What to make of a diminished thing

December 26, 2018 9:27 AM

From Outside Magazine. Excellent article about aging through the lens of losing the ability to run recreationally.
posted by Kemma80 (29 comments total)

I had to give up running five years ago after back surgery and I miss it so much. I bike and swim and work the elliptical but it's just not the same as being able to throw my shoes on and hit the trail.
posted by octothorpe at 9:34 AM on December 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yikes, yeah. I was an avid runner until a car wreck left me with really awful whiplash. I couldn't run for years...I'm just NOW able to do so without debilitating pain and I forgot how much I need it to feel whole. I assume this is something I will also grieve the loss of as my body continues to age.
posted by Young Kullervo at 9:53 AM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

I felt this one a little bit. Time is a dick.
posted by putzface_dickman at 9:57 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]

I was never a capital r Runner but it was something I (sort of) enjoyed doing, in the sense that it took very little effort to just open the door, go outside, and do it, especially at the weird hours I've always kept. Like a meditation for people who absolutely cannot sit still. Enjoying the quiet of the city at ridiculous hours when everywhere normally busy becomes a liminal space while the exertion pushes you outside your body.

Losing that, and so much else, to spinal injuries and the general degeneration of my gross horrible flesh prison's joints, has been really ugly, and as obnoxious an emotional injury as the physical injuries which limited me in the first place. It feels like a violation, like coming home to find you've been robbed, horrible grimy unknown thieving hands rifling through your belongings, your life, everything you are and have, snatching some things away forever and smashing others with malicious glee, and the knowledge that it will happen to everyone else eventually as well helps not at all.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:00 AM on December 26, 2018 [30 favorites]

I've never been a runner, but this experience isn't limited to that activity. It's true of anything we do or have that we use to define ourselves and take pleasure in, since inevitably it all goes away: physical prowess, voice, eyes, ears, brain...

Perhaps because I started going bald early, I've been unusually cognizant of the aging process and my eventual personal experience of it; yet I was still slightly surprised when I started feeling Clearly Less Young Than I Once Was in my late 40's. I don't relish the continuation of the process, even assuming no major trauma happens to me beyond the standard inevitable decline.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:17 AM on December 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Diminished energy.
Diminished stamina.
Diminished strength.
Diminished healing.
Diminished eyesight.
Diminished hearing

More chronic aches and pains.

Fuck.

This is what 61 is like for me right now.
posted by Oh_Bobloblaw at 11:45 AM on December 26, 2018 [9 favorites]

I had to give up running five years ago after back surgery and I miss it so much.

Ditto. Blew-out my T-10/T-11 disc and that was the end of running.

I was never anything close to a serious runner. I learned early-on that pavement running didn’t work for me, so I relegated myself to 3-4 mile stints on elevated treadmills 2 or 3 times a week. But, oh my, did I love it! Just the feeling of my body working like a strong, coordinated machine was like an elixur. Then, the absolute most horrible, debilitating pain I could ever imagine signaled the end to that magic.

That was roughly 10 years ago. I’ll be 61 in a couple of months.

Every time I see a runner, I shed a few internal tears. I really miss it.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:02 PM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

This article is such a mood for me right now. 56, a year and a half of battling knee issues where I rehab, get back running, tweak them again, repeat repeat repeat. I'm late to running and have so much more I want to do and wonder if I ever will.

Literally off to the park to try 2 mins walking, 1 minutes running and see how that goes...
posted by maupuia at 12:10 PM on December 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

That article, and this thread, is exactly what I'm dreading. I am still able to run (tho I am [perpetually nursing small pains and niggles) and so much of my mental health depends on exercise it scares me sometimes. I'm a bit sad that the article didn't end with some sort of acceptance. He's still fighting. *sigh* Well, I guess I'll keep practicing my meditation so I'll be as ready as I can when the day comes.
posted by ClarissaWAM at 12:48 PM on December 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

I can only do about 5k at a time now, because of my knees, and I probably shouldn't even do that.

