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Dan Buettner is best known as a writer and extreme adventurer who rode his bike around the world from east to west and from north to south through the Americas and Africa and Europe and Asia. He has crossed the roadless Sahara desert, numerous jungles, and active war zones. He has contracted dozens of diseases and hosted plenty of parasites. He has written three books, and has had his every move monitored by millions of schoolchildren. But Dan Buettner really got his start in croquet.

 

The first time I’d heard of Buettner, things were looking up for the crew of AfricaTrek, a record-setting bicycle trip from the Mediterranean Sea to the Cape of Good Hope. In April of 1993, the Star Tribune published one of its periodic dispatches from the trek, with this introduction: “They forded eighty bridgeless rivers, survived on roast monkey meat and bananas and gashed their legs crashing off muddy rainforest paths. Now the four men bicycling across Africa think the tough part is over.” But what stuck with me about this report was the account of a stretch through Zaire (now Congo), where dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule was violently crumbling, when the team’s wounds would not heal because of the intense humidity they were encountering. It sounded like pure hell.

Thirteen years later, at a coffee shop near Macalester College not far from where he lives, Buettner relayed even more gruesome outtakes from AfricaTrek. He enumerated the various parasites and sicknesses that caused the four riders to lose eighty pounds among them by the time they reached the Congo. He told me a horrifying story about seeing corpses on the highway while biking through Nigeria, where no drivers stopped to investigate or even move this “human roadkill.”

“I am not going to lie, it was hell, and if I had just been on my own doing it for fun, I would have quit,” he said, in a momentary departure from what one of his friends calls his ruthless optimism. “But when you make commitments, I think they really drive you through times of hardship. I had all these sponsors, I had a staff of people, I had all these classrooms following us along with CNN. Knowing we would let them let down if we quit—that was kind of our saving grace.”

Dan Buettner is forty-five years old, though he could pass for a decade younger. He’s the father of three kids ranging in age from elementary school to college. He typically dresses in a way that most baby boomers can no longer pull off. At the coffee shop, for example, he wore an ironed aquamarine shirt unbuttoned one button too far, with a beaded necklace threaded through a weathered Asian coin. But hey, I figure a guy who pushed his bike across the Sahara, which he calls “a sandbox the size of the United States,” is entitled to a lifetime’s worth of open shirts. On top of that, he dates seventies supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, who presumably requires some bold fashion choices from her companion. And that bauble around his neck? No doubt it’s a precious gift from a friend he made in some exotic, far-flung destination.

For Buettner, life gets more interesting as he gets older, and his most recent project is all about aging. “About two and a half years ago, I came across an article about baby boomers and how there were seventy million of them and every seven seconds another one turns fifty,” Buettner said. It occurred to him that these baby boomers, whose interests are shifting from the recreational drugs of their youth to prescription drugs like Prilosec and Cialis, would be interested in learning how to add a few years to their lives. He was able to enlist as sponsors and partners such respected organizations as the National Geographic Society, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the University of Minnesota School of Public Health to create what he calls the Blue Zones project.

Buettner says there are at least four regions on the planet that are demographically confirmed to lead their respective continents in life expectancy, in disability-free life expectancy (a measure of the quality of life in later years), or in concentration of centenarians. He has dubbed these regions “blue zones.”

This month, Buettner’s account of his initial visits to three blue zones—Okinawa Island in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, and the city of Loma Linda in California—will be published in National Geographic. Among other things, the work examines how the diet, lifestyle, spirituality, and social relations of people in these regions may hold clues to their longevity. (He declines to name the fourth blue zone at present.)

But the twelve-hundred-word article is only the beginning for Buettner. Starting October 31, he’ll be leading a new expedition back to Okinawa Island in Japan. It’s his first adventure in more than two years, and the first of four blue-zone educational “Quests” he’ll lead this and each subsequent fall (Sardinia is scheduled for 2006). This portion of his work is the real nut of the subject. He and his team of fourteen adventurers will spend ten days conducting intensive research and trying to learn more about how longevity works. Through his Blue Zones website, millions of students and interested adults will follow and supervise the quest.

