At Forty, He Started Running and Realized Men's Vitality Care Isn't Something You Just Buy

On his forty-second birthday, A-Hong decided to start running. The reason was a little embarrassing: he couldn't catch the bus, and the driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. He still remembers that look. He bought running shoes, downloaded a running app, and even did three rounds of warm-up stretches in front of the living room mirror, thinking he was fully prepared. But after his first run, he sat by the riverbank for twenty minutes before he could stand up. On the way home, he clung to the handrail while climbing the stairs, and his middle-school daughter caught him. She asked if he'd twisted his ankle. He said no. She asked what was wrong then. He thought for a moment and said, "Dad is getting reacquainted with his legs." She rolled her eyes and walked off.

The next two weeks, he ran every day and had sore legs every day. His wife couldn't stand it anymore and hid his running shoes on the balcony, saying he could run, but first he had to fix his daily routine. Only then did A-Hong admit that for the past ten years, he'd gone to bed at nearly 1 a.m., woken up at 7:30, and relied on two cups of coffee to get through the day. He'd thought running could offset staying up late, but later realized it just piled exhaustion on top of exhaustion. He dug out his health check report. There weren't many red flags, but every number was borderline—that neither-here-nor-there kind of result, more unsettling than an outright fail.

He started making changes. The first thing wasn't buying something—it was moving his bedtime earlier. He set an 11 p.m. phone reminder. At first, he couldn't fall asleep at all, tossing and turning in bed. Eventually, he just went for a ten-minute run at eleven, came back, showered, and then fell asleep as soon as he lay down. The second thing was switching to running every other day instead of pushing through daily. The third was food. He used to eat dinner as late as nine; now he tries to finish before seven. Late-night snacks went from fried chicken to a cup of warm soy milk. These changes were small—so small he himself thought they were nothing special. But a month later, he caught the bus. Well, he made it to the stop, but the driver still pulled away.

The real turning point came on a Saturday morning. After a run by the riverbank, he ran into Mr. Chen from the same neighborhood, a man in his sixties who ran more steadily than he did. They got to talking, and A-Hong complained that his stamina just wasn't coming back. Mr. Chen laughed and said, "You've only been running a month, and you want to be twenty again?" A-Hong asked if he took any supplements. Mr. Chen said sure, a whole drawer full, but after a while he realized the most effective thing was still getting enough sleep. When A-Hong got home, he opened his own drawer. There were several boxes he'd bought on impulse, some with the plastic wrap still on. He picked them up and read the labels, realizing he had no idea what the ingredients were or what situations they were for. He only remembered ordering after seeing an ad while scrolling on his phone.

That afternoon, he laid everything from the drawer out on the dining table and looked at each box one by one. His wife came over and asked what he was doing. He said he was doing his homework. She said, "Why didn't you do that when you bought them?" He was speechless. He went online to research and found the information on these products was all over the place—some were foods, some had unclear labeling, some ads used exaggerated wording. He remembered reading somewhere that supplements aren't better the more you take; someone took huge amounts of a certain trace element to grow hair and ended up with problems instead. He couldn't say for sure whether what he'd bought was problematic, but he was certain of one thing: he didn't even know what he was taking.

He decided not to buy anything new for now and to take what he'd already opened to ask someone. He brought the boxes to a pharmacy near his home and asked the pharmacist to look at the labels. The pharmacist went through them one by one, asked if he was taking any other medications or had any chronic conditions, and then said most of these were foods, not drugs. If he had concerns, he should bring the complete packaging to a doctor or pharmacist and ask, not guess on his own. A-Hong asked, "So should I take them or not?" The pharmacist said, "That depends on why you want to take them and what your current health is like. I can't decide that for you." That sentence stuck with him. He went home and wrote out a list—what he was currently taking and what he'd bought before—planning to bring it all to his next doctor's appointment.

Later, he saw someone on a forum put together information about men's vitality care, and only then did he realize he'd been approaching this with a "buy it and it'll fix everything" mindset. He began to understand that the point of this topic isn't which box to buy, but first figuring out where your sleep, exercise, and diet went wrong, and then deciding whether you need extra supplementation. He fixed his running schedule: one longer run on weekends, two shorter ones on weekdays, and no more scrolling on his phone before bed. Three months later, he hadn't turned into some macho man, but getting up in the morning wasn't so painful anymore, and he didn't keep wanting to doze off during meetings.

One day his daughter asked, "Dad, do your legs still get sore?" He said occasionally. She said, "Then you've improved." He smiled. Of the boxes in the drawer, he ended up keeping just one and recycling the rest. He didn't recommend anything to anyone, because he realized everyone's situation is different—what works for someone else may not suit him. His approach now is simple: when in doubt, ask a professional, bring your list, and don't make decisions based only on ad copy. He often tells friends that after forty, stamina isn't something you rescue with a single box of something—it's built from all those daily choices that look boring. When friends ask whether they should buy it or not, he says, "Get enough sleep first, then we'll talk."