Recently in Aging Category

My father died 30 years ago today, so some of my siblings and I (along with my daughter) will be marking the occasion later this afternoon at a tiny cemetery in Becker, Minn., where he and my mother are buried - along with a large contingent of the Cox clan (including my grandfather and great-grandfather). There will be much reminiscing about our childhood years, I'm sure, and I expect we'll raise a few glasses of Grain Belt in his honor.

 

He made his living delivering that golden elixir to bars and restaurants in St. Paul, an occupation that earned him a barrel chest and arms like steel. (I remember returning from Air Force basic training feeling pretty buff and foolishly challenging him to an arm-wrestling match at the dining room table. It was over before I could contemplate the true depths of my delusion.) He was strong, but somehow sickly at the same time.

 

That barrel chest loomed over an even larger belly (he fought weight issues for much of his adult life), and he suffered from ulcers and other digestive ailments. His love of fried foods and sweets was legendary around our house, and we all learned how to smoke cigarettes and drink beer by observing him.

 

Of course, back in the '40s and '50s none of us knew the dangers of smoking - much less the insidious threats posed by greasy foods, refined carbs, a sedentary lifestyle and chronic stress (Dad was a hall-of-fame worrier). So, when he landed in the hospital with a heart attack at the age of 52, we were all shocked. And when cancer claimed him eight years later, we all felt he'd been stolen from us.

 

So I was thinking about Dad this morning while doing my morning zazen. And later while sweating through a half hour of push-ups, planks and kettlebell moves. He really didn't know any better. I don't have that excuse.

I think I've mentioned once or twice on these pages how I used to play basketball back in the day with a bunch of guys who were within shouting distance of my age. We got together one night a week at a local school gym (and, in the summer, at a local playground). We'd run up and down the court for a couple of hours, talk some trash, occasionally twist an ankle or dislocate a finger, and then go have a couple beers. I did this from 1985 until after my 50^th birthday in 2001. I recall attempting a poorly calculated comeback a year or two after that, but I've basically been out of the game for the better part of a decade.

 

So, I was a little taken aback recently when my tennis buddy, M.E., told me that the old gang was reconstituting the weekly game and was extending an invitation to him and me to return to the court. I was flattered, of course, but circumspect. I mean, on the one hand, I really don't think I can recapture whatever skills I once owned. And the chance of injury is pretty good. On the other hand, these guys haven't exactly grown younger in the past decade; I suspect the game would be played more or less in slow motion.

 

There was some fine print to be considered in this deal, as well: It wouldn't just be old guys on the court, actually. Apparently, there was a gaggle of twentysomethings that kind of filled out the roster, M.E. noted. Could we convince them to let us old guys slog along on our own while they pranced, gazelle-like, on a neighboring court?

 

Part of me -- the testosterone-fuelled idiot part -- loves the idea of playing against guys young enough to be my sons. It would be a great challenge. It would push my limits. Clear out the cobwebs in my fitness routine.

 

I was kind of in that zone Wednesday night, when M.E. and I arrived at the LTF Crosstown club for a 9 pm tennis match. We had about a half-hour to kill, so we tossed our tennis gear into a corner the gym, grabbed a basketball and started reliving our former glory on the hardwood. I was surprised to see that, after a few bricks clanked off the rim, I began draining 18-footers like the old days (which is to say, intermittently). Meanwhile, M.E. was starting to feel pretty good about himself, which meant he needed a little one-on-one.

 

That was OK. He's not as tenacious as he was in his 40s. And nobody was going to be driving the baseline for reverse lay-ups. Just a couple of middle-aged guys reliving the good old days. But, here's the pathetic part: We went at each other for maybe 10 minutes, neither of us presenting much in the way of defense, and the ball never actually managed to travel through the hoop.

 

Hmmm.

 

We grabbed our stuff and silently shuffled off to the tennis courts, where we battled through an exhilarating 14-game set before I prevailed 8-6. It was the best tennis we'd played all season: long rallies, great shot-making, much scampering from baseline to net. We worked up quite a lather.

 

And on the way home, I don't recall any talk about basketball.