In 1984, Buettner was a recent graduate of the University of St. Thomas who had returned from a year in Spain, where he had backpacked, discovered a latent talent for bike racing, and learned Spanish, among other things. As he describes it, he “blundered” into a dream job with National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. His assignment was to help the legendary literary editor and participatory journalist George Plimpton organize a celebrity croquet tournament. The event was a fundraiser for NPR but was backed by a developer in Boca Raton, Florida, who wanted to draw attention to a new development. Buettner helped recruit forty celebrities who were each paired with three big-dollar donors. Why croquet? “It was one of these sports that’s semi-aristocratic,” he said, adding that it required no special ability from either celebrity or donor.

Buettner cultivated a special knack for connecting the rich with the famous, and for getting his travel expenses paid. In addition to being flown regularly from Boca Raton to Washington to New York, where he was put up in the San Moritz Hotel, he also swung a deal where the tournament’s sponsors would fly him and several of his fellow organizers home every weekend. “But instead of saying that home was St. Paul, where it was freezing, we rented an apartment in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. So every weekend we’d get to fly to the Bahamas, and it was a fabulous experience!”

The life of the leisure class had fallen into his lap. “I think that, like most college graduates, I aspired to the same kind of life of wealth and ease that Americans generally strive for,” Buettner told me. “But this year was so wonderful to me. I got to ride around in limousines all week. We had an unlimited expense account, ate at the finest restaurants. And after nine months I was sick of it. I didn’t give a damn about nice restaurants—I mean, I wanted to go home and make a sandwich! I was living the life of someone who was fifty-six and very successful, so I had this wonderful opportunity to look ahead. It was almost like one of those Ebenezer Scrooge epiphanies where you see where you’re going to be in the future and see you don’t want to end up there. So you change your path.”

George Plimpton also played a role in Buettner’s redirection. Plimpton, who died in 2003, made a career out of creating unique opportunities for himself, such as playing for the Detroit Lions and sparring with a professional boxer, and then writing about them. He helped Buettner to think about what made for an interesting life. “I call him the thinking man’s Walter Mitty,” said Buettner.

With these new insights and with the tournament over, Buettner dropped his earlier plans to go to law school. Instead, he dreamed up the idea of bicycling from Minnesota to the southernmost tip of Argentina. The tournament also taught Buettner a thing or two about how publicity could net sponsors for an event, so he inquired with the people at the Guinness Book of World Records about whether they would consider this a world-record ride. They told him no, but that a bike trip from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego would be. With that, Buettner began a series of cycling feats that included 15,536 miles traversing the Americas north to south in 1986-1987; 12,888 miles around the width of the world in 1991; and 12,172 miles down the length of Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Cape, in 1992-1993.

The motivations for explorers and adventurers are complex, but many of these sojourners are solitary types who may be as driven to get away from society as they are drawn to wilderness. Obtaining sponsorships is often their least favorite part of the job, and the speaking tours and even the educational components can appear to be necessary evils in facilitating expeditions. By contrast, Buettner is gregarious and a consummate salesman, and this aptitude serves him well in arranging sponsors for his adventures. For example, he recently secured the support of Davisco Foods in Le Sueur, Minnesota, a whey-based products company, which is allowing him to offer the Blue Zones curriculum free to any classroom that wants to participate in the quest. (Previous quests had cost one hundred dollars per classroom.)

“Dan is a great storyteller who is really good at charming people over dinner,” according to Sarah Kast, his assistant at Blue Zones, who told me that he often returns with a sponsorship check. The connection between making a pitch and traveling emerged when Buettner was a teenager selling newspaper subscriptions door to door. “I found out I had a knack for it,” he said. “I was fourteen and the paperboy was making three dollars each week delivering papers. I was making seventy-five dollars a night selling subscriptions. They’d also award the top sellers a trip, and every year I won. I ended up going to Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and Spain.”

