I think most runners have this thought. I know I did back when I ran.
You look at the Boston qualifying times, for example, and think, wow, I’d have to be 75 to qualify. (That’s me. You might be much speedier.) But then you think of the upside. I don’t need to get faster. I just need to get older and stay the same speed.
I’m no longer a runner, but it’s finally happened.
This week, while riding my bike on the trainer, I got a notification from Garmin. Thanks to all of your hard work, your fitness age has just lowered. Your fitness age is now 62.
This week, thanks to the ticking of the clock, I actually turned 62.
Garmin suggests I aim for 56 as my fitness age. I know their metrics aren’t perfect–see the discussion of weight above–but I like the idea of getting younger fitness-wise, as I get older age-wise.
For the last few nights, I have been doing about 5 minutes of mobility exercises before bed and the practice feels really beneficial.
I didn’t start the exercises with a plan, I just did them one night while listening to the end of a podcast and I liked how I felt afterwards so I did them again the next night.
And since I often find myself feeling a bit twitchy and restless before bed – with an odd feeling or an ache in one place or another – but I haven’t had that feeling in the last few nights so it seems worth exploring if there is a connection between the exercises and the lack of twitchiness.
This may be a coincidence of course but that’s part of the experiment.
I’m referring to it as going in circles because I made myself laugh when I referred to the exercises that way on Sunday night.
And seeing as the routine includes rolling a ball under each foot and then doing ankle circles, knee circles, hip circles, upper body circles, arm circles, shoulder circles, and neck circles, it’s not wrong it just sounds a bit funny.
So here’s my experiment:
For September, I am going to go in circles for 5 minutes each night before bed and note whether or not I feel twitchy afterward and whether I feel more or less stiff each morning.
I’ll report on my experiment on October 1.
These imperfect circles were fun to make and they are a good representation of the imperfect circles in my practice. Image description: a drawing of 8 overlapping, painted circles in fall colours (shades of green, brown, red, orange) with a different pattern in black ink on each one (spirals, circles, grids, lines, triangles, squares) and each circle is outlined in black. The drawing has been cut out of a larger sheet of white paper in an irregular shape that resembles a cloud or a puddle. The outer edge of the paper is trimmed in black and there are gold dots between the black trim and the edges of the circles. At the bottom are the words ‘hello, September!’ written in black.
I got my first road bike when I was 51. It felt so great that I signed up for an AIDS ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles that was to take place a year later. I trained hard and made it to LA, and as I held my bike overhead in celebration, I was thinking, “Well, I’ll never do that again!”
Got that wrong.
First I found myself doing another AIDS ride, this one 100 miles per day for 5 days. Yikes! Then a couple more. And some organized centuries.
Next major surprise: I decided I wanted to ride across the USA, and hoped my husband would join me. (He didn’t really want to all that much, but he agreed, so I let him choose the route. Fair trade, right?) We rode the Adventure Cycling route called Northern Tier, which is the longest of the organization’s cross country options. Anacortes, Washington to Boston. I only skipped a few spots, including the one where there was a hurricane looming off of Vermont, where we were headed. Yes, that was the one that actually caused some serious flooding right where we might have been. I rode 4200 miles in three months. This was in 2011, the year we turned 60.
By then I had figured out that I really did like touring, and fairly long distances, and I started thinking of places I might like to see by bike. We went to Europe and did some famous climbs, and some leisurely rides. We saw parts of northern Italy, Slovenia, France, England, and a bit of Spain . We were with friends in the French Pyrenees; we rode to lunch in Spain. Australia. New Zealand. And there was an infamous Costa Rica ride. I LOVE Costa Rica, but it’s not a cycling paradise if you’re not a fearless mountain biker. And Nova Scotia & St. Johns/Labrador (Newfoundland). Prince Edward Island. British Columbia. Even a very brief ride as part of our Galapagos tour, so Ecuador, I guess. And one bit at a time, I began to ride in various US states.
A few years back I realized it wouldn’t be that hard to ride in all 50 so I started keeping track. Hawaii is easy for me; we have relatives there and visit fairly frequently. Haleakala from the beach to the top – 36 miles, 10,000 feet, is not so simple, but I have done it a couple of times. We made a trip to Chicago & rode in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Kentucky. I rode the Southern Tier, and spent my 70th birthday in Suwannee state park in Florida. I was mostly on my own, and when Bruce joined me & we drove home together to California, we stopped in Arkansas and Oklahoma & rode some miles.