My eldest sibling likes to remind those of us who envy his retirement lifestyle that the one big problem with life after work is that "every day is a Saturday," which is to say a day in which you tend to go shopping, have lunch or dinner out and generally open your wallet on more occasions than you might otherwise do so. I was reminded of this concept last week, as My Lovely Wife and I sampled the fare at several of our favorite local bistros and happily drained our checking account.

Still, if my week away from work was any indication of how we'll spend our retirement years, I'm thinking I'm going to be OK with that next chapter. Sure, we ate out like we were on vacation, but we also hit the gym one morning, put 25 miles on our bicycles one sweltering Saturday afternoon, enjoyed a good long swim in Lake Nokomis, visited St. Paul's legendary Swede Hollow for a 3-mile hike, did a 45-minute yoga session at a new studio in the neighborhood -- I even played 18 holes of golf.  So, despite all the fine dining, when I weighed in at the gym this past Tuesday, I was pleased to discover I was holding steady at 159.5.

(I mention this to MLW, who suggests that I'm acting like a woman. This might be a compliment.) 

I've been spending long, and not especially grueling, stints on the EDM for the past several weeks -- typically 45 minutes at steadily increasing resistance levels -- and I'm finding that it's a pretty reliable fat-burning regimen (the machine informs me that I'm burning a little more than 600 calories during these sessions). But, last night, I decided to shake things up a little and climb on the stationary bike for some intervals. After an easy five-minute warm-up, I cranked up the resistance on the machine and did six 30-second sprints (about 105 RPM) interspersed with 60-second rest periods. It's a nasty workout, but there's nothing like it for getting the heart pumping and ridding your body of a quart or two of perspiration.

A little, mostly clueless, stretching (how do you get those hammies to loosen up?) and I was ready to descend into The Pit. It had been awhile since I'd run through Marty Gallagher's "purposefully primitive" lifting routine -- barbell squats, bench press, dead lift, biceps curls, overhead lift, and tricep extensions -- and, one set into the routine, I remembered why. Barbell squats are just killers. With only 110 lbs. on my back, I managed three sets of eight, but it was not pretty. I was off balance and rushed and, if the bar hadn't been secured in a sliding rack, I suspect I might have created a bit of a scene (think old guy stumbling backward with barbell flying toward unsuspecting victim).

So, I back off a bit on the dead lift (80 lbs.), which is probably a good idea, since I'm having some difficulty keeping my chest out and back straight while bringing the bar up past my fragile knees. I  avoid the barbell-oriented bench press in favor of pressing two 30-lbs. dumbells. That works pretty well, which is to say nobody got hurt. And I breeze through my curls and extensions with no further damage to my dignity.

I'm feeling it all over this morning. But, hey: It's the start of a long weekend, so who's complaining?

I was back in the Pit Monday, lifting and sweating and feeling generally OK about this fitness thing, when I ran into Robyn Wells, an LTF personal trainer who I met recently through my rugby-playing colleague JS. Robyn is a 20-something powerhouse athlete who specializes in teaching us lesser beings how to get the most out of their workouts. And she generously offered to help me out.

Now, anyone who's at all familiar with my peculiar fitness journey understands my fitness personality. To review: I'm a 57-year-old guy with a bum knee and rusty ankles who can't run, hates to stretch and heads down to the gym two or three times a week with only the vaguest idea of what is about to transpire. I have no plan, few goals beyond remaining functional into my twilight years, and only a modicum of discipline.

All this I confessed to Robyn when we met Wednesday evening for our consultation. And, to her credit, she did not put down her pen, crumple up the sheet of paper on which she was listing my defects, and send me away. She led me over to the EDM for a brief warm-up, after which we descended into the Pit.

I am not a confident fellow in this atmosphere, as you might imagine. So, you might think that having an actual uniformed P.T. at my side would lend a certain credibility to my efforts: You know, a guy working with a P.T. might actually know what he's doing; he might be serious about this stuff, a force to reckoned with. That sort of thing.

Or not. I mostly worried that Robyn was attracting a bit more attention (Duh!) than I would normally receive -- which, of course, added a certain amount of pressure to avoid humiliation.