Buettner’s appetite for travel and adventure was not exactly new. “I was fortunate to have a dad who, instead of taking us to Disneyworld, would take us up into the mountains for four weeks,” Buettner said. “Or he would take us up into the Boundary Waters for weeks at a time every year.” Although Buettner’s eleven-year-old daughter, Irene, recently declined to come to Okinawa with him for fear of missing too much school, Buettner takes his kids on some of the travels he writes about, and is proud of his eldest son’s adventuring tendencies. (Dan Buettner-Salido is mountaineering in Colorado on break from school at the University of Colorado at Boulder.)

But it was the overseas trips on the newspaper’s dime that truly planted the travel bug within Buettner (he would contract many other bugs later) and first got him dreaming that he might be able to travel for a living one day. “I was in Spain’s Costa del Sol. It was my senior year in high school on one of these newspaper company trips. I was waking up on this sunny morning and back here in Minnesota it was ten below and I said, ‘I want to do this!’”

Like many of his peers in outdoor adventuring—which include fellow Minnesotans like Ann Bancroft, Lonnie Dupre, and Will Steger—Buettner’s professional life has evolved to the point that he considers his main role to be less as an explorer and more as an educator. The Blue Zones quests are a case in point; in Okinawa, Buettner and his team of scientists, writers, and producers will not only be visiting a developed country, but for the first time they won’t be using bicycles to get around. In contrast to the younger man who was most interested in figuring out how to have someone pay him to travel for a living, his recent years have been spent guiding educational quests. “There was a certain sea change from wanting to be the adventurer to getting the thrill out of the education,” he said.

“For seven hundred years, ever since Marco Polo went to China, the way exploration worked was a group of people, usually men, went to a faraway part of the world and endured hardship and then they came back and they told us what they found, and we as an interested public could read their books or magazine articles,” Buettner said. He believes that there are not many “firsts” left for adventurers, and that exploration achievements are becoming more convoluted rather than impressive. “Most things that are billed as expeditions today amount to little more than a stunt,” he said. “I really believe that expeditions of the future, the ones that will make a difference, will do one or more of three things. They educate, they add to the body of knowledge, and increasingly they can convey a sense of adventure and discovery to people who don’t have the wherewithal or the inclination to get up and go.”

One of Buettner’s longtime collaborators is Jocelyn Hale, who is now a program manager for the Best Buy Children’s Foundation. She told me she can remember a clear point of transformation for Buettner. It was after he’d returned from his trip around the world east to west. He’d undertaken the expedition with a Soviet cyclist in the latter days of the Cold War, and it had become a cause célèbre in the media. Hale said, “He saw how much press he was getting and thought maybe there’s more he could do with these things, to make them richer and deeper experiences.” Thus was born the idea and the inspiration for AfricaTrek, which happened in the wake of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Buettner put together a symbolic team to cross Africa. It consisted of his brother, an African cyclist, and an African-American doctor. “It was to be a message of peace,” Hale said.

With the help of Jennifer Gasperini, who founded Hamline University’s Center for Global Environment Education after spearheading Will Steger’s educational outreach, Hale and Buettner worked with a map company to build a curriculum guide for students who could monitor AfricaTrek. The grueling trip succeeded on many levels. Much of the expedition was communicated back to the world via telephone (making use of one of the first demilitarized satellite phones available). Buettner eventually coproduced a television documentary about the trip for PBS; it won an Emmy award. “Ultimately, it was very cool for kids to follow. The kids’ response and teachers’ response were amazing,” said Hale. “There was great excitement for Dan in talking to thousands of school kids. That changed his life.”

The revelations coincided with the rise of the Internet, and Buettner understood early on that this was a technology that would revolutionize his work, allowing a new convergence of education and adventure for kids in classrooms. Hale said, “I think it was a natural progression that paralleled the path of what was happening in technology—and, at the same time, his development as a person.”