Last fall I acknowledged that I had not treated Iowa very well. I had only ridden across a pedestrian bridge to Iowa when I was doing some work in Omaha (Nebraska), and gone around a few blocks. So last fall we took a train to Omaha and focused most of our riding on Iowa, then went on to Des Moines & rode some more. And all the other states – we generally had a relative, or a park we dreamed of visiting, or some attraction, so they happened.
But Alaska…
I don’t love cold. My daughter-in-law’s 50th birthday approached. She planned to celebrate by taking a cruise through the Inland Passage. I figured I could rent a bike at some of the stops & get Alaska done. In the summer of 2020. That was not meant to be. It kept nagging at me, though, and we decided this summer was the time to do it. I did some research and found AlaskaBike. It’s a father & son bicycle touring outfit that takes you to places most tours don’t go, so you get a good look at the back country of the state. It has an amazing amount of back country. We learned that the population of Anchorage, the largest city, is about 300,000. The population of the entire state is about 700,000, less than San Francisco. And the size. Alaskans like to say that if you put Texas inside its borders, then another Texas, you’d still have room for another half-Texas. So we went. A few of my cycling friends joined us, and two other women, one of whom was actually riding in her 50th state, too.
Pictures speak louder than words. I don’t have any with bikes, but I really did ride about 125 miles of Alaskan roads!:
In the lobby of our first hotel. This enormous brown/grizzly bear was stuffed many years ago. Fortunately, we saw none of his descendants outdoors. Canoe trip down the Maclaren River. Peaceful. Spectacular views
Bio: I am a lifelong Californian. My mother and father were not born here but moved to the state as small children. I have two grown daughters and five wonderful grandchildren. I spent my working life working at, and eventually running, the family insurance business. My father had introduced many employee benefits – sabbatical starting in 1970, optional four-day work week in 1972, elimination of all official work time rules in 1974. Adults like to be treated as adults, and people tended to stay a long time, so it was a very pleasant working environment with key elements of trust and respect. I also served on a couple of independent school boards, one a strong academic school serving grades 6-12, one a school designed to start helping city kids who had suffered the ongoing effects of racism & poverty to find opportunities they might not as easily discover without support. I live at a Lifetime Care Community where I serve on the finance committee and chair the sustainability committee. I also plan to join the newly formed fitness committee. And for fun, I have ridden my bicycle across North America. Twice.
NOTE: a number of the articles cited have paywalls, so I linked them to open archive.is sites. You can click and get there from here…
For decades (well, centuries, really), menopause was not considered a topic for discussion, much less an issue to be addressed medically for half the world’s population that goes through it. Menopause brings with it a lot of physical and emotional changes and health risks that have not been acknowledged, understood or treated. Women have had to suffer with little or no support. No news there.
Fast-forward (very fast–past the development, backlash, misinformation and correction periods for the use of hormone replacement therapy — HRT; read more about it here and here) to now: 2026.
Menopause and perimenopause are now the hot topics for social media influencers, podcasters, writers, and telehealth companies. You can look here for a list of the top 70 (Why 70? no idea) “menopause influencers of 2026”. Tressie McMillan Cottom, social scientist and NY Times critic wrote here last month “Ladies, we’re entering our Crone era. It’s about time.”
Our society’s approach to menopause and perimenopause reflects the deep flaws of a health system that has long treated women as an afterthought. Consider the staggering fact that, according to one survey, less than a third of American OB-GYN residency programs offer a menopause curriculum of any kind.
We need a menopause revolution in this country. Better training is an obvious place to start. By including menopause care in both foundational and continuing education for health care practitioners, we can equip more of them to support their patients. Medical schools and residencies need to embed menopause care in their curriculums, and accreditation bodies and licensing boards need to make it a required part of training — not just for OB-GYNs, but for anyone who treats women in midlife.
And Cottom readily concurs, pointing out the intersectional health disparities experienced by non-white women:
Unfortunately, those greater expectations [of increased research and clinical care] have not necessarily resulted in a consistent, effective women’s health care system. Most women experiencing menopausal symptoms still do not receive any medical treatment for them. As is often true, that bad news is even worse for Hispanic and Black women. Despite entering menopause earlier and having more health-related consequences (like fibroids), Black and Hispanic women are least likely to have medical support for menopausal symptoms.
