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.
