When Ryan Bingham (1 million frequent flyer miles), a 35-year-old consultant with Denver-based Integrated Strategic Management, waxes poetic about his business travels, you almost believe him. "Planes and airports are where I feel at home," he says. "Everything — the dry, recycled air alive with viruses; the salty food that seems drizzled with warm mineral oil; the aura-sapping artificial lighting — has grown dear to me over the years. … I love the restaurants and snack nooks near the gates, stacked to their heat lamps with whole-wheat mini-pizzas and gourmet caramel rolls. I even enjoy the suite hotels built within sight of the runways on the ring roads, which are sometimes as close as I get to the cities that my job requires me to visit."
When Matt Goldman (1 million frequent flyer miles), a 32-year-old principal with Chicago-based Technology Solutions Company, does the same, you wonder if he's serious. "If the hotel gym is subpar, I can do workouts that require minimal equipment and space," he says. "I have a comprehensive push-up workout, and if there's anything nearby resembling a chin-up bar, I'm in good shape. I have an exercise tube, which looks like surgical tubing. They come in varying degrees of thickness, which provide varying degrees of resistance. There are probably 20 different exercises you can do very easily in a hotel room that simulate bench presses, leg presses, shoulder exercises, and more."
Yet Bingham is fiction, the main character in Walter Kirn's sharply enjoyable novel, Up in the Air (Doubleday, 2001), while Goldman is rock-hard fact. For most consultants, the realities of healthy business travel lie somewhere in between. Even as they pass on airport food and maintain impressive fitness regimens while darting from Boston to Brussels to Bangkok, most consultants emphasize that moderation is the key to healthy traveling.
"I look at food as one of the advantages of traveling," says Mike Schroeck (travels 175 to 200 days a year), the 46-year-old global leader for iAnalytics with PwC Consulting in Chicago. He jogs about 50 miles a week, and watches what he eats (no red meat) while maintaining a healthy appetite for fine food. "I certainly enjoy nice meals," he adds. "I stick with seafood and chicken. You have to keep an eye on your diet, but I'll also have dessert once in a while."
Eat to Win
Schroeck and Goldman each swear by energy bars, an on-the-road staple that marks departure from the cocktails-and-appetizer diet of a bygone era. "Twenty years ago, we would go out for drinks and hors d'oeuvres," says Phillip Hornthal (American Executive Platinum member, United Executive Premiere member, Delta Silver Medallion member), 51, managing partner of Inward Strategic Consulting's Chicago office. "That would translate to starchy fried foods and beer."
These days, Hornthal sticks to vegetables and an occasional glass of red wine. A few years ago, he and his project team dieted together during a long-term assignment. "We followed a modified Atkins diet that took a low-carb, high-protein approach. The other five members on the project term served as your conscience. We asked waiters not to bring bread to the table, found restaurants that offered omelets with the right vegetables, and made sure that the concierge would have strawberries for us."
It worked. Hornthal lost 20 pounds during the six-month assignment, thanks to the teamwork.
While shedding unwanted pounds may be an attractive traveling objective, Andy Core, an Arkansas-based exercise physiologist who founded Core Wellness Seminars, cautions frequent flyers against aiming too high. "When they're on the road, it's all about maintenance," he says. "To maintain your weight, you need only to perform 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three days a week. It doesn't have to be 30 minutes at once. Accumulating 30 minutes in a day three times a week provides the same benefit as hitting the treadmill for 30 minutes."
Thirty minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week counts as one of Core's Rule of Threes. The others — drinking 30 ounces of water before and after 3 p.m., and eating a snack at 3 p.m. each day — are even more pivotal for road warriors.
"On the road, you tend not to eat as frequently as you do at home, but you eat larger meals," Core notes. "For travelers, the most important meal of the day is the 3 p.m. snack. Typical Americans eat 80 percent of their calories after 6 p.m., which is the formula for fat gain. Your metabolism peaks around 3 p.m. and then subsides, as does your activity level. So, that mid-afternoon snack helps to eliminate the afternoon lull and gives you the willpower to eat a lighter dinner."
Core also notes that dehydration stimulates appetites and depresses energy levels. "If you are even 1 percent dehydrated, you can expect a 10 percent decline in your mental and physical energy," he adds. "And if you let yourself get 2 percent dehydrated, that results in a 25 percent reduction in mental and physical energy."