So, isn’t it a good thing that the podcasters and the social influencers are spreading the word? Isn’t it a win for healthcare equity and access that telehealth companies are offering a variety of new treatments and approaches to managing the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause?
Well, it’s complicated.
But with research and training and actual interest in women’s health and well-being, it needn’t be so complicated. By Jon T for Unsplash.
In a JAMA Women’s Health article from last month (newsflash: JAMA started a Women’s Health journal. In September 2025. Uh, better late than never?) Kate Schweitzer writes that the “explosion of products and providers following decades of neglect represents a long-overdue investment—a gold rush fueled by growing awareness and demand for better care.” But, she warns that it has”created a rocky menopause landscape akin to the lawlessness of the Wild West, in which bold claims often reach patients before clinical evidence does.”
I couldn’t agree more. We are being pummeled with ads for products that promise no more hot flashes, less fatigue and brain fog, easier and better sex, and (Content Warning here) even no weight gain (as if that’s the worst thing that can happen to a 40- or 50-something year-old woman).
Using another favorite Wild West theme, Stephanie Faubion, MD, MBA, medical director of the Menopause Society and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health, cautions us:
“The pipeline has expanded significantly, and that’s a good thing,” Faubion said. “But you have to consider when it’s not actually creating value for these women.…You’ve got a lot of people out there selling snake oil, too.”
Wikipedia image of 19th-century snake oil.Snakes IN oil, not to be confused with the former.
I’m happy to report that snake oil was outlawed after the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (thanks, Wikipedia, for the info!), but for reasons way above my pay grade, not in my area of expertise and utterly beyond my ken, current US telehealth companies are not regulated such that we can trust that the products they market are 1) tested; 2) effective, or 3) safe.
Hence the Wild Wild West talk.
If you’re interested in a deeper dive into current and emerging interventions for menopause, read the JAMA article; it’s got evidence-based information on what we do and do not know about them.
Here’s my bullet-list takeaway:
In addition to the much-tested HRT, there are compounded hormones, testosterone therapy, and loads of untested supplements on the market.
Influencers are out there extolling the virtues of every potion you can imagine, backed by slim to no evidence.
Telehealth is offering to fill the gaps created by lack of access to primary care, offering similar potions from non-medically-trained folks with little to no evidence basis.
Dr. Nanette Santoro, an investigator on many studies over decades with the Women’s Health Initiative, summed it up: “What this [boom in menopause treatment products] does is it tells people, ‘You can get ahead of this curve,’” she said. “But because we don’t have enough good evidence, it’s really saying that you are being part of an experiment.”
All I’m saying is, watch your back out there, okay, pardners?
With researchers and clinicians sidelined by lack of evidence, the influencer and telehealth gunslingers are everywhere. Watch your backs.
We talk a lot here about physical fitness and health, and frequently about mental health. This week, though, I have been thinking a lot about financial health. Or at least about having my financial affairs in order.
I’m some ways, my financial things are pretty straightforward. I worked for the federal government for most of my career, so there was only one pension to worry about, and I’m already collecting that. I have a will (it was actually a requirement before my first posting abroad). But there have been other bits and pieces of information that I really should put together someplace where my kids can find it: I have a bit of money in other financial institutions, an RRSP I set up years ago with a out-of-town friend who has long-since retired, account numbers and passwords for everything from the hydro bill to credit cards.
And I need to figure out how to keep it all up to date (lesson learned from my dad, who kept records of everything including the adoption of our family dog in 1969 in his handy binder of key information, but had not updated info on an insurance policy so it took me a over year to track it down to get it paid out).
I have questions too. Do I need to keep some sort of proof of ownership for my cottage and house, or will that require a title search anyway before the kids can take over and sell them? What do I want to happen with my cats?
And my books? I have some that are probably of value because they are rare and out of print, but they are pretty niche. I have promised the kids I would provide the names of a few friends who might be interested in them. I’ll provide a list of those I think would be worth reselling or passing on to a museum. But if they choose to just dump them? I have promised I won’t be offended because I’ll be dead.
The same general principle applies to my craft supplies and the furniture I love because it came from my grandparents, assuming I haven’t yet downsized myself.