In 1995, at the dawn of the worldwide web, Buettner founded Earthtreks Inc., under which he led nine interactive quests over the next seven years. Under his “quest” model, he hires a team of experts, “the very best I can get—they’re usually the top in the world—who assume the position of an enlightened conduit.” Those members of the team are complemented by journalists who report to the online audience each day through articles and videos.

“Each expedition is based on a mystery,” he said. “It’s not based on seeing if we can get from point A to B; it’s seeing if we can solve a real problem or unravel a real mystery.” For example, MayaQuest, the first quest expedition, allowed kids in participating classrooms to solve a classic mystery: Why did ancient Mayan civilization collapse? In time, 1.3 million people, including students in thirty thousand classrooms, participated in the quests, which explored regions in East Africa, Australia, the old Silk Road in Central Asia, the Galapagos Islands, Greece, and Central America, among other places.

The newest Blue Zone expedition to Okinawa comes after a three-year hiatus, one that was not entirely voluntary. In 1997, Buettner sold Earthtreks Inc., to Classroom Connect, an educational software company, which was then bought by publisher Harcourt. According to Buettner, Harcourt decided to focus its investments on its principal textbook line rather than online education. “The writing was on the wall,” Buettner told me, “and I quit two months before my non-compete clause expired,” he said. Ever since, he has been busy raising his kids, helping to create an educational program for Minnesota Public Radio, speaking on the corporate and college lecture circuit, and writing as well as researching and planning the Blue Zones expeditions.

One of the unique aspects of Buettner’s quests is that, at the end of most days, kids from classrooms around the world get to vote on what the expedition team will do next. “The quest all of a sudden tells a twelve-year-old for the first time in his life that he is in charge. He gets to solve this mystery. We want the kids’ ideas and research and imagination, and a Ph.D. archeologist will listen to what they tell him to do. That’s enormously empowering. That in a nutshell is why they work; kids have control over the learning environment.”

Outside magazine writer Stephanie Pearson was part of quests to Australia and Central America, and she knows from firsthand experience how to get kids interested. “I had a scorpion run across my face, I had to find, gather, and eat wasp larvae, which was a local delicacy, and I had to simulate a shark bite with ketchup,” she said. It was all part of a not surprisingly popular feature called “Gross and Disgusting” that she oversaw.

Despite these appeals to kids’ fascination with the gross and disgusting, Buettner bristles at an obvious comparison—to reality TV shows like Survivor and Fear Factor. “I happen to know how those shows are put together,” he said. “They hire soap-opera writers and they shoot a ton of footage. Then a soap-opera writer takes segments and lines them up in a soap-opera type story arc; they lead you on one path. They intentionally create a fiend and a hero. I cringe when I see Survivor is going to Guatemala, site of the MayaQuest, because it’s completely false. The people who participated in MayaQuest, on the other hand, they were the world’s top Mayanists, and they shaped everything we did.”

Buettner admits that his quests use devices like character exposition to introduce the team to the online audience and cliffhangers to maintain interest. “But our conflicts and resolutions are real: If a team member gets bit by a poisonous stingray, it really happened,” he said. “Or maybe there is just one team member who absolutely isn’t working out, so we have to kick her off. Our satellite equipment fails on us. Somebody gets malaria. It’s not like Survivor that makes this all up. But you do need to use storytelling techniques to keep people engaged.”

Buettner sees his quests as the antithesis of passive TV watching, saying they encourage kids to engage in critical thinking and to come to their own conclusions, about themselves and their world. By looking at the Anasazi or the Mayans and how their cultures flourished but ultimately collapsed, he says, the quests help students see how a society’s relationship with the environment is critical to its survival; but it does so without preaching or spoon-feeding them a conclusion. “Anybody who knows kids knows, if you tell a kid to do something, you get one level of understanding, but if you can create the environment for them to figure it out for themselves, that is five times more powerful,” Buettner said. Ultimately, the students are indirectly studying themselves and their own society. “The beauty of looking at these ancient civilizations is they provide a mirror. Self assessment is often too painful; it’s too painful to see what’s going on with us right now.”