I hate it. Nothing compares.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:01 PM on December 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

the paragraph about how adulthood is not just experience, but the particular experience of loss and having to move on from it, was poignant. this is why some people are overgrown babies into their 70s, while others are wise beyond their years in their 20s.
posted by wibari at 1:51 PM on December 26, 2018 [9 favorites]

I blew out a disc recently and can't run or train in karate and may never again. The irony is I was doing these things to keep from getting old.
posted by tommasz at 1:57 PM on December 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

It’s a bit of relief to hear other people going through this.

For a very, very long time my identity was wrapped up in athleticism. I lifted, boxed and Thai boxed for over 25 years.
Well into my forties.

And most of that time I had undiagnosed FAI - that manifested in compensatory knee and low back pain. Which just got worse and worse over the years. And the mobility work I focused on made it slowly worse because you can’t stretch bone.

Then finally the hip pain started and the MRI showed advanced Femoral Acetabular Impingement and of course the requisite arthritis on my spine.

I had to stop training and coaching. I had to stop running. I had to stop heavy lifting. I miss feeling tough.

Hip, knee and back pain was handled if I stayed away from hard impact. So I started swimming a few hours a week as the supposed low impact alternative. But because I tend to go too hard after two years that led to a C6-C7/ cervical/thoracic syndrome. Arthritis again. I tried a dopey snorkel to try not to twist as much and within a year the nerve was pinched again.

Sports docs were like “yup, you were highly active and wore you body down.”

I was like, fuck, I thought that’s what you were supposed to do? I have couch potato friends who didn’t do shit all their lives starting marathon training in thier fifties. And I’m almost crippled. The irony doesn’t escape me. My doctor attempts to make me feel better telling me well your cardiovascular system is in great shape and I have a 55 resting heart rate like that was the point of it all. But it wasn’t. It was the activity. It was the doing.

So. Seven years of expensive PT. And pain. The best I can do is bike and some calisthenics three of four times a week.

And it’s just not enough to alleviate tension and anxiety nor focus my competitive energy. I realize at 55 a whole part of my life is done. I walk around now feeling weak and vulnerable and I don’t know who I am.
posted by You Stay 'Ere An Make Sure 'E Doesn't Leave at 2:12 PM on December 26, 2018 [14 favorites]

I went through a very brief phase of running regularly. I did it long enough to get what people loved about it, in fact I found it so addicting that I kept skipping my rest day, which probably contributed to why it was a brief phase. I actually looked forward to going for a run after work or first thing in the morning. Etc. And then my knees made it clear that if I wanted to run in my serious hobby sport (dog agility), I was going to have to stop running at other times. So it sucked, but I stopped in the hopes of preserving my joints for as long as possible so I can keep playing my sport. And even now, after a long weekend of agility competition, which includes some running but a LOT of walking ( I regularly do over 30,000 steps per day on those weekends), getting up after sitting for a while is...slow and creaky.

Getting older sucks, but it's still better than the alternative (where "the alternative" is "death" and not, obvs, "eternal youth with all the cartilage").
posted by biscotti at 2:45 PM on December 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: Eternal youth with all the cartilage
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:22 PM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

Ooooh this hit me in the guts. I may have mentioned this before but the summer before my sophomore year in college a guy on a cell phone in a pick-up plowed into me while I was biking down the street. It was Require-a-Flight-For-Life-to-Another-State bad. At the time, everything in my life revolved around being outside and doing physical things. I wouldn't have called myself an athlete but I trail ran/backpacked/hiked/fished *all the time*. I snowshoed and skiied and had earned all of my book money for each semester by acting as a hunting guide. I went on adventures with friends. I grew up on a small ranch and still helped out my parents, and was already thinking about down the road when they were older and how all that hard, very physical labor of ranch life might be handled. I was poor, so goddamn poor, but there was a national forest outside my back door and BLM land outside my front door and not for once did I ever consider myself poor because I might have lacked a couch but I could run through the trees and that.was.EVERYTHING. Outside, physically active - that wasn't just my identity, that was my life.

