“My bicycling partner got old…” says Alan Levinsohn, 70. “He just got old.”
Despite the fate of this former partner, it seems like Alan may never get old.
Levinsohn instead completes his frequent long-distance bicycle trips with his wife. He’s an avid hiker, a downhill and cross-country skier, and he walks five miles almost every day.
“So, I’m active,” Levinsohn humbly understates. “My game plan is to keep as active and as healthy as I can in my 70s.”
Levinsohn does so by applying the principles he’s learned with the Kairos Wellness Experience to his daily life. As a clearly active individual with a strong priority for fitness, he began his journey with KWE and Al Gonzalez at the exact right time, crediting breathwork techniques and wellness ideals with greatly improving his experience over the last year.
Kairos lies at the intersection of fitness and wellness, a place Levinsohn hopes to find himself as he continues the journey.
A new path
Levinsohn is a retired SUNY Morrisville social sciences professor and has maintained an active relationship with the Wellness Center on campus for 20 years. One of the Wellness Center’s most unique aspects as a college facility is the internship program, a for-credit opportunity that allows Exercise Science students to work as personal trainers for the facility’s clients. Levinsohn has worked with at least one new student trainer every year.
During the Fall 2023 semester, Al had just started as the new Wellness Center director when Levinsohn requested a student personal trainer, but all student interns had already been assigned. Instead of turning Levinsohn away, Al took him on as his personal client and they trained together for ten weeks.
“Every year I get different people giving me different exercises, and I walk in with Al, and it is a totally different experience,” he says. “The first thing he talked about was the importance of breathing; then he talked about nutrition; and then hydration — this is before we really did any exercises — the importance of drinking water. That’s never been incorporated by anybody before. And then he gave me yoga.”
Levinsohn has prioritized his relationship with nature — and has used fitness as a medium to do so — since his youth, but Al’s training has enhanced this medium, most specifically through breathing. Levinsohn is now ascending his mountain at a much faster rate.
“I’ve integrated [breathing] into my exercise experience and my life,” he states. “The breathing enables me to increase my performance in bicycling and walking. If I feel stress or anxiety, I begin to breathe, and it sort of calms things down.”
Al’s incorporation of these traditionally wellness-based principles into a fitness regime changed the way Levinsohn has approached that fitness since.
“He was able to infuse these new disciplines into the workout regime to create a new sense of wellbeing,” he says. “This is all Al.”
Long-distance trails, long-lasting results
Levinsohn’s bicycle trips have spanned distances and circumstances any 20-year-old cyclist would envy. He’s traversed loops from Lake Michigan and Ottawa back to Morrisville, biked along the coast of Florida, through Maine, from Seattle to San Francisco, and San Francisco to Los Angeles.
“I did that in two trips,” he says. “I was younger, then.” Ha!
His journey has not been pain-free, including a formerly debilitating hip injury, but KWE’s principles have implemented “a tremendous change.”
“I have had virtually no pain since working with Al,” he proudly states. “It used to be debilitating. It hurt so [much] I had to stop walking — that hasn’t happened since working with Al.”
This healing process has allowed for remarkable longevity in Levinsohn’s journeys.
“No matter what I do, I don’t stop. I eat on my bike, I drink on my bike, I just don’t stop.”
Fitness ≄ wellness
A core value at the heart of the Kairos Wellness Experience — and one that Levinsohn has taken to heart — is the intersection between being fit and being well. Though commonly interchanged, the two states of being are worlds apart.
“We can be fit and be sick all the time,” says Al Gonzalez, founder of KWE and ISSA Master Trainer and Health Coach. “You can be free of symptoms, but wellness is freedom from disease. This is fitness at a level of wellness, not just free of symptoms, but enjoying an active life.”
Levinsohn speaks to this intersection from personal experience: “The wellness part has to be developed in order to help me maintain my fitness.”
“Fitness is always going to be there for me,” he continues. “But wellness is the part that was never truly developed by any of my trainers at all.”
The opportune moment
KWE’s name draws inspiration from the Ancient Greek word kairos, meaning “the right, critical, or opportune moment.” Wellness Specialists Al and Carol can speak worlds about this concept; so can their creative team; so can Levinsohn.
“At other times, what [Al] had to offer may not have appealed to me,” Levinsohn says of his fitness journey in his earlier life. “But at this time in my life, what he had to offer was not even good, it was exceptional.”
Levinsohn has taken his moment and run with it, viewing every aspect of fitness and wellness as an opportunity to grow.
“I am a novice in virtually all those areas,” he says of the wellness principles he’s learned. “But, I look at that as something that is good. I have a lot of growth potential in that area. It’s brought a new sense of well being into my life.”
Al is a sophisticated, personable and deeply empathetic individual; he introduces solutions, emphasizes preparation, and employs patience in every area of his life. Al packed our backpacks; it’s up to us to take that first step on the path.
“He’s giving you the opportunity to open a window,” Levinsohn muses. “If you choose to open it, he’s fine with that — in fact, he gets very excited about that.”
“And if you choose not to, he accepts that as equally fine. That journey will come.”
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