Post Category → Fitness

Aging Takes Toll on the Male Psyche

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/robin-williams-in-a-group-facing-higher-risk-of-suicide-older-white-men-with-depression/2014/08/12/8e1164d6-225e-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html

One reader commented:

“White middle aged and older men suffer from depression and commit suicide at a higher rate because their life centers around career, status and making money…”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/baby-boomers-are-killing-themselves-at-an-alarming-rate-begging-question-why/2013/06/03/d98acc7a-c41f-11e2-8c3b-0b5e9247e8ca_story.html

The writer commented:

“…many Boomers are reluctant to accept the realities of aging.”

I’m gonna’ let you in on a little secret: Nobody accepts aging. Nobody. It’s something we all deal with either through denial or prescription medications.

There are exceptions:

1] Those who manage to keep themselves so busy [and distracted] in their careers that they don’t have 5 minutes to think about it.

2] People of low ambition and correspondingly low expectations in culture groups of similar mindsets.

The rest of us have to fight our way through it with varying degrees of success.

I have no way of knowing what Robin Williams felt the day he took his life. No one can stand in another person’s shoes, to inhabit their lives.

But what I can say with absolute certainty is that successful older men do feel intense pressure to maintain relevance, both physically and professionally, and when either one of these falters, the emotional fallout is usually disastrous.

Most people visualize successful older men sitting on a beach in Tahiti, waiting for the gulls to drag them out to sea. But what they fail to consider is that the very things that got them to where they are still burn. Beaches are nice for a weekend, but boredom is usually just around the corner, and, after that…indignity.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

Napoleon Bonaparte

 

At 62, Mickey Rourke Redefines “Living Life to Its Fullest”

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2989264/Mickey-Rourke-playfully-gets-knees-hangs-friends-Hollywood.html

I’ve always been a fan of Mickey Rourke. He lives life like there’s no tomorrow [literally] … like he already knows there will, in fact, be no tomorrow.

Mickey’s a few years older than yours truly, but we’re in the same ballpark, generation-ally speaking.

We also share a certain playful audacity that comes with the territory when you’re an older, successful actor, artist, entertainer, writer, photographer and the like.

We are what civilians refer to as “out there,” some more so than others, but still.

Many people probably see Mickey as some drug-addled psychopath with delusions of relevance. What I see is an extraordinarily talented man who believed in himself, and through sheer force of will, lived to see another day.

What’s left standing is not a man in his final hours, but a man who wears the scars of his life like a badge of honor.

After all, not everyone is a normal, well adjusted adult with reasonable expectations, and thank God.

The Common Cold and Other Existential Flotsam at Midlife

 

cure-for-the-common-cold-2020-2025When I was a kid, colds were an annoyance, nothing more. I didn’t see them in a catastrophic context largely because I was immortal.

But over the years I’ve learned that immortality is just borrowed time.

Eventually, it goes back to its owner and you’re on your own.

Now when I get sick, I assume the worst.

Last week I had a “mutated – and incurable – strain of the flu.” Or was it pneumonia? Or meningitis? Or something unknown to modern science?

The shoe eventually drops.

Okay, so there are a lot of false starts before something major happens, but the longer you wait the closer it gets.

In the meantime, I just got a realty-check that all the working out and healthy eating and hydration and rest and recovery and everything else aren’t enough to annihilate the inevitable.

Needless to say, as we age the days ahead of us are more precious than they used to be.

If we open our eyes in the morning it’s another good day, no matter what the hell it feels like.

It’s a weird way to live, honestly, but we all learn to appreciate what we once took for granted.

If you look at older people from this perspective, you begin to understand why everything we say and do somehow relates back to something we had or did no matter what comes out of our mouths.

On Dating Men in Their 60’s [or older men, in general]

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http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a9/dating-men-in-their-sixties/

In my particular socioeconomic niche, inter-generational dating is considered normal. A lot of this, as expected, has to do with financial security. But it also involves other things tangential to getting older, which I will cover.

In my mind, the only reason not to be open to dating older men is child-bearing, which is often a non-issue as many women these days either forestall, or avoid it altogether. Needless to say, most 60-year-old men are going to be less inclined to put up with raising a family, unless it involves dogs and cats. They’d rather focus their attention on the young women in their lives, which is the point of this article.

My new soon-to-be-available book, Urban Dystrophy, covers a lot of this, but suffice to say, it just makes sense when you balance the commodities of youth and beauty with maturity and appreciation.

I’m in one of these relationships. My girlfriend is 30 years my junior, and we’ve been living together for 4 years. Do her friends wonder if she’s lost her mind? No. In fact, I’ve noticed that many are intrigued as our culture changes.

As for the math, it’s irrelevant. When I’m 70 and she’s 40, we will have been together 14 years. This would constitute a record by today’s standards.