And then I was waking up in a hospital room and in front of me was a mangled leg and a doctor telling me that at age 19 I would be fucking lucky if I ever walked again in a somewhat normal way. And all that other stuff? Running? Backpacking? Throwing hay? That was Out. Forget it. Accept it and Move On. But because I'd been hurt before and because I was a stubborn jackass, I basically told the doctor to go fuck himself. It took four years of intense PT and hard work and night after night after night sitting on this fucking. . . . excuse of a chair box thing I picked up at a thrift store doing my leg and foot exercises but eventually I lost the crutches and the walker and the cane and the limp. Eventually after that I even started backpacking again and even running. And last summer I hiked 900 very slow miles! It's been a journey.

But I'll never run under 10 minutes again. I've fallen so many times I've got big knobby wrists from breaking 'em, and the start of some bad arthritis. There are still some nights when my hip hurts so bad the tears sliding from my eyes soak the pillow. I lost so many nerves in my foot that I get frostbite at the drop of a hat because I can't tell my toes are going numb. And the eventually decay that happens to everyone looks like its going to happen at a super accelerated pace, and worse it's going hit the uninjured side just as badly because it's been taking the brunt of everything else all this time to "protect my bad leg". And let's not talk about my knees.

Somehow I was fortunate enough that with some hard work I managed to come back from injuries and keep doing some of what I had done before. I know that not everybody gets that. And I view. . . I still view. . . every.fucking.day I get with my body as gift. My body is the best gift I'll ever get, no matter what. And I'm fortunate that not terrible enough things happened that I can maintain that attitude. SO fortunate. But wrapped up in all that are the layers of pain. The pain I went through to get here, which means that my pain tolerance to the point that I don't take care of my injuries, like when I tore my ACL and shrugged it off. The pain caused by the very real fact that the breakdown of my body is already starting to happen, that I get up some mornings like I'm my 70 year old dad and I'm three decades+ behind him. The layers of pain about a very real loss of the life I had and everything I wanted to do.

And the grief. Because I've adjusted to the physical limitations and pain and struggle of doing almost everything else. Except. . . sometimes. About the running. I loved to run. I really loved it. And after one July morning I've never again been able to run down a mountain trail among the pine trees and the breeze, toward the valley below, jumping over rocks, my hair streaming behind me, my lungs full of good air and feeling the sun and the sweat and my feet so in touch with the ground I didn't need to watch the trail, just my muscles pumping and feeling alive and alive and alive. I loved to run and though I can run now I will never be able to run again like I did back then, and it was stolen from me because some asshole decided he needed to call someone on a phone. And I can't grieve properly for it because I know I'm lucky that I can still run *at all* and I know what I went through to run my shambling run that I do. But I don't run now. I jog. I jog, and I no longer jog by myself, I have a companion called Anxiety, because I'm anxious about my knee and my leg and my hip and falling so I will never run as free as I once did. It's been almost 20 years, and I've adjusted to my reality. I had to. And I can still do so much! But what I wouldn't give, I think sometimes, to be able to wake up morning and go on just one more run, as free as I can be, as fast I want, with nothing between me and the ground but my shoes and my fine working, marvelously working, amazing strong free legs. And I miss it as fiercely as as I did the very first time I realized I wouldn't ever run like that again.

But still. For now. For some time in the future. I still can put on my shoes, go down to the park, and jog, and even though there's what feels like a goddamn car's worth of metal parts and scars and scar tissue between me and the ground, my legs are still working; and despite that fierce ache in my chest I feel missing what used to be, I also feel a swell of gratitude and amazement that I'm able to do what I can; I can still feel the sun and wind on my face, and my sweat and hear my breath,I'm still alive and outside!, so off I go and will until I just can't anymore. One day I'll lose running again, and I'll grieve my guts out. But until then, I'm going to run, cherishing every torn breath and every bead of sweat, and keep running for a very simple reason: because I can.
posted by barchan at 3:28 PM on December 26, 2018 [36 favorites]

I am 42. For most of my life, I viewed myself as a brain in a jar. My body being the jar. The last few years have taught me otherwise, with much pain, but also much pleasure.

