I Took the Elevator. One Floor. Twice. Then a Man on the Next Court Asked What I Thought the Beetroot Was Actually Doing.

I am sixty one and I took the elevator up one floor. Twice in the same week.

The second time I noticed myself doing it. There is a flight of stairs outside the building where I meet a client, maybe forty steps, and I had started standing at the bottom of them doing a small private calculation before I went up. Nothing hurt. Nothing was wrong. I simply did not fancy arriving at the top out of breath in front of somebody.

That is the thing nobody warns you about, because it does not announce itself. It is not pain and it is not illness. It is a slow quiet narrowing of what you say yes to, and it happens so gradually that you have already stopped doing three or four things before you notice you stopped.

Where mine actually showed up

Mine showed up on a pickleball court, in the third game.

I play twice a week with the same four men and we are all somewhere in our sixties. Games one and two I am fine. Somewhere in game three my legs start quietly packing for home, and I become the one suggesting we call it, which I always dress up as being considerate about somebody's knee.

It was never anybody's knee. It was me running out before the people I was playing with ran out. And the thing about that is you can feel it happening in real time, which is far worse than finding out later.

I am fine during games one and two. By game three, I start looking for a reason to stop.

What I had been buying instead

So I did what the aisle tells you to do, and I bought a tub.

Two of them, over about four years. Both were enormous, both were a colour not found in nature, and both made my forearms feel like a mild sunburn for roughly twenty minutes after I drank them. I assumed that was the product working, because what else would it be.

It is beta alanine, and it is a sensation. It is not a result. The category has trained a whole generation of us to grade a supplement by how odd it makes our arms feel, for the obvious commercial reason that something you notice in ninety seconds is far easier to sell than something you measure in three weeks.

The other thing those tubs do is follow you home. A scoop at five in the afternoon is still with you at ten at night, and anybody who plays in the evening finds that out once and does not forget it.

Then beetroot failed me too, twice

I did eventually get to beetroot, and beetroot did nothing for me either. Twice.

First I tried capsules, which ran into arithmetic I did not understand at the time. A man in a supplement forum later put it in one line: "Tablets do nothing as they won't contain enough nitrate."

Then I tried a powder, which failed somewhere else entirely. Another one described my exact experience: "the powder becomes like cement after a very short time. I end up wasting it." Mine went solid in the tub by about week five and I threw most of it away.

So I filed beetroot under things that do not work on me, which is a conclusion a great many people reach, and which turns out to be a conclusion about packaging rather than about the vegetable.

The conversation by the fence

The man who straightened it out for me is about forty and plays on the next court down.

I had made some joke about needing whatever he was on, and instead of laughing he asked what I had tried. When I told him, he said the thing that reframed all of it. He said I had been buying the sensation and skipping the mechanism, and that the two have almost nothing to do with each other.

Then he asked me a question nobody selling me a tub had ever asked. Did I know what the beetroot was actually supposed to be doing in there?

I did not. I had been taking it for four years, on and off, and I could not have told you.

He asked what I had tried. Then he asked what I thought it was doing.

What he explained, in one pass

Your body makes a compound called nitric oxide, and nitric oxide is the signal that tells the muscle in a blood vessel wall to relax.

When that muscle relaxes the vessel opens a little wider, and blood reaches the muscle asking for it with less work. The way he put it has stayed with me. A stimulant tells the car to drive faster. This widens the lane.

Beetroot is a natural source of something called dietary nitrate, and your body converts that nitrate into nitric oxide over hours rather than minutes. That is the whole thing. It is so unglamorous that it has never been able to compete with a tingle, which is roughly the entire problem.

What the exercise research actually measured

This is the part that changed my mind, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.

Two findings come up again and again in the dietary nitrate research, and both of them were measured rather than reported. The first is that muscles did the same amount of work while using measurably less oxygen. The second is that people lasted longer before reaching exhaustion on the same test.

Sit with those two for a second. Between them they are a precise description of game three. Doing the same work for less, and having something left when the others are zipping up their bags.

That work traces back to trials published in 2009 and 2011, and it sits in sports science rather than in the supplement aisle. Which is exactly why four years of standing in that aisle never once put it in front of me.

All of it was run on dietary nitrate rather than on any finished product, and that distinction matters. What a label can honestly promise is the amount it contains.

What to expect, and roughly when

The first fortnight is uneventful, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you a sensation again. This works over weeks because it is doing slow structural work rather than stimulant work. So the early days are quiet, and quiet is the correct result.

Around the third week it starts, and it arrives as an absence rather than as a surge. Game three comes and nobody suggests calling it, because I have stopped being the one who suggests it. The stairs outside my client's building are just stairs now, and I get to the top still able to hold up my end of a conversation.

By week six or eight the quieter work is underway in places I cannot feel, which is where the grape seed and the printed amounts earn their keep. Those numbers are modest rather than dramatic, and they are measured. That is the reason I keep taking something I can no longer feel.

Over months it stops being an experiment and becomes a thing in the bag, like the spare paddle. Circulation is not something you fix once, it is something you keep, and keeping it is dull work that only gets done when it is easy.

The part I had not expected is the smallest one. I stopped doing that calculation at the bottom of the stairs. I had not noticed I was doing it until it was gone.

Last week we played until the lights came on, and I was the one who wanted another.