Consultants committed to healthy travel have their own rules. Schroeck takes several vitamins. Goldman picks up Fig Newtons when he can't replenish his stock of PowerBars. Nancy Katris (200,000 air miles per year), a 37-year-old Accenture marketing director based in San Francisco, avoids all forms of caffeine and rarely flies without a bunch of grapes.
"Just say no" seems to be the underlying rule for maintaining healthy dieting habits on the go. "Americans are very good at that, because you have vast portions of food in this country yet most people who maintain a sensible diet eat a quarter of their meal and then push the rest away," says Mark Austen (travels once a week), 52, the London-based global leader of PwC Consulting's financial services area. "I've adopted that sort of habit. There are also a lot of carbohydrates consumed through booze. I think that you can easily drink too much. It's always good to have a glass of water for a before-meal drink rather than have alcohol."
Fast Food, Low Fat
Even the healthiest consultants sometimes find themselves stranded in airport fast-food alcoves during lengthy flight delays. That's when what Goldman describes as "strategic consumption habits" require an inspiring makeover. "On the food front, I try to employ discipline in my eating habits," says the Peter Drucker of road health. "My goal is to reduce unnecessary fat, while eating a little bit of fat, protein, and carb at every meal. On the road, it is a bigger challenge, and it doesn't always work."
As a result, Goldman has developed selection techniques to navigate the menus of the fast-food joints that saturate most airports:
On McDonald's: "You can get an Egg McMuffin, no cheese. I know that violates some kind of New World Order, but if you remove the cheese, the rest of it is semi-decent: eggs, lean meat, and bread. It's not horrible for you. If you don't have anything else, it's sustenance. It's not helping you, but it's not hurting you."
On Chick-fil-A: "Get a grilled chicken sandwich. Have them strip down everything on there that isn't a vegetable or in its natural state. That way, you're semi-healthy. You get a bun, chicken, and lettuce and tomato. And then you can manage your own condiment intake. Mayo is what kills you. Mayo and cheese are the big no-nos on the road."
On Taco Bell: "For a consultant, Taco Bell is a staple. It's cheap, you can get a ton of food, and they're everywhere, especially in airports. Whatever you do, strip down the cheese. Order a chicken taco without any cheese or any of the goopy sauce. Get it grilled. Or get the bean burritos without cheese."
Acing Airworld
Add airport meals to mayo and cheese, and you have the evil axis of travel food. "I spend my air travel life trying to avoid food," says Austen. "I look the other way. I eat once I'm on the ground and tend to think that's my prize for abstaining."
Austen does partake in aspirin on long flights. "It thins the blood," he says. "It may be psychosomatic, but I find that I'm not as tired after long flights. And my eyes aren't so bloodshot."
He also makes sure that transportation awaits once his flight touches down. "I try to minimize the stress of connections," he says. "I always try to arrive early for flights. I know what I'm going to do when I arrive. I find that really contributes to my general well-being."
Planes have the opposite effect on a consultant's well-being. Core reports that the air on most passenger jets averages 14 percent humidity, which is normally drier than the air in the Sahara Desert. That aridity prevents eyes, noses, and mouths from capturing germs before they enter fliers' systems.
Travel Fit & Healthy: Experts Share Their Secrets (Fodor's, 2001) identifies the following tips for combating germs and dryness on flights:
• Wash your hands and keep them away from your face, and drape your own clean pillowcase or towel over the headrest and/or the airline pillow (which are not freshly laundered for each flight).
• Use a saline nasal spray and/or cover your nose with a damp cotton handkerchief. "This may look a little silly," Fodor's editors note, "but it is a terrific strategy for fighting extreme nasal dryness or postflight respiratory illness."
• Drink at least eight ounces of water for every hour in the air, and avoid alcohol and caffeine, which dehydrate you.
• Spritz your face with water to keep your skin moist; Fodor's recommends a prepackaged spritzer, such as the one made by Evian.
Jet lag follows germs and dehydration as the most commonly cited air-travel challenge. Katris, who regularly flies to Europe, swears by a combination of rapid reorientation and exercise. "Last week, I left San Francisco on Saturday night and arrived in London on Sunday," she says. "I got off the plane, checked into the hotel, and jumped into the pool there. I swam for about 40 minutes, walked around the city for a while, got an early bite to eat, went to sleep early, and was raring to go Monday morning. No jet lag whatsoever. I think it's vital to get into the local routine as soon as you step off the plane."
Oh! Calcutta!