I have a T 7–8 protrusion that impinges my nerve around my rib cage. Because I’m a woman, I was brushed aside as misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia for years before someone figured it out. That was in 2015. I got better, like pain-free better, With epidural injections and physical therapy. Then my life fell apart and I didn’t keep up with the activity. I do I had to keep working on my body, but it seem like too much. I always told myself I would start again the next day. Next day became two weeks, then months, then a year. I started having problems a little at a time, but they were bad at the wood away with rest and massage and ice. I do at the back of my head it was important but I just didn’t get to it. Until the spring when I lifted something wrong.

I floundered all summer. Making small strides, but never really improving completely. I did physical therapy again, but I didn’t follow up with the epidural injections because a) they suck, b) the logistics of them, now that I’m alone, seemed too much.

I remembered how as my back got better the first time, I started to walk, then to run. See, I’ve always hated running. The last mile I ever ran was in high school. But something told me to do it because I hated it. That was the challenge. (OK, I kind a wanted to be able to eat a cupcake that again and not have it immediately go to my waist.) But mostly it was because I hated it and wanted to find the joy in my body.

I didn’t really run much the first go around. I started mid summer veeeery slowly. Essentially I got cold in the fall and stopped when it got down to the mid 50s. I told myself I would run again for the past two years. And didn’t. But something this fall made me do it. My back had only improved a little, and I just couldn’t seem to make progress. But the end of September came and I started running and I just kept running. And I ran through October. And my back pain which had flipped and flopped was finally getting better.

But then November came. It got cold. I had things to do that kept me inside. I had a period of time without my adhd medication, which made the focus I need it to run harder to pull to the forefront. Though things got better after running through October, I still wasn’t healed, I still have to be cautious with sitting too long or standing. But I let myself get carried away, and to swear I’d start again “tomorrow” through most of November. About two weeks ago, I let myself get too complacent it hurt my fucking back again. Like the author, my calves of even the arches of my feet seized up as the inflamed nerve tickled by back muscles and locked everything up. I couldn’t even walk, and the way I’ve managed the back pain is through walking. I also have the foolish notion of foregoing muscle relaxers the doctor prescribe for times like this. I realize a week in that I was just going to keep getting worse if I didn’t.

I am now starting to run again, trying to learn how to run in Wisconsin winters. I tried running indoors but I really didn’t like it. I don’t like the cold how about I hate the indoors more that I hate the cold.

I’m a tad worried with other symptoms i experience that my back worse than it was two years ago – not that its just really inflamed again. I have an appointment at the end of January to talk to my doctor.

But I also ran my first a broken while since high school two days ago. That I got sick yesterday. Just a cold, but I’m terrified if I don’t keep moving that I won’t keep running. I even made myself do a half-assed run yesterday, knowing I would probably be in bed for a few days and that could cause my back pain to get worse.

This article really hit close to home. It’s been hard for me to cope with having a debilitating injury. Even harder that I had a year where it’s seem to subside completely. And even though my running is still very new, I feel like I need to do it. Like it’s something my body has been missing my whole life. That my “jar” needs attending to as much as my brain. Do I accept these new aches and pains as part of who I am? Or I have I just experiencing another bump in the road and things will clear up again? Where they thought My pain was fibromyalgia, I had learned to accept that might be as good as I got. But then there was that year with no pain or limitations. But I don’t know if it if I get back there, someday I’ll have this problem again. The cruel joke is that now that I’ve discovered how important my body is to who I am, I have to fight to keep it together and I’m not sure I can get to pain free, or for how long. And will I do the same thing, that once it stops hurting, I stop with the back care? I so often feel like I could leave manage one major task in my life. So the moment I have other obligations, I promise myself I’ll do the one thing the next day. I’m really not ready to give up this newfound physicality, but I’d like to have a choice. Even if I do, it’s been a reminder that this body will keep breaking down until the day I die.

