I'm Older Than I've Ever Been. And now I'm Even Fitter
I used to consider birthdays to be a rite of passage. But nowadays, my perspective is that age is just a number. Major milestones or changes in a person's life happen irrespective of the number of candles on our cake. Instead of aging like a fine wine, I am drinking from the fountain of youth.
My perspective on life and aging has drastically changed since 2020. The pandemic awakened my OCD fears of contamination like no other event in my life. On the bright side, it has been one of the major motivational factors for me to get in shape. My fitness journey is just four years young; a very small fraction of my life thus far. But it’s made the one of the biggest impacts on my physical well-being in all of the years I’ve been alive.
As I turn forty, I feel way more youthful than I did five years ago. I’ve been spending every day over the last four years training hard and learning how to productively build strength and endurance. Many trainers and exercise scientists consider forty to be a benchmark with regards to building muscle and cardiovascular health, and maintaining one’s physical fitness into “old age.” Just type “fitness after forty” into Google or YouTube and you’ll be overwhelmed with the results.
I don’t often get retrospective or reflective on my birthdays. But I must admit that it’s nice to celebrate the good moments from the past and present, while looking ahead to the future. Coincidentally, fellow Substacker, Philipp Märzhäuser (
) recently published a post that has contributed to my musings on fitness after forty.The title of Philipp’s post is “Learn the Cheat Code For A Long Life From A 94-Year-Old Rowing Champ.” He describes the training routine and philosophy of Richard Morgan, who is ninety-four years old and won four international rowing championships after the age of seventy. The article notes that tests performed on Richard’s heart “showed the performance of a person aged forty while he carried a body fat percentage unusual for his age.” Richard is a few years into his ninth decade, but he’s quite literally young at heart!
While Richard's got a few years on me, I too am flourishing within the fitness community at a point in time that most people consider "middle age." My body feels like it did when I was wrestling in high school. Actually, I feel even better, because I've got a more focused approach to my training and diet now than I did then.
There are a lot of inspirational stories like Richard’s, and it’s quite easy to get swept up into idealizing the aging process through the lens of health and wellness. But as a realist, I know that life is unpredictable. Even more so in our current climate. There’s no magic elixir to longevity, although exercise definitely extends the quality of one’s life.
I hope to enjoy the fruits of my labor for many years to come, and plan to continue my rigorous routine for as long as I can. And since I’m writing about getting older, why not end on a time honored cliché? The adage “with age comes wisdom” is actually something I’m taking to heart. I’m learning to listen to my body and give it what it needs to thrive at the given moment (and hopefully well into the future). I am eschewing the notion that something is impossible at a given age. It’s never too late to make the change you want to see and feel.
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Great stuff - keep it up. I hit 50 recently and also in better shape than ever as I figure I need to be to keep on thriving. I just subscribed for updates.
Great stuff 💪 HBD!