Preparing for Elderhood

Recently I was scrolling through Instagram posts by other fitness people (a lovely intersection of personal and occupational interests) and saw someone respond to the question of “why do you work out?” with something quite simple and quite profound.

“So I don’t lose my mobility as I get older, and so nobody has to wipe my butt for me.”

As the children of today put it: I felt seen.

I often allude to my father’s role in getting me started as a serious gym freak. Today, I want to give a fuller summary. I expect to write something like this again, maybe as I gain more experience with my own aging process and have fresh insights, but maybe just because it’s such a deep and important topic for me. As in: I think about this *all the frigging time*.

My dad’s father was an amateur boxer. My dad grew up loving and playing sports of various kinds. He was also very bright, though with hindsight it’s pretty clear that he also had attention deficit issues. A foundational story from his elementary school years was the one about being considered below average for a year or two, because when the class was expected to read ‘in lockstep’ from a “Dick and Jane” type book, my already-literate dad was so bored he read ahead, and then had no clue where the class was when he was called on. This got him instantly categorized as stupid, and it took a while for him to prove himself otherwise. If you know other people from the 1940s and 1950s who grew up with AD(H)D, or even folks from my generation, you’ll recognize how common such a story was. (And still is, all too often.)

In any case, by high school he was on the average-to-slightly-short side for his age, but playing football regularly. And the gridiron was apparently where he took his first major physical damage. With his feet in cleats and his cleats dug in, he took a late hit while playing quarterback, and something in at least one knee got torn.

It plagued him for the rest of his life. We have a picture of him from the football team at his Army base in the mid-1960s, still quarterbacking, but even when he was in his late twenties I recall him talking about how often the bad knee troubled him. At some point along the way, the other one developed issues of its own.

He remained active in various ways throughout adulthood. He ended up coaching Division III and adult-league soccer teams, did some playing himself, and generally did all right a lot of the time.

I wouldn’t say he had an exercise habit, by any means. He absolutely worked very hard at his career as an instructor and technical-staff member on a college campus in Boston. “Workaholic” isn’t a bad word for it.

Aside from a stress-related mini-stroke at 60, things were mostly okay. Until he retired. In a cruel irony, he turned 70 and basically had to retire within just a year or so of the major economic crash of 2008-09. His savings and investments, never huge, took a big hit, and he didn’t have time to reinvest for long enough to recover.

Still, he bought a small trailer home in Southern California, where he had always dreamed of retiring, and located it on a retirement community with a 9-hole golf course. He spent the next few years playing around the area, sometimes caddying for others to earn playing hours on other courses.

Now let’s talk about me briefly. I was the little ‘gay’ kid who found team sports challenging and didn’t know how to live up to an athletic father’s expectations. We weren’t a great ‘fit’ in terms of coaching outlook and motivational style: he tended to be a hard-ass first, a supportive mentor second; I’m the opposite. He would tell you exactly what he thought right at the outset; I hold my cards close to my vest until I know you well enough to think you can hear what’s behind my (genuine, but not my whole self) Pollyanna facade. (This tendency to hold my temper until I explode is something I apparently share with his father. Ooops.)

Eventually I found a couple of individual sports in high school and college and did okay, but like dad, I never really made fitness and exercise a goal. Like dad, I developed pretty strong workaholic tendencies. I suspect that both of us spent more of our adult lives than we care to admit, trying to please the voice of our own fathers in our heads. He had tended to feel that I wasn’t ambitious or hard-working enough. For a long time, my successful career in IT at a big university (the same one we both attended) didn’t just put food on the table, it was me giving a big ‘F U’ to the critical voices from my childhood.

You think I don’t work hard enough? WATCH ME. Do I have to ignore my own needs to do that? Well, nobody rags on me for that—or at least, nobody who can scare me into action like my father could, or like his father did to him—so tough shit.

It took one of my own knees beginning to fall apart to smack me out of it. My dad had retired for a couple of years at that point, and I had begun to piece together, with adult experience and insight, how some of his difficulty keeping at tasks other than paid work was probably a side-effect of his ADHD; one term that applies is ‘executive dysfunction’, a difficulty with sticking to plans. This also shed light on why he had been so hard on me, because I had similar struggles. I can specifically recall a point in my teens where I began to be more self-directed, and the immense pressure that started to come off me when he saw that.

It took a long time to understand that what he disliked and tried to fix about me was something he struggled with himself.