Mary Petricca teaches elementary school in Schaumburg School District in Illinois along with her twin sister, Maureen. Both have used Buettner’s quests extensively at different grade levels. Mary told me the profiles the team dispatches about kids they meet on their quests are very powerful, and they help students identify with children in different parts of the world. “They see these kids doing many of the same things they do,” she said. “And even though the quests go to some very impoverished areas, the kids there are still happy to have their family and their culture. Our students certainly become more empathetic.”

Maureen Petricca said the quests are great for schoolwork because they can apply to all areas of the curriculum—social studies, math, and English. In organizing Blue Zones, Buettner has paid close attention to conforming his curriculum to the many state and local educational standards that have emerged since his last quest in 2002. “Otherwise teachers just won’t use it,” Buettner said. For Blue Zones, for example, a one-hundred-page teacher’s guide was put together with help from the National Institute on Aging.

When former students contact the Petriccas, they often say what they remember from class are the quests, and they ask how Dan is doing (and they’re disappointed to hear that there hasn’t been a new quest in more than two years). “You know that it made an impact,” said Mary Petricca.

“I was one of those kids so inspired by the quests that I have basically spent my life trying to get on one,” Rachel Binns, a twenty-five-year-old doctoral student at the University of Southern Florida told me. Binns was a junior at Disney’s Celebration School in Florida, a model elementary and secondary school for technology, where she helped younger students follow AfricaQuest and MayaQuest. While still in high school, she met Buettner at a conference on classroom technology. “I was totally treated like a star for just meeting him—the teachers had crushes on him and the students idolized him,” she said. She told her teachers at Celebration that she would go on a quest one day.

Remarkably, she kept to that goal throughout her years in college. As an undergraduate, she studied communication at Purdue, and began her graduate program studying love and interpersonal communication. She kept in touch with Buettner, who encouraged her studies—communication appears to have a great deal to do with longevity. Initially, he told Rachel that she might be able to participate as an expert from afar for the Blue Zones trip, but he ultimately reconsidered and hired her as part of the team going to Okinawa. “I told him he should bring me along on a quest, but he didn’t think so. But I was persistent,” she said.

The Guinness Book of World Records used to say that “no single subject is more obscured by vanity, deceit, falsehood, and deliberate fraud than the extremes of human longevity.” That was proven by one of National Geographic’s previous looks at longevity. In 1973, Harvard gerontologist Alexander Leaf wrote about his visits to, among other places, Soviet Abkhazia (now the Republic of Georgia), which at the time claimed to have the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. The most tangible outcome of his look at allegedly life-prolonging practices was years of Dannon advertisements touting the life-affirming qualities of yogurt, a staple of the Georgian diet. Buettner does not mind attesting to yogurt’s positive attributes, but the age claims made in Leaf’s original article have been debunked. Dr. Leaf himself acknowledged in 1982 that a large number of the men and women he met had exaggerated their age, either in order to improve their social status or to promote tourism. Similar dodgy record-keeping and outright lies about age were later found in the supposedly long-lived areas Leaf visited in Ecuador and Pakistan.

The age claims in the blue zones are backed-up with more reliable age records as well as peer-reviewed health studies. Buettner has found that Okinawans, for example, not only have the world’s longest life expectancy, they also have one-fifth the rate of heart disease, a fourth the rate of breast cancer, and only two-thirds the rate of dementia as Americans.

Buettner has done much research in the science of aging. In particular, he likes to refer to a Danish study performed on identical twins that found that roughly twenty-five percent of healthy longevity—of living longer lives unencumbered by significant health-related problems—is dictated by genetic indicators, and seventy-five percent by lifestyle. “The National Institute on Aging and our experts will tell you that you can live eight to ten years longer if you optimize your lifestyle,” Buettner said. “The blue zones are places where they’re living those additional eight good years of life that we’re not. If we can go there in a methodical way and find out what their lifestyle is and bring it back, what we have there is a recipe for longevity.”

