On Aging and Pushing Limits

📷 @blade9films

I’ve been beating myself up.

Recovery has, in my mind, been slow. I’ve been comparing myself to much stronger, and younger athletes and using that as a baseline for my own recovery. This is a mistake! It’s only been a month after all.

I celebrated my 50th birthday on the trail. I remember sitting at a gas station in Penticton, at 5 or 6 in the morning, stuffing my face with garbage food (Hey! It was my birthday!) getting ready to climb my way up to Chute Lake (where I ate two breakfasts) on my return leg of my BC Epic yoyo. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend that day. Hungry, dirty, tired, swollen, on the bike, in the heat. To call it suffering, especially since I signed up for it, seems inaccurate. I don’t presume that I’m going to live another 50 years so keeping this in mind, I’m over half way dead. 

I’m proud of my age. People often comment that I look much younger, which is flattering, though I sure don’t bounce back like I used to. I’m not fighting my age but I am working on my health span, which is different than life span. I want to be healthy and somewhat spry into the later years of life. I don’t really think about how long I’m going to live, I just want that time to be spent maximally, not dying in a hospital bed.

In the late 70’s, as a child, I remember looking in through the hospital window in Deep River, Ontario. My Dad was in traction after having a couple of discs removed from his spine. Giving his pound of flesh for the abuse he put his body through as a virile young man, a police officer and an athlete. The doctor told my Dad that he would likely need to walk with a cane for the rest of his life. He wasn’t having any of it. I recall my father’s morning routine of performing a battery of stretches and movements. Even in the other room you could hear the light thuds on the floor as he completed each exercise. The sound of him breathing through each motion as he performed his daily maintenance ensuring that he would never need the assistance of a cane. It became his ritual and to this day, over 40 years later, my dad still walks 5 miles a day, rain or shine, -30 or +30. He gets after it!

“Moving water don’t freeze” was a phrase that was said to me over 25 years ago. The words were said to me while I was setting up a mid 70’s dude on a snowboard when I worked at McKonkey’s in Whistler, BC in the 90’s. Not just any board set up. This was an asymmetrical, hard boot setup not for the faint of heart. His words, for whatever reason, burrowed their way into my consciousness and bubble up from time to time. He impacted me. He inspired me.

Death is entropic. As soon as we burst into reality from our beautiful mother’s womb, we begin to die. Morose but true. You can’t fight it but you can try not to take yourself too seriously, eat whole foods, sleep, be vulnerable, be creative, spread love, move your body and push your limits without fear. Modern life is comfortable but we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of years being very uncomfortable. Hormesis is the reason why humans have adapted and have survived for so long. Just as you would stress a tomato plant to yield more fruit, humans are the same. If we don’t moderately stress our bodies physiologically, we become less capable of adapting to our ever changing environment. Our lives become less fruitful. 

So with that, I challenge you. Find something that’s physically difficult and do it. You may not succeed the first time. Shit, you may not succeed the second or third time, but at least you tried. You got uncomfortable and made your body, and more importantly, your mind stronger. It’s the aspic between our ears that holds us back and nothing else. Humans have evolved to move and are capable of great physical feats. If you can win the battle with your ego, you will get to the finish line.