Fuck.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 4:46 PM on December 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

I am approaching 70. No more running and jumping for me (not that I cared much for them in the first place). But still, there has to be a physical element to life besides infirmity. So I decided on graceful. Whatever purposeful, fluid and coordinated movement I can manage with perhaps the occasional stumble or falter and a "I meant to do that" smile. Works for me...
posted by jim in austin at 4:52 PM on December 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

Not a runner, but, at 48 I can see in the distance the time when I will no longer be willing/able to throw a leg over a horse and go for a ride. I know for sure that my balance isn't what it was in my twenties. My bravery, some of that must have fallen off somewhere in the years behind me because I don't have as much of it as I used to. And it's not just me. Many of the folks I grew up with, avid horsepeople all, still have horses, for their children or (now) grandchildren. But they, themselves... they don't ride anymore even though they seem healthy. Anyway, most days I can see in the distance the day I hope never comes. I try to be happy that today is not the day. I hope it never is the day, but hope is a whore and I am old enough to know better than to believe her for real. It's gonna hurt like hell.
posted by which_chick at 4:54 PM on December 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Interesting reading the article and these comments.

I’m 41. About eight years ago, I started running. It was a real love/hate thing. But there was enough love to keep me going. One day a few years ago, I found myself no longer able to run. I’ll spare you the whole medical story and just say that there’s no coming back from it. I can’t run.

But I’m glad I ran when I did. I sometimes wish I had never gotten into it because then I wouldn’t ever miss it. But on the whole it was a net positive.

In my post-running era, I’ve learned that I can still cycle. It’s not the same. It’s not. But I enjoy it, even moreso knowing it won’t last forever. Nothing does.

I got angry sometimes that something stopped me from running — that a whole era of my life is over. But I’ve made peace with the way my life looks after running. I think I thought that my mental health and my physical well-being were the result of running. But really it was just one pathway out of many toward that.

FWIW, I saw a kinesiologist who specializes in working with people in my situation. It made a world of difference.

There’s nothing quite like running. But there *are* other things. If I could run one more time, I’d savor it and I’d run till I was exhausted. But I can’t. That’s life.
posted by veggieboy at 6:53 PM on December 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Well this is an interesting, if somewhat depressing thread.

I have always been a runner, if never a serious or competitive one. I'm proud of having run on 4 different continents, in some of the most amazing places, and having done a half marathon. I want to do another half, but things just started going awry with my lower back and hip. I can't seem to stay injury free long enough to train for a second half marathon, and now... ( I don't even like to write this, lest the writing make it true) I have to think, maybe I will never get a second chance. I'm trying to run just enough to satisfy the need and not too much that I f*** up some new body part. I'm a runner. I must run.

There is some tiny comfort that all of you here are also dealing with this. It feels just the littlest bit less sad and lonely.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 9:24 PM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

"Acceptance feels like giving up." expresses in one sentence the challenge of aging.
posted by storybored at 10:04 PM on December 26, 2018 [8 favorites]

Well, the Buddhists do say that suffering comes from desire for and attachment to worldly things....
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:19 PM on December 26, 2018

Running and I only had the briefest of flings. I was a fat kid, and, well, now that I’m 42, I can say that I’ve literally had the same fat, bald body for the last 20 years. There’s muscle underneath, and there was stamina, but I can feel that fading now. At 20, I fell down some icy steps, and through never really understanding the need to maintain the body, and the importance of taking care of it, that fall led to a herniated disc that, with care, could probably have been avoided. That disc led to surgery, that led to MRSA, and then, just as things seemed to be getting better, a car accident (my fault) so violent the same disc ruptured again, shooting disc matter out and wrapping around my spinal cord. The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it.