For many consultants, the first step is a jog. Schroeck and Katris are marathoners. Austen and Goldman also run regularly. "It provides balance," says Schroeck. "You gain tremendous mental and emotional benefits from an active exercise program."
For Schroeck, that means taking an hour each morning (his assistant does not schedule meetings between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m.) to enjoy the sights and sounds of cities he's too busy to explore during the rest of the day. "In Bangkok, the traffic was a little overwhelming, so I did laps around the King's Palace," he says from a hotel in Philadelphia, where earlier in the day he had jogged Rocky Balboa's route up the steps of the art museum. "It was pretty obvious that I was a visitor. On the second morning, I had three seventh- or eighth-graders who had decided that they were going to race me."
He's also hit the road in Calcutta. "You tend to be the only jogger out there," he says. "In addition to dodging cars and people, you're also jogging around horses and cows." Not to mention what they leave behind.
On New York assignments, Schroeck picks a hotel close to Central Park. In Boston, he stays in Cambridge and runs along the Charles River. In London, he prefers hotels close to Hyde Park. Katris also selects hotels based on their proximity to scenic runs (see "Landmarks and Ligaments"). Chicago (around Lake Michigan), Paris, and Stockholm rank among Katris's favorite jogging cities.
"Stockholm is incredibly picturesque, and the air is so clean," she says. "You're typically running from island to island and crossing bridge after bridge. Even though the air's not so clean, Paris is a phenomenal city to run in. You look up and want to pinch yourself. Plus, it's the only time you see the little green men." The street cleaners wear green outfits while sweeping leaves and trash. "But you only see them from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., before the Parisians are awake."
Besides running, road warriors regularly swim and work out in hotel fitness facilities. "Besides food, there are three primary areas you have to be mindful of for fitness," says Goldman. "They are cardio, strength, and stretch." If the hotel's fitness facility underwhelms (i.e., tiny room, early-model stationary bike, rusting Universal machine, treadmill with unreliable motor, etc.), Goldman will pick up a running route from the front desk and pull out his exercise tube. If that fails, he'll track down the nearest evening Jazzercise class. Seriously. "The classes are the same everywhere you go," he says. "They're easy to find and they offer a balanced workout."
Goldman's colleague Emily Layton (travels 100 percent of the time), 28, offers a more moderate approach to the three primary areas of fitness. "I get my cardio when I'm late to the airport, and I'm running to my gate," she notes. "The strength workout comes from lifting my computer bag. Ours are pretty heavy, and I add to the load by accumulating paper. As far as the stretch component goes, I do quite a bit of stretching before leaning back in the airplane chair and falling asleep on the flight home."
Sidebar: Landmarks and Ligaments, or An Insider's Guide to Healthy Travel Destinations
Accommodations:
• Palace Hotel (New York): "Nice facilities and never crowded," notes Accenture marketing director Nancy Katris. "Look for the fruit bowl so that you can pick up something healthy on your way out."
• Hotel Vernet (Paris): "A stone's throw from the Accenture office," says Katris. "It's only a few blocks from the Seine, which is a great place to run as long as you get out early before the car exhaust takes over the city. Guests also have access to a nearby health club."
• Hotel Inter-Continental (Hong Kong): "It has some terrific workout rooms, and a lovely swimming pool overlooking Hong King Harbor," says Mark Austen, global leader of financial services for PwC Consulting in London. "The whole positioning of the pool is so stimulating. I think it's the best hotel fitness experience in the world."
• One Aldwych (London): "They have a really nice small fitness facility that is never crowded," says Katris. "They also have a great pool where music is piped in under the water."
Bookmarks:
• http://atkinscenter.com
• http://www.jazzercise.com (click the "class locator" box)
• http://www.vegdining.com (worldwide listing of vegetarian restaurants)
Airports:
• Pittsburgh International: The airport with the best fitness center, according to an e-Travel survey of business travelers.
• Minneapolis-St. Paul International: The airport with the largest selection of restaurants that offer healthy food, according to the e-Travel poll.
• Newark International: Achtung! This airport features the most treacherous parking-lot jogging facilities, according to Mike Schroeck, global leader for iAnalytics with PwC Consulting. "I stay at the Marriott at Newark International, and just run out the back door and do laps around that parking lot," says Schroeck, who runs eight miles a day. "One morning while running there, I stepped in a hole, rolled an ankle and tore ligaments, and broke my leg. That set me back for a couple of months."
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