59

I turned 59 a week ago. An acquaintance emailed me birthday wishes, remarking that she would always be three days older than me. I replied with a resigned, "Yeah, we're old!". She replied resolutely that we're not.

Some Boomers deny our age. This mitigates the achievements we attain while we age. Ten years ago, to the astonishment of my physician and despite that two cardiologists had refused to put me on a treadmill for a stress test out of fear I'd have a heart attack, I began running. I lost 40 lbs. The result was life changing. But at 49, the ingrained habituation of indolence is hard to overcome. Inertia grows with each year.

Now, as I approach 60, the challenge has evolved. Running and an athleticism have become part of my life style, part of my world view. I have moved to the point where people remark that I must have the genetics for fitness, or that it must easy for me because I'm so trim, or that I have been doing this all my life. But I manage the growing aches and pains each morning getting up. I am learning the compromises one has to make with age, that injury comes more easily and recovery comes more slowly. Conscious form, correct and deliberate execution, and more judicious use of intensity all become vitally important to avoid injury. The fitness momentum carries me into my older years, but the aches and pains of effort are beginning to grow. The dull ache in my hips upon arising in the morning are not an excuse to do nothing, they are an ugly harbinger of what life would be like if I stopped what I am doing.

With each passing year, many of us justify the growing sloth and its resulting frailty and weakness with excuses that we're too old, that we don't have the right genetics, that it is natural to become impotent and frail as we age, or, insidiously, that "we deserve a break today". Even now, 10 years after the herculean effort it took to re-adopt athleticism, I have refocus daily on the absolute necessity of keeping a strong mind in a strong body, defying the cultural current all around me that tells me that its ok to degrade.

Saying that 59 is not old is lying to oneself. I am old, but I redefine it with growing strength and resolve. To say that 59 is not old is to deny the magnitude of this achievement to myself and to all others who chose this way.