As is happening with alarming frequency, I have once again been deserted by my family. My wife and daughter flew off to California on Friday to install the young one at college. My wife allegedly returns 10 days later. I am beginning to take this personally. It’s not like I demand much from my family. What kind of a world am I living in where I am I expected to make my own gin and tonic when I get home after a round of golf? Believe me, I share your outrage.
In any event, being on my own, I decided to have a “me” day on Saturday. I got up early, went out for a brisk 25 mile bike ride, did some stretching, and then went to the gym for weight training. I got back, had some lunch, and did a little yoga for an hour or so, before going and doing some food shopping. Had a lovely dinner with an old friend that night, polishing off a tasty Barollo (2000 Parusso Barbera d’Alba Superiore Ornati) and went to bed early. All in all, it was a full day.
I got up on Sunday and was out the door for my usual 25-mile Dover bike ride by 7 AM. Being an observant fellow, I noticed that it seemed to take a long time to get warmed up. An exceedingly long time. Put simply, at no point on the loop did I feel strong, and was remarkably beat by the end of the ride. The only good news was that none of my tires deflated, and I was at least able to walk to and from the golf cart later that day.
I could have blamed this miserable performance on dehydration, but that didn’t fly because I drank about 1.5 liters of water with electrolytes in the 90 minutes it took me to finish the ride. I could try to blame nutrition, except that I had a homemade protein bar before I started. I came to the sad conclusion that I simply can’t expect at my age to be able to sandwich 2 moderately long bike rides between weight training (especially quad and other leg exercises). I reckoned that I didn’t have the same stamina that I had when I was 25.
But I was wrong. As I thought about it, I recalled the depressing fact that I was not in better shape when I was 25 than I am now. If anything, I am in much better physical condition now than I have been any other time in my adult life. This gave me some solace, I as realized that my difficult day on Sunday was not necessarily a sign of aging. But this reprieve was temporary as I realized that my inability to remember what a slug I was was perhaps an even more obvious sign of my rapidly diminishing capacity.
So in short, not being able to perform like you used to is a sign of aging. Not remembering how poorly you performed when you were young is a sign of aging.
I think I’ll just sign off.
It sounds like your only mistake that weekend was to do your lower body workout at the gym. Having biked you could have foregone that and merely done a little upper body or just stuck to the yoga. At any rate the sheer number of hours you spent exercising on Saturday makes you sound like a Dannnenberg!
It all sounds too familiar. At 25 I was still smoking and not in anywhere near the shape I am in now.
Left by Susan on September 6th, 2008