There I was with a knee starting to give way, thirty years of my dad’s ‘bad knee’ stories behind me … and what I knew about how I mirrored his tendency to put work first and everything else, including his own health, a distant last.

To say that a fire was lit under my ass would understate it.

The grace I got was that I quickly discovered that at 49, I enjoyed physical activity at last. I knew myself well enough to know that I’m a hedonist, well motivated by pleasure … even if it’s not something that would strike someone else as ‘fun’. So anytime I had fun with something, I let myself do more of it, only taking on the more rote tasks of fitness piecemeal, with the fun stuff as my base.

I also knew how easily I fall into inaction, low-grade depression. In my early years in fitness I pre-planned a lot of ways to ‘game’ myself into exercising even when I had a case of the Don’t Wannas.

Meanwhile, my father slowly fell apart. More mini-strokes began to happen. Knee pain often got the better of him. When he wasn’t golfing, he was watching televised sports … a passion for him ever since I was consciously aware of his habits … which meant a lot of sitting.

My sibs and I suggested he look into knee surgery and/or full replacement. He turned the idea down, with long-winded explanations about how an artificial knee wouldn’t be flexible enough to let him get low to the ground to check out the setup for a putt.

We all knew the shape of his excuses for not doing things, by this time; we all have similar tendencies. It was his life, we couldn’t force him into anything.

Alcohol numbed the pain of the knees. British Premier League football gave him something to focus on outside himself.

There was a bad fall. In the aftermath … to be honest, he never really committed to the rehabilitative exercises he’d have needed to make a full recovery.  Even when we visited him and tried to get him to exercise, *at his own request*, he typically told us “not right now” … over and over and over.

It got to the point where walking up the not-very-tall stairs into his trailer was an effort. Probably a loss of hip strength. Even walking around his little living space turned into a shuffle.

His mobility worsened and worsened. To the point where, following another mini-stroke, we had to move him in with me, and my youngest brother moved in to take primary care of him.

The fate imagined by the person who posted on Instagram today was exactly the fate my father encountered.

It wasn’t fun. Not for him, not for anyone.

Now let’s step back and look at the bigger picture. My parents came of age at the height of American prosperity. Even more so than the Baby Boomers, perhaps, because having been born in 1940, their childhoods were marked by the last of Depression austerity and then wartime shortages.

That generation was sold a set of expectations about elderhood that still affects a lot of us, though younger folks than I will remind us that for them, it’s becoming more and more obviously always-illusory, and also out of reach.

My parents’ generation were led to believe that old age meant rest, relaxation, and nonstop time to do whatever they pleased.

No real messaging about the value of staying engaged and active. You know: unless you WANTED to. But not as a smart idea that everyone should plan on.

Retirement, even now that it’s becoming tougher to do in the first place, still means “I worked hard all those years, I can be as lazy as I want now,” to all too many of us.

I don’t actually think my dad was lazy. I think he was depressed, and having that issue in my own life, it’s no joke and not easy to work around.

All the more reason I plan ahead for my own final years with a lot more intention, and certainly a lot more physical activity.

I’ve seen two generations of my elders bedridden. I am wise enough to know that I can’t shape my fate by pure will; maybe I’ll end up the same way. But not because I didn’t plan ahead for a better fate.

Churchill supposedly quipped that all generals fight the previous war: that everyone tries to beat the enemy that came last time, with the tactics that helped a generation ago. Meanwhile the world moves on and those old guidelines may be exactly what betray us. Oh well: life is messy and unpredictable. But to say that I often feel like one of those generals Churchill was talking about would be completely accurate. You BET I’m going to fight in a way my father couldn’t, or didn’t, or decided not to.

So here’s the link to my own work as a personal trainer …

Because I’m a Pollyanna first, a hard-ass second, I don’t usually beat clients up with the bad news about what happens if we don’t work out. If we don’t get a handle on our health. If we don’t learn to listen to smart advice. If we don’t find some way of doing a bit better than we have been doing so far, even with all the very real, very important challenges of daily life around us.

I find it much more effective to acknowledge all of those limiting factors and cheerlead people into working on their health anyway.

But the knowledge of what can go wrong in old age is always driving me.

To be perfectly honest: sometimes I wish more of us felt this way.

© 2022 Grampa Fitness

Disclaimer: Ideas expressed in this blog post should not be construed as official advice on how to safely perform fitness activities. Always consult with your doctor and other medical professionals as necessary, before engaging in exercise.