Fitness and fitting
in
The alarm rang, disrupting a dream filled with shadowy
figures wandering hallways, drifting through time. It took a few moments for me to make that
wrenching transition from sleep to waking.
While my dreams recently have been complex and filled with strangers
moving about in odd, unfamiliar settings, they dissolve into shadows, and my
early mornings are always still and silent.
There is no one stretched out next to me, his room-darkening mask
covering deep brown eyes, his breathing just audible. There was a reason for setting the alarm
today, but I momentarily forget it and in my confusion, wonder why it’s still
so dark outside. This is June, after
all; where is the early morning sun? But
it is indeed time to wake up, into this gloomy today, with rain already
threatening to drench the already over-watered flower beds. Today, I belatedly
remember, I have to be at my physical therapy appointment for aquatic
exercises, to strengthen my leg muscles and help me regain my balance after a
grueling year with my left ankle encased in a walking boot cast.
When I arrive at the pool, I greet the staff, and the now
familiar faces of others slowly walking or gliding around the heated pool. After coming to sessions for about a month
now, many of the faces are familiar to me, and we remark to each other on improvements
in gait, or strength as we lazily move through the warm water, laps forward and
back, sideways and with legs crossed. A
generation ago, such a group of men and
women, in their 60’s and 70’s, would
never have worked so hard to stay fit or regain strength after surgery or
injury. I recall my grandmother, sitting
on a stool in the kitchen or on the front porch, her fingers gnarled with
arthritis, her back permanently bent. Her
only exercise consisted of the daily routines of food preparation. Yet here are
two older black men, comparing knee replacement surgery experiences, laughing
about the prospect of needing periodic ‘lube jobs’ like their cars. Two Asian women slowly swim laps, never
stopping while they talk quietly of grandchildren, or compare notes on
instructors teaching women to move through the stiffness of their arthritis. Helen is the preferred instructor, I gather,
since she is close to their age, and joins the class in the pool. Another
woman, well into her 80’s, walks her twenty minutes smoothly and gracefully,
before she climbs out of the pool, retrieves her cane, and bent almost double, slowly
makes her way to the elevator. She and
her husband live in a nearby senior housing complex. He has rapidly advancing Parkinson’s
disease, and she uses this time alone as a needed respite from his daily care.
After my session, I return upstairs, greeting the usual gang
of men and women sitting around a low table, resting from walking treadmills,
or lifting weights. The talk is usually
of politics but more recently about health care. Each has very clear ideas about the best way
to solve our growing health care crisis; but all agree that it must be fixed,
and it must be fair, and it must be soon.
As I look around the gym, I see so many older adults, working their
bodies to the limit, defying entropy, defying disintegration of body and
mind. Across the road sits a senior
center, open and available to local community members. Compared to the usual mid-morning members at
the club, the senior center is filled with the truly elderly, many in
wheel-chairs or walkers, some drifting from quiet conversations to catnaps, all
past dreams of rebuilding their worn bodies.
Are we, at the gym, fighting against reality, or are we changing
reality? If “fifty is the new thirty” than is “seventy the new fifty?” Will our generation, the pre-baby boomers, be
the first ones to try to outrun, out-fox age and infirmity? Do we need a human
version of “jiffy-lube” for our bodies,
bringing them in for periodic tune-ups; a knee replacement here, a rotator cuff
repair there; then back on the road, or the bicycle, or treadmill? How old is old?
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