Spandex

Time is a useful construct, but sometimes it seems to have meaning that it doesn't really have.

Turning thirty-eight or thirty-nine on your birthday is not nearly so important in our society as turning forty. Why? Because forty was, for a long time, traditionally the start of middle age. These days, forty is the new thirty, but it used to mark a major milestone.

Those birthday years that end in fives or zeroes, they seem to have more impact. Not always, but I can tell you that turning sixty felt more monumental than turning thirty, forty, or fifty ...

Sixty was old, when I was growing up. The pyramids were sixty. Dinosaurs went extinct sixty years ago. My grandmother was sixty ...

Forty was middle-aged, but even if sixty is the new forty, um ... well ... you ain't no spring chicken no more. Patch, patch, patch.

The year I turned forty, I was determined that if I was going to be middle-aged, they were going to have to drag me into it kicking and screaming.

We tricked out half the garage into a workout room -- weight-stack machine, freeweights, stair-stepper, a rower, a mini-tramp.

We bought bicycles and did some serious riding. I did martial arts forms, hiked all over creation and gone, and walked the dog every day.

I bought Spandex. I wore it when I biked ...

Every set, every rep, every chin, I logged into a workout journal. Every other day, I hit the weights, at least to start out. I quickly realized I couldn't recover the way I had as a young buck, so I backed off to two or three sessions a week. I moved some serious iron. Not so much big weights as moderate ones, lots of times. My favorite torture was to do descending sets of chins: ten, break for thirty seconds, then nine more; break, then eight, seven, etc. down to one.

I burned all over ...

I hit everything hard. By the end of the year, I was the fittest I had ever been, including the year I trained to run a marathon. Bounce quarters off me, resting pulse of fifty-eight, hold my breath for three minutes, bench press three hundred pounds for reps, I was in shape.

Now, fitness is not about how you look, but about how you feel, and how you can function. How slow and steady your heart beats, how much air you can move efficiently, how you can apply yourself to tasks that need to be done. There are obese folks who run marathons who are in better shape than guys who win bodybuilding contests. However, there are usually some side effects to feeling good, and one of them is that you tend to look fit.

I used to could wear Spandex. Well, except for having to carry a big stick to keep the women off me when I was out and about ...

Which is all to say that, twenty years later, I am going to have to work a little harder to get in shape -- I don't want to peak too early -- and it might take a little longer, since I'll have to go slower and rest more frequently. And probably no Spandex this time ...