You and I Are Way Too Old to Cling to Identities Which Have Left Us Behind

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

Photo by Konstantin Mishchenko on Unsplash

No, that’s not my buddy NL, above. But it is a photo of a late-midlife woman, which is who NL is, and NL’s story is worth sharing.

Natch, I have permission.

Quick background here: I wrote for Medium.com for five years. Built a good following. When things went south financially, I took a leap to my own blog.

A few folks, emphasis on few, followed me over. Only those mad enough to hang in there with me, and further mad enough to continue to financially keep my lights on. NL is one of them.

NL is in her mid-sixties. What characterizes her is intensity. If she falls in love with something, she is balls-to-the-wall. Right up my alley. Not without cost, which is why I’m publishing her comments here.

After she had kids and lightly dusted her hands of them (lightly, they are still alive and kicking), she turned herself into an athlete. A runner, primarily, but also someone happy to do the hard work of weight training and anything else to help her journey.

To wit, she also does her research on food, additives, nutrition and the like. She even throws herself into researching the kinds of clothing she wears so that she doesn’t don materials which have cancer-causing materials in them.

In fact it was largely NL who inspired me to dump my Under Armor leggings.

God I love my readers. That’s another article.

This one speaks to something that is likely to happen to all of us. First, NL’s story which inspired this article. After a recent injury, NL’s running career has been sidelined.

Her identity as an athlete is threatened.

OMIGOD do I get that.

However: You and I are WAY Too Old to try to recapture identities which may well be done with us.

NL’s comments:

I've been sitting quiet for a month or so, trying to figure out how to claw my way out of whatever I injured in early November and kept using (runners are the worst at taking a day off, I'm told). So finally I took the days off, and saw another PT who gave me a strengthening routine for my L hip. But in the past few days the change in my gait, inevitable from a hip/hamstring injury, is triggering an old inflammation in the foot. FFS, if my foot flares and won't settle, I'm really screwed.

It's scaring the bejeebers out of me. My resting heart rate is up 5 beats in 6 weeks, argh. If this foot thing doesn't settle down, I could end up in a boot again - REALLY ARGH. And who the hell will I be if not the athlete who came back after 25 years of child-raising? The answer is in there, but it might involve finding a pool instead of a road for running. And I have to be OK with that because it will let me do the aerobic work even if it's in the water.

IT WILL BE OK. I don't have to go back to being a mushmelon. Mainly it's about my BRAIN not going back to being a mushmelon.

Thank you for the tracks in the snow... (author bolded)

First, NL knows she’s not in threat of imminent death of her heart rate goes up a few beats. Anxiety alone about her loss of identity as an athlete will do more to cause that than a few months of being sedentary.

Second, she has also already identified how to get plenty of aerobic work: the pool. When I broke my back, and at another point, smashed my pelvis, I took my busted body to the pool.

Really does work.

I’ve done it. Got webbed gloves, pool shoes, a shortie wetsuit and tunes. An hour of running side to side up to my clavicle. It’s damned hard exercise.

Photo by Marcelo Uva on Unsplash

In fact, I just bought a membership at my brand-new local Y so that I can do the same thing there to help me rehab my healing left hip. Water workouts are part and parcel of most great athletes’ rehab, especially if they can’t put full body weight on a lower joint.

Both times when I was seriously injured I was back on a horse in six weeks, largely because the water PT was both gentle and hard work.

You can buy a pullup bar for across a doorway, which can also be used for pushups. You can use a bench for all kinds of work to get up a sweat.

We can do this.

What it takes is redirection, which is what NL is doing. But we can only do that when we are brave enough to realize that what we had once may not be what we have next.

Let me say that again differently:

Sometimes we must release an identity so that we can rise into the next big chapter.

That’s the larger issue. The identity of being a late-in-life athlete, which many of us are, means that after all that work, a single injury, or a cascade of them (which I most certainly am dealing with right now and so is NL), means that perhaps that part of us needs to slide out stage right.

For people like NL and myself, we are ALL IN. Often to excess.

Then when injury or overuse take their toll, it’s not only difficult but terrifying.

Because, omigod, how much of all this hard-won fitness am I going to lose if I’m down for a while?

If the down time is fairly brief, and you can do other stuff while recovering, then likely we don't lose much.

I had a spate of some twelve major surgeries, many of which flattened me for the better part of a year plus, and made damned near everything impossible.

I couldn’t walk, couldn’t grip, was in too much pain. Or any or all of the above.

I gained weight, watched parts of my body change forever, and mourned a good bit of it. Part of the process was accepting that our bodies do morph no matter what we do.

NL might find that if she pushes too hard to get back on track it may backfire. After my second major foot surgery last March, I took a hike on very steep hills with a friend. That impatience was expensive.

The damage I did to my poor foot put me well over a year behind in recovery. Nature and our bodies have a way of bitch-slapping us into next Thursday and saying NOT BLOODY NOW.

Learning how to do just that with a sense of humor, with the patience of a sage (doesn’t come easily) is part of sage-ing.

Photo by Erwans Socks on Unsplash

We can work very hard to maintain and often improve, but wrinkled arms (like old balloons, gah) and other proofs of age will eventually show up. Being horrified at how our bodies are changing disrespects us.

Did we really think, NOT ME??

NL is gifted with a great deal of common sense and knows how to research. However, the urgency to get back to being who we were, a persona with which we are deeply identified, is powerful.

Look, I want to go back to being that Badass Adventure Traveler. Four months out of the year doing unbelievable things.

That door is finally opening up. However, not all the way. Other, better doors are opening instead.

I’ve had to learn to let some things go, and wait, with absolute faith (which I am for shit at doing, frankly) for the next thing. It always comes. And I am forever embarrassed that I tried to hang on so hard to what was gone, for it was no longer right for me.

This is true of every aspect of life, not just the body. You know this. You see it. Feel it. Yet where we are deeply identified, we have a terrible time trusting.

Try trusting. NL’s doing it. I’m doing it. It’s worth dropping the anxiety levels.

NL will see that heartbeat drop those extra beats in no time if she hits the water. Who knows what kind of badass will then rise from the waves?

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Thank you so much for your time. I hope you got both ideas and inspiration from this article. If this kind of material works for you, please consider

If you know someone struggling with letting go and moving on, especially with changes in their bodies, please also consider

Either way I hope you allow what is coming to you to gently push away what you are done with, even if it doesn’t feel like it’s time. The Universe doesn’t move in our time, but its own.