In his National Geographic article, Buettner highlights three sets of best practices from the regions he visited and from the current scientific knowledge of aging. He sees a connection between his previous explorations of ancient cultures, and the lifestyles and practices he has seen in the blue zones. “There is so much observed history and wisdom built into everyday peoples’ lives—the way their spirituality intermeshes with their agriculture and meshes with the societal norms. It evolves like an intelligent organism. We found these cultures where this really works and then we extrapolated from that. What is it that works—it only exists in little pockets, and with the intrusion of a less healthy modern lifestyle, it may soon be all gone,” he said.

None of the broad recommendations Buettner relates are much of a surprise: Don’t smoke; stay physically active; keep socially engaged; cherish family; and eat a plant-based diet. He says his article only scratches the surface of what he’ll be able to “drill into” with the Blue Zones quests, and he firmly believes that the experiential component will help people retain and incorporate the quests’ findings. He stresses that the project is unfolding with the help of behaviorists at the University of Minnesota—the better to help people make a healthy shift in their lives.

On the Blue Zones website (www.blue zones.com), Buettner and his partners have created what he calls a vitality compass, a proprietary survey of a person’s habits that recommends the practices Buettner has found in his research and will explore on his Blue Zones expeditions.

In the spring, Buettner will bring the Blue Zone Challenge to students and parents who have participated in the quest. It’s a healthy lifestyle curriculum aimed at reducing childhood obesity, an indicator related to longevity, and is based on work done by University of Minnesota epidemiologist Cheryl L. Perry, who previously led a three-year school-based program that was successful in reducing student fat intake and increasing physical activity.

What does Buettner do on behalf of his own longevity? He said his typical day includes a midday yoga class followed by lunch, and then, about a half-hour later, a power nap on a cot in his office’s supply closet. He insisted this is more of his own circadian imperative than a health practice. “I slingshot right out of it,” he said.

Buettner met Cheryl Tiegs in 2001 and the two have been dating for three years, doing their part to keep CJ’s trickle of celebrity gossip going at the Star Tribune. I called Buettner and left a message, asking if that kind of attention was going to his head; in short, was he going Hollywood on us? “Actually, I’m standing in the alley behind Marshall Liquor in St. Paul, so I don’t think so,” he told me when he called back one night. He was walking around his neighborhood, which is his preferred mode of returning phone calls. Hale backed him up on this point. “Dan never forgets his old friends,” she said.

Dan Buettner has carved out a renaissance lifestyle. He uses his local celebrity status and his accomplishments as means to his latest projects, yet he does not appear to put any more stock in fame and success than he did twenty years ago, in his croquet days. Writer Stephanie Pearson calls Buettner an “exponential experiencer,” a person who is able to find new connections, new projects, and new experiences where other mere mortals cannot. Jocelyn Hale is a little more blunt, but still complimentary: “He’s the classic A.D.H.D.—creative, chaotic, jumping from one thing to another. His work is not always linear, but he always gets things done. His vision stays clear, but his process can be a little messy,” she said. Buettner himself sometimes invokes Sisyphus, the mythical character who is forced to spend eternity rolling a large stone up a hill, only to have to do the same thing the next day. It’s the prospect of new challenges and new connections each day that excite him.

“You know, when you are forty-five years old, telling people you set a record for riding your bicycle, it’s more sort of a Minnesota State Fair midway accomplishment than anything else. Right now I am getting very little funding for the education component of this. I have a team of people, textbook writers, who’ve written the education curriculum. It will cost me six figures and is mostly self-financed right now. At some point I might get that back, but at the end of the day, when you look back on what you did, what endures is the people you touch and the difference you made—not so much in a flash-in-the-pan world record.”