Speaking of being dead, I should add funeral plans to my list and make sure the kids know my wishes (and if I arrange a pre-paid thing, ensure they know where to find that information).
It feels overwhelming to deal with all these details, on top of managing Mom’s financial affairs. But each time I get through a little task, the mental burden lifts a bit.
This week’s achievement was moving furniture from Mom’s and my houses to the cottage. I finally have a proper bedroom and place to eat, and both Mom’s basement and the room I use for my fitness studio are significantly less cluttered. It was definitely a workout loading up a van then getting into the cottage from the parking area.
My cottage bedroom, finally with a dresser and a proper bed. One of my grandma’s crocheted throws is at the end, with my cat Pandora sitting on it.
I spent much of the rainy long weekend relaxing on that bed, alternating with making lists of next steps to ensure my financial health.
How about you? Do you have all your financial information and wishes organized and accessible? Or is it something you dread contemplating?
This year five friends and I tried to repeat a two-day cycling tour some of us had attempted a few years ago: the Guelph to Goderich rail trail, which is just short of about 150km of gravel path through scenic rural Ontario.
The first time, it was my first multi-day cycling tour ever, and I didn’t even own my own gear. We’d unknowingly scheduled the original ride during a derecho storm, so we made it most of the way until the rain, the cold, and the trail that had turned to a sandy stream made the ride not fun anymore. After getting 2/3rds to Goderich, we stopped at a brewery in a small town called Blyth and called it a day.
This time, the rain and the cold were back, fortunately only during the second day. But with the dramatic turn in weather from the first sunny day, so once again we found ourselves soaked, muddy, and at the brewery, warming up with a beverage and deciding to end the ride there.
Sun and shine and smiles on the first day….
In the car on the way home, I thought about what it means to progress in a sport or exercise activity. Typically, to me it has meant faster times, more goals, or better scores. Really, though, the goal posts are always moving as we age. The same journey gets harder over time, even with more experience and better gear. Not even considering an adjustment for age, we chose not to feel bad that we didn’t finish at Goderich but good that we got as far as we did. As my friend Lisa said with a smile, “I’m confident there weren’t many 60 year olds out doing as much as I did today.”
Lisa and me riding into town, soaked but happy. Photo by GA Koops.
Progress was being able to get the same thing done even after a few years of creaky bones, knee problems, more stiffness. Fun and accomplishment were our goals. As I enter mid-life, that kind of relative thinking gives me a new and better way to measure my own success, one that acknowledges what I can’t control and focuses on what I can (like chasing joy rather than results).
For long-time readers, this blog is itself a testament to this kind of context-based thinking about fitness and aging. As we write, over the yesrs, what is maturing along with our bodies is our sense of what progress means. We can give ourselves permission to move at a pace that reflects the time and space we’re in, rather than set ourselves up to fail with ever-higher expectations that don’t appreciate where we really are.
The Guelph to Goderich rail trail line is referred to fondly around here as the “G2G.” Now that we’ve made it as far as Blyth, twice, it’s now sort of a new tradition for us, our “G2B.” And if we can get even that far again in a few years, rain and/or shine, we’ll all be happy with that.
Gotta keep your strength up! Delicious pie and tarts at the end of Day 1.
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.
I find all the talk about aging fascinating. We seem to worry about the aging process almost as much as we worry about climate change. And yet, as a very old man always said when I asked him how he was, “It beats the alternative!” I discovered this blog when I was already well past 50; it began after I was fifty, with Sam’s & Tracy’s stated goal of achieving great fitness by the time they reached that landmark age. I have been reading it steadily ever since, and realize I am quite a bit farther on the aging path than the other contributors. So, I thought I’d share a few of the things I have experienced and observed.
In my first post, The Origins of My Surprising Fitness Journey, I described my brain cancer experience: I was told at age 46 that I was lucky; I could reasonably expect to live 10 to 15 years, but that didn’t feel very lucky to me. So I made ever-increasing forays into fitness. I’m 74, and honestly, I feel stronger and better than I did at 35. Yes, there are a few changes I don’t love: one knee, which was diagnosed with bone-on-bone arthritis about 15 years ago, has very recently made it clear that running is not a reasonable choice anymore. OK, I never really liked running much. I just used it as cross-training for a day or two most weeks, never went farther than the 7 miles (12k) of San Francisco’s (in)famous Bay to Breakers run.
