It’s been two years that I’ve been keeping this blog. And no time. Hardly a day goes by now I don’t think about not thinking about getting old. The condition I have (not suffer from, the word “condition” need not be the Boomer gen perjorative) is known as reverse aging.
As a Boomer friend said over dinner recently, “Good luck with that.”
I reply, no, I’m not kidding myself. In fact, as I told her, I’m now, at age 56, in the best shape of my life. I have no aches and pains. Why shouldn’t I feel such possibilities that come from the idea that there might be something to the “Curious Case of Benjamin Button” http://imdb.to/99N3VE (If you haven’t seen this 2008 feature staring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett then Netflix it . . . M and I saw it this year on board our flight to Paris and we both loved it).
Reverse agers start from a place where there is no pain. In my case, even the forefoot pain that I’d complained about in posts here has been corrected by athletic insoles; a sports podiatrist diagnosed the problem as inflammation caused by high arches and prescribed insoles that have scrubbed the pain away.
From there I have been running as hard – perhaps harder – than ever. In most cases I move from rest to full-tilt eight-minute-mile pace with little resistance. I run out the door and into a mental landscape, one that is soon awash in restorative body chemicals, slipping into a high, as I push my bad leg up the hills and slopes around my Brooklyn home.
On Saturday, July 14, I took a twenty-minute nap, read some more of “Wish You Were Here” by Graham Swift, then scampered out the door, and up into the park where I did intervals up and down the lookout steps. I can’t wait for my next run.
So far, 36 years and counting, I’m having good luck with this.
Next: Running for Your Life: Managing Disappointment
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