.S. Rosabella has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied for any reason, every penny back. No questions asked. That's a sensible policy. It gives you long enough to actually see whether it helps before you decide. P.P.P.P.S. Rosabella is a small operation. Beets grown on small farms in Lancaster County. Cold-pressed at low temperatures so the betalains stay intact rather than getting cooked off the way they do in most processing. The harvest is once a year and they bottle on their own schedule, so I keep an extra bottle in the cabinet. They've got a multi-bottle option I went with myself the second time I ordered. Worth a look. P.P.P.P.P.S. I'm not the kind of guy who writes letters. I told Sue I was going to write this on a Saturday morning over breakfast. She said: "Bob, who are you writing it for?" I said: "Some other guy at some other cookout who can't lift his end of a cooler." She said: "That's a fair thing to write a letter for." So that's what this is. If you're him — if you've been standing at a bathroom sink for five minutes looking at yourself after something embarrassing happened in front of your buddies — I see you. I was you in June of two years ago. You don't have to keep being him. Talk to your doctor. Add what you decide to add. Be patient. Give it some time. If your cooler comes around again — and if you do this right, it probably will — pick up your end. That's the whole reason I wrote this. Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.