And that turned out to be not that big of a deal, since she didn't seem at all convinced that I could lift much of anything. At the bench press, she started me with a naked barbell. Same with the barbell squat. I was prepared to be indignant and slap on a couple hundred pounds and reel off four or five sets without breaking a sweat, until she pointed out how bad my form was and the myriad ways I could injure myself if I didn't learn how to lift properly.

When I showed her my deadlift form, in fact, she was so alarmed that she found an altogether different piece of equipment -- a rectangular frame with barbell-like protrusions on which the plates sat and handles on the sides, all of which is designed to be lifted from inside the frame -- and urged me in no uncertain terms to abandon my former approach.

I was off on my overhead press, as well: slightly bending my knees and opening my chest kept my belly from unwanted exposure. And she showed me a more effective way to do tricep extensions (laying on the bench).

Only my beloved biceps curls seemed to be in working order.

Humility is not a bad thing. It's a good way to cope with one's limitations. And I have a fairly robust capacity for humility, in my humble opinion. But I have to say that I left the gym that night feeling every one of my 57 years. Not decrepit. Not ancient. Not completely irrelevant in a youth-crazed, age-phobic, botox-and-silicon-injected world. Just kind of old, kind of pathetic.

Which, of course, I am. Especially when you consider all the elements required to create a serious competitive athlete -- which I am not. My young P.T. offered me a tiny glimpse into the discipline, intelligence and devotion real athletes need, and her advice will no doubt make my middling workouts more productive -- and my body less injury-prone (thank you for that). But at some point during Wednesday's session I realized that the distance between me and a real athlete can best be measured in light years. And that made me feel a faint nostalgia for those years so long ago when I might have considered myself up to this sort of challenge.

(Disclaimer: The above is a slightly delusional form of nostalgia. I've never been a particularly disciplined athlete, except maybe in my youthful fantasies.)

In fact, I'm going to skip the gym tonight and take a leisurely bicycle ride home. I probably won't even break a sweat. Next week, I'll get back at it. My P.T. says I should try out the spinning bike. Break out of my routine. I just might take her up on that.

I recalled on Saturday morning that, contrary to the post below, I had sort of resolved to drag out my old hockey skates and get out on the ice this winter. (I had actually communicated the resolution to my fitness guru, SW, in a moment of weakness -- making it all that more difficult to ignore.)

A bit of history: After years spent bouncing basketballs on Saturday mornings at my local grade school gym and perfecting my jump shot in my uncle's driveway, the National Hockey League came to Minnesota in 1967, and my best friend (who sucked at hoops) and I transformed ourselves into puckheads. Every night after supper, we'd slap on our breezers and pads, grab our sticks and walk down to Hillview Park, where we would lace up our skates and chase the puck around the rink along with whomever happened to show up that night. Sometimes, we'd have nine or 10 or more players -- of all ages -- crowding the ice on either team, creating a divine sort of anarchy -- avoiding the little kids, crashing into our peers, and always keeping the puck on the ice (nobody was wearing a cup, you know).

The warming house was always populated by our neighborhood's more adventurous girls, Marlboro-puffing vixens who inhabited a world far more mysterious than any hockey fantasies my sports-obsessed friends and I could conjure. So, it all made for some magical winter nights.

I played a couple years of park and rec hockey in high school and one particularly embarrassing intramural league game at Williams Arena at the U of M (I'd neglected to sharpen my skates and spent my dwindling shifts sliding around as if I were wearing boots while deflecting pucks into our own net) before giving up the game in my mid-20s. I still loved to skate, though, and My Lovely Wife still speaks of the time in the late 1970s when, at a skating party with a gaggle of local bon vivants, I cast wild aspersions on my carefully constructed literary-revolutionary identity by casually carving figure eights on Lake of the Isles  -- while skating backwards.

But, I've been out on the ice only a handful times in the past 10 years, so when I sat down late on Saturday afternoon on the wooden steps leading to the the Lake Nokomis rink to lace up my skates (the warming house, of course, was closed -- budget cuts), I really didn't know what to expect. And that's a good thing, because if I'd had any idea how awkward it was going to feel, I probably would've stayed home.