And I wasn’t doing so many push-ups. Hmm. I got back to work on those and am back up to about 10 & still increasing, so no aging problem there. Balance? Nope, with all the dance classes I take, I can claim to have better balance than all the silly tests we keep seeing think a 30-year-old should have. Endurance? My bike rides right now are maxing out at about 30 miles, but I fully expect to work back up to 50 over the next month or two.
We moved four years ago to a Lifetime Care Community, a place that offers independent living, where you pretty much get on with whatever you were doing before you got there, assisted living if/when the need arises, skilled nursing (primarily for recovery periods when you’ve been released from the hospital but can’t quite be on your own yet), and memory care. Sounds sort of, well, weird, to want to live at such a place when we are still so healthy and active, right?
This community has taught me more about aging than I ever thought to learn, and I have never regretted our move. That is only a tiny bit due to one silly little thing: I never expected to go around saying, well, I’m only 70! I have met dozens of people here who are in their 90s and still taking brisk, hilly walks pretty much every day. I have learned about technology, history, sustainability… the list is long. People here are vigorous, intellectually challenging and fun to be around. And this is a feminist blog, so I can happily add that women are, on average, holding things together longer than men. Which brings me to a concept I read about before I moved here.
Squaring the Aging Curve.
I get a weekly bicycle newsletter in which one of the writers pushed the concept. He had believed that we can keep right on doing a lot of the active things we enjoy. We just might have to slow down a bit. Or maybe not. He didn’t think it would extend our years, but rather than it would keep us feeling better longer, with perhaps a steep drop off at the end. In fact, that is exactly what happened to him. He was still riding his bike in mountainous terrain when he died suddenly. I admit I don’t know much about the science behind this. I don’t even know if it has been tested in any way. We do know that people who exercise more tend to be quite a bit healthier than people who don’t move much. I do see that people who contribute to my community intellectually, musically, artistically, and who are often to be seen at the gym or out walking, seem to be a lot better off than I ever dreamed I’d be if I reach their ages. I plan to follow that thought for as long as I can!
I admit to being a chronic optimist. To prove that I don’t go too far in that direction, I will comment on a few elements of aging I could do without: getting up to visit the bathroom most nights; sagging, sensitive skin (I don’t burn at all easily & have had a hard time accepting sunscreen – but have grudgingly done it), plus there are more saddle sores; fussier vision, including reading glasses & cataract surgery; dreaded colonoscopy, but lots of years between them.
Sure, it’s not all easy. With a little luck, though, I think we can breeze through it longer than I expected. I see the fitness everyone here aspires to as an amazing head start to a great old age.
Bio
I am a lifelong Californian. My mother and father were not born here but moved to the state as small children. I have two grown daughters and five wonderful grandchildren. I spent my working life working at, and eventually running, the family insurance business. My father had introduced many employee benefits – sabbatical starting in 1970, optional four-day work week in 1972, elimination of all official work time rules in 1974. Adults like to be treated as adults, and people tended to stay a long time, so it was a very pleasant working environment with key elements of trust and respect. I also served on a couple of independent school boards, one a strong academic school serving grades 6-12, one a school designed to start helping city kids who had suffered the ongoing effects of racism & poverty to find opportunities they might not as easily discover without support. I live at a Lifetime Care Community where I serve on the finance committee and chair the sustainability committee. I also plan to join the newly formed fitness committee. And for fun, I have ridden my bicycle across North America. Twice.
I’m not big on following trends, especially those using terms like “maxxing” but this one made me laugh because I may be a trendsetter.
What is nonnamaxxing? Apparently, it’s a viral TikTok thing that encourages people to adopt the habits of an Italian grandmother, or “nonna.” Things like cooking from scratch, daily walking, gardening, long family meals, real-world social interaction and reduced screen time.
I don’t do all of these things (especially screen time), but I do love to cook from scratch, garden, go for walks or bike rides, and chat with friends.
As the Miami Herald says, movement, real food, social connection and mindset are the pillars of a nonna lifestyle.
