If you call modern medicine “amazing,” I’ll quickly agree and add this as evidence.

If the two fractured femurs I sustained in separate bicycle crashes would’ve taken place during the bicycle craze in the 1880s, I would’ve spent months in a cast and been confined to a hospital bed in traction. And even after extensive rehabilitation, I still would’ve been lame.

But my crashes occurred in the 21st century, so after a few minor incisions, titanium rods were inserted into my legs. My fractured femurs were screwed fast to the rods and stabilized.

No casts for me - or even much bed time.

After the first surgery, I was ambulating with a walker in three days. Walking without crutches, albeit ungainly, in 10. Riding a bicycle, although slowly and on a mountain bike on flat roads, in eight more.

Thirteen months after that and countless hours of rehab, I finished first in my age group and sixth overall in a very hilly 75-mile road race.

But a good bicycling buddy of mine (who’ll be featured in an article sometime soon) can tell a far better modern-medicine-is-amazing story. He became a cycling world champion in May of 2023 after being days away from death in July of 2018.

His world championship came at the World Transplant Games, which he qualified for by virtue of a heart transplant that kept him from a seemingly apparent early end. Possibly even more amazing is that my buddy is getting solid results when he now competes in age-group bike races.

Another equally amazing result of modern medicine: More and more Americans will live to the age of 100 in the future. According the Census Bureau, there are 101,000 centenarians in the United States right now, but there will be nearly 4.5 times more in 30 years.

At this point in the article, you’ve already read the word “amazing” four times, but that’s not because I have a limited vocabulary. It’s been intentional and based on the word’s versatility.

It can also be used negatively to mean “disturbing.”

And there is something negative and disturbing to modern medicine being so amazing. It leads to people neglecting their health because modern medicine is so good at undoing damage done.

To avoid that trap, here’s something you can do. Frequently think about living to be 100.

Whether that’s something you hope to do is not the point. What is, is creating the motivation to eat better and exercise more that inevitably results from considering how your life could be “later.”

Especially if you’re aware of the significant difference between lifespan and healthspan, the second of which is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the length of time in one’s life during which an individual is in reasonably good health.”

Do you want to spend “later” bedridden and confined to a nursing home? Or do you want to be at home, caring for yourself?

Putting away groceries, puttering in the garden, playing with your grandchildren.

If you want the latter, you need to train for it in a manner that doctor Peter Attia - author of the New York Times bestseller, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, and the host of The Drive, a highly popular health and medicine podcast - calls the Centenarian Decathlon. In short, he advises you to create a list of things you want to be able to do at 100 and then work backwards from there.

In one of his first podcasts ever, Attia shares his list of 18 things (somebody please tell Attia “deca-“ means 10) he’d like to do at 100. One is to be able to lift a 30-pound child.

So now he’s doing what he refers to as “backcasting,” an idea he got in large part from Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets.

Think of backcasting as the opposite of forecasting. Of deciding what to do now after deciding what you want to do later and then structuring your current workouts based on that while keeping in mind you invariably get weaker as you get older.

So if you’re 50 currently and want to be able to pick up a 30-pound grandchild at 70, you need to be picking up more than 30 pounds presently. And what makes your efforts more likely to elicit the desired result later is doing the lifting in a motion reminiscent of lifting a child.

For this, Attia suggests a weightlifting exercise called the goblet squat, a modification of the traditional barbell squat. Instead of placing a barbell across your shoulders while squatting, you hold one end of a dumbbell with both hands close to your chest.

The change forces your arms and core to work in concert with your legs and requires a good degree of balance, something else you should also work on as you age.

And in Attia’s case, the goblet squat does double duty. An another item on his list of things he’d like to do at 100 is walk up stairs with 10 pounds of groceries in each hand.