Thankfully, there was no one else on the ice to watch me totter about, propelling myself speculatively -- prospecting for some sense of balance. Should I lean forward? Crouch more? And what do I do with my arms? For a while, I felt like I shared the impending tragedy of a toddler's first steps.

But, after a couple of turns around the rink's big oval, I was starting to get the hang of it again: leaning and pushing, leaning and pushing, arms swinging , body swaying, and blades skimming along -- frictionless against the frozen track. I was working up a bit of a lather after a few minutes; a healthy breeze greeted me after each half-circuit, forcing me to push through the oval's home stretch. It felt good, though. Despite the rough ice, the wind and a rapidly forming blister on the outside of my right ankle, this was actually kind of enjoyable.

And this seemed to be working muscle groups that I didn't even know existed. I could feel it in my lower back, my glutes, quads and knees -- especially my knees (but not in the way I felt it when running). Maybe even a little bit in my core, actually. This can't be a bad thing, I thought, as I marveled at the pink sunset on the west side of the lake. Then, coming out of the second turn, wind at my back, I was suddenly greeted by a glorious full moon hovering just above the eastern horizon. MLW had mentioned the arrival of the "perigee of the Moon" (she knows about this stuff), the closest encounter with the moon in 2009, which presents a fuller, bigger moon than you're going to see the rest of the year.

I'm not accustomed to these sorts of magical moments. I could've just as easily caught a blade in a rut and tumbled face-first onto the merciless ice. Or turned an ankle. Or skidded over a bump and torn open my kneecap. (At my age, you think about these things.). But, no -- here I was, gliding around this oval in nearly perfect silence beneath this glorious full moon feeling like I was, oh, maybe 45 again.

So, I coasted over to where I'd left my boots and, with more effort than you'd expect from a 45-year-old, sat down and pulled off my skates, checked my new blister and slid on my boots, welcoming their offering of stability.

I was recalling those long-ago boot-clad treks home from Hillview Park, skates hanging from my hockey stick, when I came upon a park police car that was just exiting the parking lot. No ticket on the Crapmobile. Hmmm. The half-buck I had reluctantly surrendered for an hour-long slot on the blacktop turned out to be a smart move. Magic.

Everyone seems to expect resolutions at this time of year, which to me is an interesting phenomenon. It's the dead of winter, a time of reflection, certainly, but not action -- and you need both to make a resolution work, right? Still, the gym is packed with folks fuelled by resolutionary fervor, doing their utmost to fulfil some promise they made to themselves on New Year's Eve.

Or, at least I assume the gym is packed. I haven't been downstairs for a couple of weeks. Laid low by my annual holiday cold virus, I've been gulping echinacea and vitamin C capsules, blowing my nose and coughing until I feel like my head's going to explode. Evenings have found me wrapped in a blanket on my favorite living room chair, staring vacantly into space. (Night before last, I remarked to My Lovely Wife how I must look just about ready for the Home. She didn't disagree.) Not exactly a resolution-inspiring atmosphere.

I'm definitely on the mend, though. I slept through the night for the first time in recent memory last night, and enjoyed a pleasant walk to work this morning, despite temps in the single digits and a nasty NE wind. I almost lugged my workout gear with me. But not quite.

Still, I'm about ready to dive back in: Climb back on that Elliptical Death Machine. Start cranking away on bench presses. Maybe even get a little more disciplined about my morning routine.

Full disclosure: I've been struggling in recent months to rise early enough each morning to do a little routine I've enjoyed, sporadically, in the past few months: some pretend yoga, a little zazen, followed by planks (thank you, JS) and pushups. Maybe 45 minutes total. When I'm able to squeeze this routine in, it really gets the blood circulating. Makes the whole morning a bit more vivid. I just haven't been able to do it very frequently. I'd like to make that happen more regularly.

But I'm not resolving to get up earlier, because if I resolve to get up earlier, I might push myself to rise before I've had enough sleep, which would be counter-productive. And I'm not resolving to go to bed earlier, either, so I can get enough sleep, because sometimes when I'm lounging at night in my favorite chair, covered by a blanket, cradling a cat or two on my lap, and feeling every bit as old as I probably look, My Lovely Wife might be sitting there across the room in her favorite chair, her own lap blanketed and occupied by a cat, and a conversation could ensue and before you know it, it's midnight, and we're still going on about Darwin's orchids or Delacroix's obsession with the light in Morocco or a local postman's preference for wearing shorts in November (MLW is like this). And who would want to miss out on something like that?

