Why ‘Grampa’?
The name of my website and personal training business runs an inevitable risk of making it sound as if I’m only interested in training elders. Honestly, I’m eager to work with anybody who takes a look at my personal writings or thoughts about health and fitness and is inspired to get support. Come one, come all.
I do mean fitness for grampas and grammas, but not only them: for anyone who might hope to become an elder in relatively good health.
Really, though: I’m the grampa here.
Like the rest of my journey over the last 10 years or so, realizing that I felt like a grampa was a gradual understanding, that fit better and better the more I thought about it.
Both my parents, independently, told the story of me as a kid on the cusp of turning six years old, with my first sibling on the way, piping up from the backseat of my parents’ little VW bug to say: “we need to have a talk about how I’m going to help help take care of our baby.“
Evidently I got the “parental and mentoring” urges quite young. As it turned out, I’ve never had kids of my own. Did look into it in my thirties, rather seriously, and then the impulse to have specific offspring seemed to fade on its own. But the desire to mentor others remained.
If you’re familiar with queer culture, or erotic fantasy in general, you may know about the whole idea of “daddy” as a role people take on, even sometimes for folks who are technically older. I got my share of people looking to me for that role. For a while I enjoyed it, but often it wasn’t a great fit. Actual parents have huge responsibility for kids’ physical and emotional welfare. I ran into too many situations where fellow adults really needed that level of emotional caretaking … and I’m just some guy, with plenty of my own flaws.
Meanwhile over in my fitness/social media life as an “out” LGBTQIA elder, I found that I had a LOT of younger folks looking at me as a kind of (semi)-wise gay uncle. I was making a lot more connections with straight folks than I had prior to taking up fitness. Not a few of them said I reminded them of an actual gay/etc family member that was around when they were growing up. And as some of these folks had kids, some turned to me for advice about supporting kids who might be coming out, or “different” in some way. Or even just about raising kids who would be good friends to other kids in such circumstances.
Slowly it dawned on me that I was giving advice about children, to parents. And that as long as I stayed in my lane and stayed humble about how much I don’t know about the day-to-day struggles of child rearing, but could synthesize what I’ve learned from supporting a lot of parents and put it in useful terms, I was actually pretty good at it. So … surrogate-parenting the parents feels a bit grampa to me. And I embraced it.
Meanwhile my own parents were now grandparents to two teenage boys, and growing through their seventies and early eighties. Mom is doing fine. For the last five years of his life, though, Dad honestly struggled.
He’d always been a pretty active guy … played quarterback in high school and on the team at his Army base in the early 1960s, played the other football on and off in his thirties through fifties. But he was better at driving himself hard for paid work than at taking care of himself. Or taking it easy because work was so hard. The man could watch British Premier League and other televised sports for an entire day without moving off the couch.
In his seventies it caught up with him. Right about the time my own long history of focusing on work and on downtime, but not ON MYSELF, started to catch up with me.
Watching inactivity, old injuries, and new age-related issues take him down piece by piece was tough. The first real gotcha came for me when I developed knee issues. He’d had knee troubles his whole life, due to football injuries in his teens. He knew he needed to keep strong to get through them … but he struggled to “motivate” himself, and although he could be highly disciplined, his own health was never where he applied discipline successfully.
“Like father, like son” became a threat hanging over me.
In effect, I got serious about my health because I had to watch him not do so.
And here I am now, the eldest in my family’s generation. Still having that conversation about “how to take care of our babies.”
The healthier we can be, the more vigor and stamina and emotional resilience we can bring to life … the better we do at passing on the good parts of what we’ve experienced, and the more we empower others to go beyond us and achieve even more. His own personal struggles aside, THAT was always my Dad’s ambition as a parent. In a different way, Mom’s too. They’ve both always looked for ways to mentor or support others.
So now I’m the Grampa. I will give you candy and bore you to tears with stories about the “old days”, and then I will send you home to whoever is really responsible for taking care of you. HINT: IT’S YOU. Ultimately, nobody else can do it for us.
But we are social animals. Support matters. None of us know it all, anyone can need a hug or a reassuring word that we’re on the right path, or a good kick in the pants when we’re slacking.
Thus, “Get off my lawn, but get fit while you’re at it.”
I hope to be a bit of help on your own journey.
© 2021 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.