I’ll be 60 in 14 months.
SIXTY.
S.I.X.T.Y.
What the everloving eff.
Most of the people who read this blog know that Tracy and Sam started this whole enterprise as part of their project to turn 50 with the best fitness of their lives. Now, several of us are thinking about the next decade milestone, as Sam wrote about the other day.
In that post, she shared a quote from someone on substack who wrote “if your goal is to be a kick ass 90 year old, you can’t settle for being an average 50 year old,” who pushed for the idea of “winning at the game of life.” That requires, the writer said, of maintaining fitness in the “top percentile” of strength and VO2max.
Hm.
I have a pretty visceral response to this kind of competitive framing of aging. What the hell is “average?” And what the hell is “winning at the game of life?” Blech.
Absolutely, I want to age in a way sets me up for functional fitness and an active life for however long I live — in fact, one of my very first posts for FIFI, at the age of 50, was about being fit for “the lithe old lady inside me.” In many ways, I’m not that different from the dude Sam was quoting.
But I come at the intention very differently. One of the things I’ve learned over the past two decades is to let go of that kind of … voraciousness. Feeling like I have to meet some external definition of “top tier strength” or VO2max completely displaces the true gift of aging, for me — learning to be very present to what my body is saying, responding to its shifts in a graceful, grateful way.
Movement, strength, bendiness, balance — all of these things are tremendously important to me. But I do those things now with a kind of awe, a kind of gratitude, an amazement at what my body does. At amazement that even as I’ve weathered nearly six decades of life — of loves and adventure and bad choices and moments of grace and a pandemic and a world that never stops supplying new waves of grief and anger and beauty — with all of that, I get out of bed, I go outside, I feel the air on my face and feel energy and light and a need to keep moving. How bloody amazing is that. I am *alive*. What a glorious, unlikely thing.
I run much more slowly than I did when I was running marathons in my 30s. My body is heavier. My skin is softer. I need a lot more sleep, but I have a lot more insomnia. I have had to learn about menopause and vaginal atrophy. My eyebrows fell out, FFS.
If I think about things like whether or not my running time is in a certain percentile, I just feel a sense of loss, a sense of a “losing battle.” No matter how much I train, what I eat, how I structure my life, there will never be another 95 minute half marathon in my life. That was a whole other person.
It’s freeing to let go of that. And to be in companionship with my body, to appreciate it even as it changes, to ask it what it needs to enable me to do the things I truly want to do.
This year, those things have included — riding my bike alone around Montenegro and Transylvania, in blazing heat. Embracing my yoga practice. Working toward a 3.5 minute plank. Riding my spin bike through the fake zwift world. Grabbing a rare rain-free two hour slot on work trip to Vancouver to walk the 11 km around the Stanley Park seawall, tossing in three separate kilometres of running when I felt like it. What a gift.
When I turned 30, my commitment was to quit smoking and start moving my body a little more. I didn’t know that that goal would completely reframe my identity related to my body. What a revelation that was, to let that unfold. Like Sam, like Tracy, like a lot of us — I want to turn 60 feeling fit and strong. And I want that to set me up to keep moving, to keep being able to do the things I care about, with energy, with awe, with gratitude, for the rest of my life.
I don’t think I need a particular external challenge or goal to get there. I’ve been integrating movement into my daily life for 30 years now. I know how to do it. What I do need is to keep building my capacity for awe, for gratitude. For appreciation of being able to show up for what is important to me and to the world.
What about you? How do you orient yourself to aging and fitness?
Cate Creede-Desmarais wrote this from the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsail-Waututh peoples.
Great post. But I don’t actually think we’re that different in terms of our plans to stay active as we age. One big difference though is that I’ve spent the past 2 + years focused on knee surgery, physio, and rehab and now I need to move past that to get back to strength training and setting myself up for some successful seasons on the bike. I just need to be a lot more deliberate about it. I like plans! And I enjoy challenges. If that approach wasn’t fun for me, I wouldn’t do it.
Love the way you captured the shifting approach and letting go of that “voraciousness”. Your post made me think more about what I want for my sixtieth and I’ll blog about that soon.
Which is in 291 days btw!
267 days for me!
14 months today for me 🙂
Youngster! 🙂
I am mere months away from retiring so that will be my “60” this year. I passed that marker almost 3 years ago. I’m really interested to see how both you and Sam have approached this age.
Cate, you inspire me! This am I rode my bike in -10 over hard packed slippery snow and ice to a hot yoga class, where I literally thought, “ started practicing yoga before more than half these people, including the instructor, were born”. And I felt satisfied with that at 57. And I’m keeping your image of the lithe old lady as a beacon. Though I might prefer the word crone paired with lithe—less musicality, but I like the dissonance of the words juxtaposed.
Mina, I’m happy to join you in embracing my inner lithe crone :-). It may not even be that inner, lol.
The solo bike tours you take have always inspired me. These numbers – well, it’s sometimes fun, sometimes worry-provoking when we reach a new decade. Me? 25 years ago I was inspired to start taking the days as they come, and being delighted to see the decades arrive. I was diagnosed with a low grade brain cancer and told I was likely to live 10-15 years. I was 46 (now 72). So I would not want anyone to have to experience that, but since it happened, the recognition of the uncertainty built into the future has made me fit beyond anything I ever thought would happen, has sent me on all sorts of adventures, and most of all has made me love the birthdays. I spent my 70th birthday riding in Florida a few days out from finishing my second bike ride across the USA. This time, I was by myself most of the time. I was in the Suwanee River State Park for a while, just loving the day. All of you who write here help to inspire me. You have some great years to look forward to!
Thanks for this alternative take on aging. I think both things might be true for me: working to build muscle and lung capacity and being in awe of what my body can do. As a cell biologist, I often marvel at how individual cells work, how they communicate to make an organ, and how entire organ systems work together to give us functional body. I am grateful for a 58-year old body that can swim 2500m in an hour, and can squat 80 pounds. And I also want to work to keep it that way for as long as I can as part of a healthy ageing plan. And I’m turning 60 shortly after you, in 19 months! And like you, I can’t believe it!!