That's the trouble with traditional resolution-making: It can become kind of an all-or-nothing deal that doesn't account for the serendipitous occasions that are rewarding in their own right, even as they derail your stated intentions. Or it can become so all-encompassing that you ignore your body when it's pleading with you to slow down.

The key, as Elizabeth Larsen points out in this EL piece from last summer, is to celebrate small victories on your way to bigger goals. "As with so many life goals, becoming fit isn't just about some mythical 'end result,'" she writes. "In fact, the unexpected benefits of fitness -- improved energy levels, better concentration and a closer relationship with your body, to name just a few -- can prove much more satisfying."

I've managed to avoid resolving anything during this two-year personal fitness adventure, and I feel like I've accomplished more than enough to keep me moving in the right direction. My walking commute has been nothing but a joy; for all its randomness, my resistance training has significantly increased my upper-body strength; and my cardio efforts haven't done me any harm (at least once I stopped running on the treadmill). Yeah, I could do more stretching, and some days I do (so bug off, OK?). But I'll never make it part of a resolution. I'll just try to keep it in mind, continue doing what I've been doing and see what happens.

Hey, maybe that's my resolution: Stay mindful. Keep moving. See what happens. I can live with that.

Act your age, Tony

I climbed into the Crapmobile for my morning commute today -- not because it was too cold to walk (10 degrees is positively balmy to a devoted walkophile), but because I didn't have enough time to hoof it across the bridge and still prep for a 9 a.m. meeting. No matter how fast I seem to be walking, it always takes me almost exactly 35 minutes. It's like there's some unwritten rule of quantum physics that prevents me from arriving any sooner or any later. It's a little weird.

Anyway, the Crapmobile is a bit of a metaphor for my middle-aged body. It's held together by duct tape, bumper stickers, rust and karma (sort of an accumulated cosmic faith in Japanese automobile technology, circa 1991). But it just keeps puttering along, well into its mid-life (180-some thousand miles). It may not look great (thank you very much), but it gets me where I want to go.

I bring this up not just because it's all suddenly occurring to me as I write this (partially true), but also because I've been noticing more anti-aging gimmicks recently. I may be irrelevant in the eyes of the mainstream advertising industry -- with the notable exception of ads for Viagra and Cialis ("Now for daily use!!!") -- but there are always enterprising individuals out there advancing the proposition that aging is a bad thing and that you should do everything in your power to deny its hold over your (aging every second) body.

There are plenty of garden-variety hucksters hocking anti-aging hormone treatments, anti-aging diet systems, and other magical potions. Then there are are e-mails from PR flacks promoting 50-something bodybuilders like Tony Little (that's him above -- what, you thought it was me???), who is "determined to whip himself into world-class shape, both as a personal challenge, as well as to be an inspiration to his fans."

Puh-lese.

I'm sure Tony Little is a very nice person as well as an AWESOME DUDE WITHOUT A SHIRT ON (AKA an ADWASO), but this kind of thinking just gets older people obsessing about the glories of their lost youth or despairing about their sagging torsos or both. It's not very productive.

Who wants to relive their 20s, people?!?!?!? I mean, think about it, for goodness sakes.

I'm not saying we should just slip quietly into the great beyond, without taking care of our body and mind and whatever other accessories we may have at our disposal. There's plenty of research indicating that regular moderate exercise, including both cardio and resistance training (and, yes, stretching -- jeeze) will keep our cellular power plants, the mitochondria, pumping away happily into the forseeable future. I just don't want to obsess over it.

It's not why I'm headed to the gym after work tonight. Sure, all the work I put in on the EDM and the weight machines is good for my body, but it's even more about the state of mind it puts me in -- not young, certainly; more like pleasantly exhausted. Like I've just carried a family of four to Ely, by way of Alexandria, without dropping my exhaust system on the highway (another story). And that's not a bad thing.

