You and I Are Too Old to Fight a Changing Body: A Guide on How to Ride the Tide

Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Ashes Sitoula on Unsplash

Just when I’d finally gotten used to this, I get that. Well shit.

It’s bad enough that as we age, some things change in ways that we really don’t enjoy. I can laugh at the outdoor rug in my nose as I mow it with the manosphere’s Weedwhacker, I can laugh at the hair coloring fiascos that leave permanent stains on my towels, floor and anywhere else I send drops flying.

I can make fun of lots of things. Some things just bloody well ANNOY.

Here’s a prime example: Back in 2016 I’d just gotten back from a big adventure in Egypt. Along the way I’d gotten food poisoning from eating unwashed grapes at a bazaar (I know, I know), recovered, spent untold amazing hours riding fine horses around the Red Sea and by the Pyramids.

The author on Valentino, an Arabian stud, at the Red Sea

Almost as soon as I got back, something totally weird happened. I started waking up anywhere from 2:30 am to 4 am. Out of the blue. I struggled with it, tried to force myself to sleep more.

Lost that battle.

My eyes popped open around 3:30 am like it or not. So I researched it. What I discovered is that a goodly number of us past the age of sixty, and I was 63 at the time, find that our cicadian rhythm shifts. For some it can be about two hours forward or back.

Very much like Daylight Savings Time. As a result, I had to make the same shift with every life habit I had. The biggest was now I had to get to bed at 7:30 pm.

As you can imagine, that meant that I gave up huge swaths of everyday life: movies, dinner, friends, classes, meetings, anything nighttime.

Hell, I wasn’t dating anyway, but still. I couldn’t keep my eyes open past 7:30, so if there were meteor showers, nights by the fire on adventure travel, I missed them.

I had to pitch my tent half a mile away from all the revelry. Wake up at oh-dark-thirty hours before anyone else, with little to do except try to stay warm, read inside my sleeping bag.

Porcupine raiding the kitchen tent in the Muskwa Kechika wilderness

I also learned to focus on what I gained. On adventures, I was up before the guides, so I got to see the animals raiding our kitchen tent. The grizzlies and porcupines drawn by the smell of cooked meat would wander in and out, and I’m the one who saw them.

I watched the first fingers of dawn, heard the first birds, reveled in the sounds of a nearby creek uninterrupted by people sounds.

For ten years, I learned how to maximize my writing in the darkest hours before dawn. I fell in love with all of it.

Erik Hogan

can relate to the magic of pre-dawn in God’s country.

People accused me of being stupid without realizing that such physical changes happen without our permission. Commenters assumed that I chose to get up that early the way Mark Wahlberg used to get up at 2:30 am to start his workouts. Hardly.

So for ten years, I settled into a pre-dawn routine and learned to love it, not just live with it.

Then, everything suddenly reversed. While recovering from what I sincerely hope is the last of my foot surgeries this year, I started experiencing insomnia. For the life of me, I couldn’t get to sleep before 9-10 pm.

This time around I was smarter: I just went with it. Instead of taking sleeping pills or trying to force what was happening, I was curious to see if my inner clock was leaping back. It sure was.

I stayed up later, woke up at 6 am. I was back on a more normal cycle, waking up between 5:30 and six am. Okay, for you night owls and late risers, six am is still appallingly early.

But it ain’t 3:30. Just saying, guys.

So after spending the last decade learning to make the most of a very big lifestyle change and learning to love it, here we go again.

So now of course, I have lost the early dark hours when I did my best writing. I have lost the tree-to-tree conversations of the owls, and the achingly sweet summer sounds and organic smells of my sprinklers turning on at 4 am.

I can concentrate on what I’ve lost, or I can now celebrate what I’ve regained: evenings and all the things that come with evenings.

My local chapter of professional writers meets around 7 pm. All kinds of musical and theatrical events begin around 7 pm. That part of life just reopened for me, along with all the events and gatherings that I had to skip because my face fell in the soup around six.

It could change again at any time. I’ve gotten a lot better at watching for a trend, then finding a way to climb aboard.

Ride it, don’t deride it

The opportunity, when such things happen, is to adapt. Age brings all kinds of big shifts including negatives, such as infirmity, disease, changes to our eyesight. Some we can prevent or certainly do plenty to mitigate.

My buddy

Jim the Geek

recently got cataract surgery. That’s an inevitability for most; I have cataracts myself but they aren’t bad enough for the procedure. Yet.