If she stays healthy, she will outlive me. If she doesn’t, I may spend years at her bedside. The point is nobody knows. We all want to run the numbers, but they often don’t pan out.

This is why I don’t think about it. If I did I would be dating someone my own age who would probably kill me long before I was physically dead.

So here are my top 5 reasons for dating older men:

1] Maturity

2] Appreciation

3] Security

4] Desire to please [and pleasure]

5] Experience and/or worldliness

It also bears noting that my SO and share tastes in music, embrace technology and live a healthy lifestyle.

Relevance is not just measured in years.

 

Birth of the Middle-Aged “Moderation” Mantra

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No matter what we do to stay in shape, eat right, get enough rest, and take time out of our busy lives to have some semblance of a functional personal life, a Nor’easter is on the way.

So two days ago I got news that my new book, Urban Dystrophy, was on press. That afternoon I hit a personal record [PR] in the gym, and late that day, I heard news from my Internist that my blood work was excellent.

What could go wrong? Right?

At 7:PM I had a great meal at home, cleaned up, walked in the dark [always a bad move] towards the bedroom to watch Criminal Minds on my Macbook Pro, and out of nowhere slipped on a plastic coat hanger.

See, normally I don’t leave coat hangers in the middle of the floor, but my French Bulldog, Zeppelin, does.

So everything is suddenly in slow motion except for the subtle “POP” emanating from my knee. Specifically, the meniscus.

Now folks, if I were 22, this would be no big deal. Back then I was injured more than not, and didn’t think much about it. It would heal, and in the meantime I would do whatever I did around it.

I didn’t lapse into some existential hell-hole assuming the worst: I will never recover, my quality of life is shot in spite of my best efforts, the stars have it out for me, God is pissed.

But this is what middle-aged guys tend do when anything goes wrong. We assume the worst because we’ve spent a lifetime hearing news of the worst, which seems to happen to people more and more frequently as they age.

The psychological impact of even the slightest injury is magnified a thousand times.

The primary reason for this is academic: We recover a lot more slowly than we did back when we were in our 20’s, and at this juncture in life, we have less time to heal. 

This is why so many middle-aged guys practice “moderation,” otherwise known as living to avoid injury.

The problem with this practice is that it takes life down a notch to a level of competitive mediocrity, and thus, yields mediocre results. Eventually, time advances at twice the pace of the body, and instead of spraining a knee, I break a friggin’ hip. This is why you have to train hard, but smart.

Having said this, the “coat hangar” will always be there, waiting to throw us off guard. Our job is to be ready to handle any eventuality to the best of our ability — no matter what it is, and moderation only assures an even more disastrous result.

POSTSCRIPT: This morning my cat attacked my leg.

 

Older Men and Personal Trainers

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For those of you able to afford a personal trainer [roughly the cost of a week’s vacation in Costa Rica at the Ritz Carlton, including first class airfare from Houston], I suggest you get one.

Now.

Before the medical bills start piling up from all the margaritas and chips.

My trainer is the guy in the caption above. His name is Tim Lamando and he’s a badass with a degree in Kinesiology, among others. He kicks my ass three days a week and keeps me on track with my physical health, which includes rest and recovery, diet, and training sessions intense enough to keep the advancing years from rolling over me.

In other words, he keeps me in the game of life, rather than bittersweet and resigned like so many other men my age — the walking wounded, emotionally and/or physically, the ones who let go, accepted the inevitable, decided to live through the mantra, “everything in moderation.”

All of them, total bullshit.

My grandfather used to say “you make the bed you sleep in,” and it was as true back then as it is today.

Life doesn’t give a crap about you. It just gives back what you put out. This means that the less you do, the faster you fall apart.

I am pushing 60 years of age, but I still think of myself as someone in the neighborhood of 39. The main reason for this is that I can do pretty much everything I did at 39, and in some cases, more. I hold the Texas state record in the deadlift in the 55-59 age group through the USAPL. This Summer I will compete in the 60-plus category in the 220 to 242 weight class. My goal is to raw deadlift 500 pounds. No testosterone, or anabolic steroids. And yes, it’s drug tested.

Granted, I’ve been an athlete my entire life, so training is kind of second nature to me. For others, it’s daunting. I get it. When people see me train, they think I’ve lost my mind, or that I’m begging for a back injury, or both. And while the first part is debatable, the second part is ignorance.

See, it’s because I train like this that I don’t have back problems, that I stand up straight, that my bones and joints are strong and pliable. This doesn’t happen by itself. I have to make it happen. I have to stay committed to physical relevance, not decay.

Sometimes I swear I can smell death on some of these guys who might not technically die for another 30 or 40 years. It’s pathetic.

They’d be better off dying tomorrow having lived a full and healthy life, than limp along with indignity.

“Old man” is a missive you earn by giving up. It’s like blood in the water that everyone notices.

Don’t beg for it.