The morning after I turned 60, I headed out on a run with my youngest brother who was in town. What a treat! And he pushes my pace. For the first bit, I felt fleet and strong. Flying. The kind of run where your feet barely seem to touch the ground, tiny levitation rockets in my shoes. And that was just a feeling, since my feet were clearly on the ground when I tripped over a tree root.
I went down hard, catching myself on my shoulder. The result: a badly wrenched shoulder and a pivot from a brisk 9-mile run to a nauseous crawl toward CityMD, arm cradled against my body.
Everything in me wanted to scream until my lungs gave out, why me? Beneath that was a darker feeling, too: that the universe had smacked me down, put me in my place. I had wanted too much. I had been too pleased with myself about still being strong, still being fast, still being the person who runs the morning after her 60th birthday. So, the universe decided to show me who was boss.
I was already prickly about 60. About a month ago, a young man I passed in the final kilometers of a 21k (he could not have been older than his early 30s) said, with dismissiveness: well, maybe when I’m 60. I didn’t hear past that snippet. I kept running. I hear versions of these casual dismissals of people based on their ages often. The unquestioned assumption that age is a one-way street, that it diminishes us.
Even with a hurt and hurting shoulder, I questioned. With difficulty.
The list of things I could barely do at first was graceless in its mundanity. Open a bottle. Get dressed (oh yes, including pulling up my pants after going to the bathroom). Brush my teeth. Grab a glass in the cupboard. Never mind trail running or mountain biking. Did I mention I was three days from leaving for two weeks in the Canadian Rockies? I had planned solitude and mountain time to contemplate my new decade.
I had to borrow rolling luggage, because I could not haul a pack on a wrenched shoulder, and I always travel with a pack on my back. My mountain bike stayed in my middle brother’s garage in Calgary. Still, the first full day there, I wrestled myself into a sports bra, shirt and hiking pants and ventured out. Cautiously. Arm in a sling. A few days later I packed the sling in my little backpack (which didn’t hurt to wear, it was getting the straps on that was the trick). Gradually, I transitioned to trail running shoes and worked myself up to a slow trot. Always aware of my arm.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been managing the background noise of persistent pain.
This is not how I pictured opening this new decade.
And yet. And yet.
Curbed in my go-go mountain enthusiasm, I moved at a pace that allowed me to bask more in all the signs of coming spring. The runoff streams that got deeper with every warming day, so that I had to find new ways to get across that particular bit of trail each time. I had space to think about what it means to cross this threshold.
Because it is a threshold, even if I am, rationally, the same person the day after my birthday as the day before. I have sat with my complicated feelings about being a person in my sixties now for three weeks and something is shifting or emerging from underneath all the accumulated detritus of the years and the immediate distress of the physical setback. It’s a feeling, a sensation, a way of being that is harder to name than fleet or strong or flying.
Out on the mountain trails each morning, even moving with more caution than usual, a feeling spread in me, as the sun moves quietly into the world each day. Grounded, yet light. Buoyant, yet stable. It feels like I have the right to be here without further justification or proof of worth.
This whatever-it-is-ness feels like an arrival. Or a coming home. Belonging. Did I arrive at this feeling because of the fall? Maybe. If I choose that version of the story, then I can silver line the fall and injury. Forced to slow down, woman discovers inner strength. Another part of me resists the patness of that explanation. Maybe I just fell. Because I run on trails and other uneven surfaces. A lot. Life happens.
My shoulder is healing. Not as quickly as I’d like. And when has any injury healed as quickly as we’d like? The pain is still there. Background noise every day. Wearing. And it is retreating. I can increase my effort. Mindfully. The mountains will still be there for next time. My bike will still be there.
I am still here.
Landed in a new decade. Not as elegantly as I might have liked. Penguin-style, which is to say, with awkward grace.