That was four months before I left for China, to teach English without knowing the first thing about either. I had a lot of down time, and one thing universities in China have in excess are basketball courts. Our university had at least sixteen full length outdoor courts, and I would play with students and friends two or three hours out of the day. One day, some other teachers were going for a run, and invited me along. Reluctantly I went, and somehow, after a life time of fat kid in gym walking the mile, I ran an 8 minute mile. It was absolutely exhilarating, and I was excited about the new world ahead of me.

A day or two later, the pain in my foot became unbearable. I felt certain I’d broken something in my foot. A friend got me to see a doctor in a PLA hospital, and they found nothing wrong with my foot. After taking my history and sucking breath over teeth at the still vivid scar at the base of my spine, the doctor told me it was more than likely my back, and that began a life of being unable to trust my own body and the lies it tells me. To anyone that says there is an intelligent designer, I say “explain referred pain, pain that appears in an utterly unconnected part of the body from where the problem lies. What intelligent designer would do that?”

And that’s been the cycle, find something fun and enjoyable, get into exercise again, try to slim down, knowing that all this weight isn’t helping my back. And two, three weeks into it, each and every time, the tendrils of sciatic burning their way down the back of my thighs. The bracelet of fire around my ankle, and I know it’s time to lie flat on the floor.

And now? I feel the exhaustion. I find I need to change gears on my bike just to get up hills that never required it before. My hands aren’t as nimble, I drop things, I am clumsier. My body, which I know I have never taken proper care of, which, hell, I never even understood what was necessary or how, it’s breaking down around me, and I all I’m left with is the regret of not having done what was necessary, what was right. I am aging, and I doubt think it will be graceful, and I am terrified.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:19 AM on December 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

>Do I accept these new aches and pains as part of who I am? Or I have I just experiencing another bump in the road and things will clear up again?

A. Parts never *quite* go back to the factory default once they’ve been compromised.

I’m lain up at home with either yet another bout of tendinitis (my 10th? I think) or a metatarsal stress fracture - maybe, at my specialist’s appointment, I’ll find out which it is! But I doubt it! Because apparently soft tissue or subtler injuries remain mysterious in 2018 (at least, they are in Canada, where MRI machines are reserved for things that imminently kill people. Ortho stuff that’s not a bone break, the attitude is “eh, it’ll probably mend itself. Or it won’t, whaddyagonnado”)

I crutched for a day before that woke up my rotator cuff tendinitis + tennis elbow and wrist stuff. So getting around is out. I’ve been stuck in for months at a time three or four times, now. Lower limb injuries suck in that this happens. Lack of mobility, isolation, finally depression. You succumb to a semi-vegetative habitus , because wtf would you do with energy anyhow, other than drive yourself up the wall with agitation and frustration. Not that other kinds of injuries aren’t awful, I’ve been acquainted with a fair few...

I grew up clumsy (except when music organized my movements, in ballet class). Last picked on every team. Easily foiled when walking by cracks in the sidewalk (or a slight slope). Running at any pace hurt felt like I was pulling a loaded-up sled with my feet in cuffs. (My third grade gym teacher gave me, uniquely, running homework. “Try to make it around the block, just once”, she begged; I couldn’t deliver.)

After a break-up in my 30s, I thought “let’s try this again!” And finally, although I was only moderately ok at modest distances, I understood what people could love about it. The rhythm of your feet and breath, a physical meditation, pounding out whatever angst or anger, for me by the lake with the company of seagulls and swans, what a lovely fucking thing. For two years. I finally got that having a body was a gift and that using it was a pleasure.