The point is that he had it done, as millions do, and suddenly he’s enjoying colors and clarity that he hasn’t seen for years. We adapt, we do what’s necessary when we can.

It’s not just that. Years ago, Jim was obese, put his heart and soul into learning what would work, found a livable eating pattern (heavy on the protein, dump the sugars, one meal a day) that worked for him and his wife, and overhauled their health.

As they move into their eighties, they are far better equipped to deal with what life deals them, as they discovered when Diane had to deal with AFIB.

So what can we do when our bodies change?

Patricia Cusack

is pushing steps and exercise, the kinds of work which will slow down and hold back age-related changes. In my case, I’ve done what I can. Surgeries on my feet have meant I’ve been unable to hike and even walk normally for nearly three years.

As a result I’m dealing with osteopenia, a condition that can cripple us if we’re not careful. Osteopenia is reversible. Osteoporosis is permanent and can be very limiting. Above all we need to move the way we’re designed: walk, hike, ride, run, swim, climb. The body LOVES work.

I am a mere four days away from being able to hit the trails, albeit gently, but I am hitting them. I’ll be down another six weeks this summer, but again, when the surgical boot gets booted, I am back out on the trails.

That’s how you ride the waves of age-related changes, not be crushed by them. You find a way to be active that works for you, that you enjoy, that you will do consistently, and have fun doing.

The best part of this is that you can start at any age, and get results to improve your options at any age. Best time to start?

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Like many other Substack writers, Patricia and Jim and

Tim Ebl 🇨🇦

and I talk about nutrition, exercise, all the obvious choices we can make to push back against sarcopenia, loss of lung capacity, weight gain and other changes which are NOT inevitable.

Such devastating physical changes are, in fact, chosen, if by default, laziness or some other excuse, barring disease or disability.

My mother lost her eyesight to macular degeneration. Had she exercised, had she been more mindful about her diet and supplemented with lutein, she might have avoided this. At the age my mother began to lose her eyesight, my eyes are still easily correctable to 20/15.

The difference is, like all the Stackers listed in this piece, I’ve done the work.

The airways are full of this kind of wonderful post:

Brodee Myers-Cooke

Mainstream media, please get real about age labels. Is there anything “elderly” about this — hiking on my 64th birthday? I dare say I’m a while away from that wheely walker you've already booked for me.

I love this kind of pushback. When I was 64, I was in the best shape of my life. You and I can do this.

The author, about 61 ish, in Croatia

So as I get ready to boot my surgical boot to the closet until my last foot surgery in late June, I am back at the gym doing the work so that I can get back out on the hiking trails myself.

“I’m just getting old” is the rallying cry for the lazy.

“I’m Too Old for This Shit” is my personal rallying cry against agesit bullshit.

Perhaps what I love best about all my fellow Substackers is that none of them is particularly unique. That may sound like an insult, but in the best possible way, it’s not. Boomers have decided en masse that they are not going to go gently into that good night.

That means that all these Substackers are in excellent company. The way each of us does it is unique, but we are a huge movement to live better, eat better, move better, age better.

We can, just as we did in our youth, push back against the idiot establishment story that makes money off our victimhood.

Oh we can’t help it we’re just getting older.

Bullswocky.

In this case it’s the idiot lie that we are useless at fifty or sixty or sixty-five. That belief not only cripples us, it cripples a society that is in dire need of our skills and know-how.

Our society needs us active, alive, engaged, clear-headed and physically fit. Right here right now. Always did, but for those of us of an age, it’s an imperative.

You and I can slide into the false belief that we just deteriorate when we get older. Sure you do. Eat crap, drink, smoke, avoid exercise, of course you’ll deteriorate. Fast, in fact. And when all that disease and deterioration comes, you will be heart-breakingly unable to deal with the challenges.

Or you can find people whose example you respect, whose research you admire, and go do the hard work. We will age, we will die. How we get there is about 75% up to us.

Those are excellent odds.

Do the work. Live the life. Have the dream of a healthy body as you age. Go striding powerfully towards that good night, we all get there. But not all of us have fun as we do.

And you and are Too Old to believe that we don’t deserve a seriously bad ass old age.

Let’s play.

Working on a happy boy (and no he’s not drugged)

Thanks as always to my supporters, to the fellow Substackers out there getting it done, and to all my readers. Please consider