After logging two million miles of flying in her lifetime, it was fitting that Jayne McAllister started writing her new book in an airport lounge.
“Mile High & Healthy,” published last month, is a compendium of all she has learned about staying fit through years of travelling for business and for pleasure.
This time, though, it was for neither. She was flying home to England after the death of a beloved cousin. It was a rough year: she’d already lost an uncle and a stepfather.
“It was losing my cousin that really did it for me,” says McAllister. “I’ve been running all over the place for 24 years but I felt a need to go home and reconnect.”
It was also a wakeup call for her to get started on the book. While her cousin’s early death at 38 was from a congenital heart problem, she herself had turned around her own health problems through exercise and nutrition.
There was a low point in her career in magazine publishing, jetting 180 days a year across Europe, the U.S. and the Caribbean, when she realized travel had taken its toll on her dietary habits. At 39, she had been diagnosed with osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis.
Given a two-year reprieve from the standard treatment, Fosamax, she vowed to try to turn the disease around herself. She went on a campaign to limit caffeine, sugar and wine. She also took up daily weight-bearing exercise no matter where she found herself.
Within eight months, the osteopenia was gone in her hip and greatly decreased in her lumbar spine.
In the midst of that, McAllister became an ardent fan of Pilates, eventually taking a year off to move to New York and become certified to train others in the method. She also studied integrative nutrition and became a certified transformational coach.
That year-long stint led to two new careers: one teaching Pilates, the other consulting with companies on how to keep their employees with heavy travel schedules from getting sick and stressed.
She formed that company, Global Business Travel Associates, with a flight attendant for British Airways who is also a nutrition counselor, and an attorney who has written a book for travelers about eating healthily.
Meanwhile, McAllister figured out how to keep travelling herself. Her love of going places has only increased since the days when her grandfather, a station master for British Rail, used to take her on the train with him when he traveled for work.
Raised in a working-class family in Lancashire, England, McAllister discovered a talent for languages at 15, when, after already studying French and German, she had to take up Spanish mid-semester in a new school and soared to the head of the class. Latin followed, and when she was accepted at Cambridge University, she added classical Arabic to a major of Medieval Spanish.
She spent her junior year in Sudan, teaching at a government school. Already, she was dreaming of writing a book: she kept an extensive journal of her thoughts and adventures. Sadly, she can’t look back on it today. She had to burn it, when Sharia law was suddenly introduced in 1983.
“I knew I’d be in trouble if they found it, so I lit a little fire in my garden and burned it page by page.” Though they never searched her apartment, the secret police did bring her in for questioning once, and her place was under 24-hour surveillance because she lived alone.
“When I’m feeling fearful, I allow those memories back in because it reminds me that I can get through anything.”
Though the would-be travelogue went up in flames, the notion to publish a book didn’t leave her, especially once she went into the field of publishing.
She got a job for an international magazine publisher that sent her to France, Spain and Dubai in her early 20s. “My big claim to fame was crashing a big gala Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum was hosting (now the emir of Dubai). I’m always up for a dare.”
Eventually she joined Peter Savill’s publishing firm that put out in-cabin magazines for cruise ships in the Caribbean. Savill was also big into horse racing – he went on to become chairman of the British Horseracing Board. Occasionally he gave his young employee a tip.
“There was a betting shop around the corner and every now and then he’d say, ‘Go put some money on this horse,’ and I’d run around the corner in my suit and go into the betting shop, everyone with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, reeking of stale alcohol, and say, ‘I have five pounds to place on two, please.’ It supplemented my income.”
For a time, she freelanced as a translator for a boxing promoter, whose Puerto Rican and Mexican fighters didn’t speak English. McAllister would be at the ready from weigh-in to ringside, sometimes asked to jump in if the referee’s call needed translating.
“The big fights were televised from Royal Albert Hall,” she recalls. “I would always wear a brightly colored dress so my mum could see me on TV.”
After extensive travel selling ads, and focusing in particular on luxury duty-free goods, McAllister was posted in St. Martin, where she met the man she married; they have recently separated, she says.
McAllister came to know Vero because her husband’s mother had a home here. Eventually the couple relocated, and McAllister opened her Pilates studio on Royal Palm Pointe nine years ago.
But this hardly left her stranded in a small town without a major airport; her Vero clients are well aware of the group trips she organized to Italy, merging her interests in fitness and food by incorporating classes in both Pilates and regional cuisine.
Those dual interests have also led to the subject of her next book: a colorful Indialantic chef with whom she plans to write a cookbook as well as his memoir.
These days, though, promoting “Mile High and Healthy” is taking all her spare time. She had the book published through an old magazine connection, Bob Morris, a food and fiction writer who has the custom publishing firm Story Farm in Winter Park.
Since the book’s December release, McAllister has had a flurry of national press – thanks to a great publicist, she says. She’s been written about on Forbes.com, and been on two national radio shows. She’s been interviewed by the New York Post and is scheduled to be on the Fox affiliate in Washington, DC, next week. Last year, she appeared on the Fox News show, “A Healthy You and Carol Alt.”
Dividing her time between her home in Melbourne and the apartment she keeps above her Pilates studio, McAllister still manages to have homes away from home in the frequent flyer lounges of the world’s nicest airports. Still, the trips aren’t always a lark.
Two weeks ago, she headed back to England one more time – her fourth visit this year.
Her cousin’s death still weighs heavily. She wonders whether his motto to “Go big or go home,” didn’t take a toll on his heart condition. “But he lived the way he really wanted to,” she says. “I realized it was time for me to get off my derriere and start writing a book.”
On the way to his funeral, she wrote two chapters. Within three months, “Mile High and Healthy” was done. As she fell into an old pattern of finding refuge in academic work, she met her July 15 deadline; the book came out Dec. 7.
“It was a key contributor to a catalytic summer,” she says. “It’s very much part of a new direction for me.”