Cue the protest. (If you sucked at sports as a kid, there is probably a reason. In my case, shitty biomechanics and weak ligaments & tendons.) Peroneal tendinitis. Plantar fasciitis (x2). Patellofemoral syndrome. Patellar tendinitis. Torn peroneal retinaculum. Hallux rigidus. Metatarsalgia. (Three years of PT, message received!!! Switch to swimming?) Rotator cuff tendinitis. Tennis elbow (x2). More I’ve forgotten. (Ok, ok. I’m made for knitting, got it.)

Cruel, I thought, to have such a fundamental joy snatched from me just as I found it. Absolutely, I grieved (and raged, if not at my body, [internally] at the doctors. So many times). But of course there’s no such thing as that kind of cruelty, there’s only physics.
posted by cotton dress sock at 6:54 AM on December 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I read a quote somewhere to the effect that aging and all of the terrible things that come with it are a kind of blessing, because otherwise we would be even more loathe to leave this life, which we inevitably have to. I try to keep that in mind as I creep ever onward into middle, and then (if I make it that far) old age, and as as I watch my parents (my father is rapidly losing his mobility), relatives and friends make the same journey.

I had a long discussion not long ago with a friend of mine who is the same age as I am about immortality, or even just the prospect of medical science being able to extend human lifespans to twice or three times their current limit; he said he would leap at either opportunity, while I said that the idea of immortality horrifies me, and even living to be 200 or 300 years old would be a dubious proposition for me. My reasoning was that even if our bodies could be engineered to last longer in good or even perfect repair, I doubt that our minds could be. I'm only 45, and already I am *exhausted* by how awful people (in aggregate) are, by how incredibly hard it is to get them to act in anything but their own self-interest, how quick they are to hate and give in to their worst instincts, etc.. I can't even imagine having to put up with that for centuries, or forever (as a different wise friend once put it "One lifetime of other peoples' bullshit will be enough for me, thanks.") And then there's the issue of how we process new information and emotions. Again, I'm only 45 and already I don't get the same thrill of discovery from new books, music, movies, art, etc. that I did when I was younger. Imagine how boring immortality would get. The same thing with relationships..."BFF" or falling in love "forever" really only means a few or at the most several decades in our human context. What would it be like to try and maintain friendships or romantic love over the course of centuries, or forever?

Anyway, I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing or otherwise minimizing the pain (physical and/or emotional) expressed by the author or others in this thread; getting old sucks, as my grandfather unfortunately told me many times when I was a little kid. But there's no way around it, so I'm going to do my best to make the most of what I've got at any given time.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:18 AM on December 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

Ghidorah, I'm taking the liberty of suggesting the Feldenkrais Mathod-- it's gentle movements which do a lot to improve coordination.

I'm not promising anything, but I've found it to be powerful stuff.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:36 AM on December 27, 2018

I don’t want to live forever, because absolutely, the sheen of it’s come off a bit, but the prospect of spending the (possibly) other half of my lifetime mostly in my condo is depressing AF. It’s a quality of life thing, it’s not about quantity.

I’m trying to get excited about aqua jogging, and, what can anyone say about it. It’s aqua jogging. Things could always be worse, there’s that.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:58 AM on December 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm 46. I started running a few years back when my bicycle was in the shop. I was trying to get in shape and fight Type II diabetes. So I ran down the street until I was out of breath. Then I did it again. And again after that. Four years later I've fallen in love with running and try to get in 20-30 miles a week. But I've seen one injury after another. Right now it's plantar fasciitis (the fascist of the foot!) in both feet. Before that it was a broken arm from bicycling. Before that it was IT band. Before that post-tib tendonitis. I realize my time as a runner is very limited. Hell, in the last year alone I've seen my (already slow) average pace slip by 30 seconds. Every once in a while I see an oldster out there still pounding the pavement and hope that will one day be me. But I doubt it. I still love cycling and hiking, and hope I'll have a few more years of those after hanging up my running shoes. I'm just lucky I turned my health around when I did. Hopefully it will help me maintain a decent quality of life later on down the road.
posted by slogger at 12:58 PM on December 27, 2018 [2 favorites]