An older woman in white shirt and pants enjoys a walk along the beach
Cognitive surrender is an essential new term that’s arisen to describe the abdication of our own reasoning to a machine that sounds fluent, confident, and authoritative. Studies are showing that when people interact with AI tools, they accept flawed reasoning at a startling level (almost 75% of the time). Not because they don’t have the capacity to reason better themselves. But because it is easier not to question. As a writer, it will likely come as no surprise that I’m leery of outsourcing. I worry about dulling not just my cognitive capacity, even more so my creativity.
And, yes, I have started working with AI tools, because I also think it’s important to understand what these machines are all about and how I might use them in an un-surrendered manner. I almost used the word collaborate in that last sentence, instead of use. I chose not to, because I’m not yet ready to acknowledge these machines as entities. That feels like surrender. This from someone who is more than willing to see trees as sentient beings well before reading Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.
I am exploring the border between surrender and leveraging these cognitive machines to free my time for deeper engagement with the world. More akin to my vacuum cleaner than a friend.
I have been thinking a lot about surrender in my body, too. Every time I read an article about aging and activity, which tells me that I should move more gently, now that I’m on the verge of a new decade, a part of me growls protectively. Not yet.
This physical version of surrender can be seductive. Messaging that encourages the little voices that say: I’m older now. Intensity is harder. Recovery is harder. Maybe I should just… let these things be harder. Be gentle with myself. Slow down. Stop. Lie down. The End. Okay—those last four are the hyperbole kicking in.The reasoning (without exaggeration) arrives fluently, confidently, with authority. And, as with AI reasoning, if I’m not careful, I might accept these blandishments about aging without interrogating the particularities of my own case.
I see the parallel this way: an authoritative-seeming signal in the form of an AI answer or an aging body; the availability of a path of least resistance; the ways that acceptance is not neutral, reshaping what we expect of ourselves and ultimately what we are actually capable of.
What the cognitive surrender research captures is that the problem isn’t using external tools. We humans have been off-loading cognitive tasks for a while now. Thank you, calculators. The red flag is what happens when we stop verifying. When silken reasoning substitutes for truth. When we accept not because we’ve evaluated, but because it’s so frictionless (and pleasant) to not expend the effort.
In the physical realm, adjusting our expectations as we age is not always surrender. Of course not. Surrender is unexamined acceptance. Letting the message of limitation go unchallenged. Sliding past the effort of finding out just what we are still capable of.
I turn 60 this year. I’d like to say I feel easy, breezy about that. I don’t. I’m in search of the right balance of grace and grit. I have set myself the goal of running a half marathon (21 kilometers or 13.1 miles) every month. Twelve months, twelve runs (among all the other runs I will do). When I was younger, that distance was a regular sized effort. Last year, I did not run that distance even once. And my year culminated in foot surgery in late November (which I wrote about here).
The decision has an element of stubbornness, to be sure. I am a Taurus, after all. On New Year’s Day, I started the year running 21k with my brother on mountain trails. I had a genuine concern that I would not run the whole distance. It took a while. I got it done. I was inspired. And so, this challenge. As I write this, four 21k are done. Eight to go.
I hear the voices that tell me: You’re not built for this anymore. I’m checking their veracity. They might be right. I might not be up for the challenge. I want to be gentle with myself, if I’m not. This is not about punishment. It’s about exaltation. The joy of discovering, each month, that I still have the capacity.
When I was a child, my mother always made us take the stairs. I remember glancing longingly at elevators as we passed them by. Now I live on the eighth floor, and I take the stairs almost every time I leave or come home. Not always. I’m realistic, not rigid. Not because I’m proving something. Because the habit of not surrendering has become its own kind of instinct. My mother was training something in me: the reflex to push gently against the available convenience, to stay curious about what I might actually be capable of.
The AI researchers found that people with higher fluid IQ scores were more likely to maintain their own judgment under pressure. I do not claim any extra intelligence. I think gentle resistance is more about habit. The habit of fact checking.
This is what I want to hold onto as I run my way through this year, one half marathon at a time. Not the delusion that there no limits that come with age. I have plenty. Instead, I want to cultivate the discipline of inquiry, to distinguish real limits from the limits that are presented with confidence, waiting for me to accept them without scrutiny.
My body, like a large language model, will tell me what it thinks I want to hear in smooth and reasonable tones. Rest. Take the elevator. Watch Netflix.
Sometimes my body is right. And I will be dancing with surrender and resistance, until I find the choreography that leads to graceful, gritty acceptance.
