06/12/2025
Keep going, even if you’re the oldest competitor, even against self-doubt and its whole attendant Pandora’s box of feelings. Fitness is a way of life structured around habits that pay huge dividends, even if we don’t win. Even if we undertake a challenge and come in last! Yup. That happened. I entered it the day before, but still, it stings with shades of being the scrawny little kid that was picked dead last for every team, every single time, for all 12 years of school gym classes. Here is where the mental reframing comes in. It is paramount to frame the events of our lives correctly, honestly, unvarnished, but also fair to ourselves: being a quarter century older, being in adequate condition to enroll in a fitness challenge at the last minute, then make a halfway decent showing of it, is already a different kind of win. Even if I had prepared properly or been younger, showing up is still a win, because the process of preparing for a competition is an impetus to focus on fitness and nutrition, which pay enormous dividends in our lives. Winning feels really good, and losing yields the more difficult but valuable consolation prize of taking stock of the gifts contained in an experience itself. In this case, that is being in superb health and condition in my 50s, a direction I was not headed 10 years ago. Of course I’m left thinking, why did I sign up for a challenge I was not prepared for on a whim, and why on earth am I now posting about it publicly? The answer to the first question is that I wanted to see what that fitness challenge was about; I happened to learn about it the day before; and in a larger context, it is in many, if not most, cases a more valuable experience to do things than not even to try them, forfeiting the opportunity to explore a course of action, whether or not it proves to change my general direction. The answer to the second question is that I field questions in my everyday life from a lot of people, particularly in my age bracket, which involve self-limiting assumptions about what people over 40 or 50 are capable of doing. It seemed worthwhile exposing my own vulnerability to self-doubt and the thought process by which I manage the corrosive effects of thinking like, I’m already older, I can’t achieve as much as I could have if I’ve found this 30 years ago, so why bother. The prize is in the quality of life I experience every day in a fit body and mind, the classical ideal of mens sana in corpore sano. Do things you never thought you could. You risk nothing but some pride, and a fit body is solid compensation!