Because, when you're held together with duct tape and a prayer, pleasant exhaustion can be surprisingly gratifying. 

I've been comparing notes recently with Hodding Carter, the 45-year-old writer whose new book, Off the Deep End, chronicles his manic pursuit of a spot on the 2008 U.S. Olympic swimming team.

Carter, who 20 years earlier won Division III All-America honors for his alma mater, Kenyon College, uses his pursuit of Olympic glory as a vehicle to escape a nasty mid-life crisis. It's an insightful and often hilarious read, and it contains some lessons for geezers who turn to exercise as a way to relive/revive their former athletic prowess.

Primary among these lessons would be the following:
• Don't blow up your marriage while you're trying to rebuild your body/self-esteem. Carter has no sense of balance -- he's all about full-on training and he treats his wife and three kids like they're obstacles between himself and his fitness goals. This is not a good idea. • Don't live in the past. In his obsessive drive to cut his time in the 50 freestyle by two seconds, he actually goes back to Kenyon and lives in the dorm and trains with his old coach. Not surprisingly, he finds he doesn't fit in very well.
• Don't assume that just because you're trying harder, your performance will improve. On multiple occasions in his quest, Carter clearly is overtraining -- and it shows. In one classic anecdote, he arrives at a regional masters swimming meet feeling better than he's felt in years, and finishes last to a bunch of guys even older then he is.

The good news is that Carter eventually gets it -- not the spot on the Olympic team (the trials are looming as the book ends), but the real reason why he began his quest. At one point, he's offered the job of coaching young swimmers at his local YMCA. He takes the gig because he figures it will give him more pool time (and he really needs the money), then gradually realizes that maybe he's found a niche that allows him to embrace swimming in his middle years. All three of his kids are swimmers suddenly under his clumsy wing, but he finds that their interest in the sport mirrors his own. And maybe that's enough.

At the state meet, he writes how his youngest, Eliza, beams after swimming her fastest time. "[It] . . . made me realize the weekend wasn't only about the drudgery and unending chaos. I'd been enjoying the days' races but Eliza's happiness made everything complete. I felt blessed to have three of my own kids deriving joy from the same sport that had been, and still was, such a large part of my life."

It's a sweet moment in an often cynical chronicle, and it reminds me that my own fitness quest could actually use a goal or two (I know, I know. . . You told me so.), but I refuse to pretend that I'm going to suddenly get back out on the asphalt and go one-on-one with some twentysomething who would break my ankles with his first killer crossover.

I'd love to be able to play hoops again, but I have no interest in reconstructive surgery. What Carter learned throughout his quest, and I what I ought to someday admit, is that a little guidance isn't a bad thing. He sought out coaches and like-minded athletes; it probably wouldn't hurt me to do the same.

I’ve never been particularly obsessed about my age, partly because I’ve always looked younger than I really am (which was a huge disadvantage when trying to buy liquor as a teenager). But the more I immerse myself in this fitness stuff, the more I see how a regular exercise regimen can peel away the years. An hour at the gym just leaves me feeling more youthful — my heart’s pumping, my muscles are aching, my lungs are burning. I always come away feeling more energetic than when I started. There’s a reason for that, according to a new study by researchers at King’s College in London: Regular exercise actually affects your DNA. Staying active can actually slow down the aging process. Researchers studied 2,401 twins and found that those who were physically active “appeared biologically younger than their sedentary peers,” the BBC reported. They measured the effect by looking at pieces of DNA called telomeres. These repeat sequences of DNA sit at the end of chromosomes and protect them from damage. As we age, these telomeres become shorter, leaving cells more vulnerable to damage. In sedentary people, those telomeres shortened more rapidly than in their active counterparts. Indeed, the most active people in the study — those who exercised at least 199 minutes a week — displayed telomeres that were comparable to those in folks who were 10 years younger. I’m still not going to obsess about my age, but I have to admit that this is good news to a geezer who’s spending at least a couple of hours a week at the gym and racking up the miles on my walking commute. I don’t know if I’m going to be 10 years younger as a result of all this, but as long as I’m feeling great, who’s counting?