You're Too Old To Hang On to Old Sh*t That Doesn't Work Any More

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back

Morning view, the Pacific, Oregon Sand Dunes by the author

We can’t manage a reboot if we’re hanging on to the past

Dear Reader: If you’re training for the future, which all of us are doing, what part of the past holds you back? What can we release to remake ourselves for best last Third?

I have a confession to make.

After living fifty years in Colorado, I moved to Oregon during Covid in 2020. Many of us make big moves like that after the kids are gone or we retire. While exciting, those moves also carry costs.

All too often we miss what we left behind so much, we can’t thrive where we are. My hand is up here: I’ve most certainly made that mistake.

You and I are way Too Old to be held back by attachments to a past we no longer inhabit. That’s just one more way we rob ourselves of our last and best years. However, part of that journey is coming to understand and honor the emotional journey which accompanies the physical one.

Let’s talk.

The sand on Oregon’s South Jetty beach just south of the coastal town of Florence, is blond, warm, soft and slippery in the September sun. It’s also brutal if you’re training on it. That’s why I was here.

The views are great, my healing hip needs work, my healing feet need exercise.

But it’s not Red Rocks. I miss Red Rocks in Colorado, where I lived for fifty years.

Lots of folks know Red Rocks Amphitheater, just west of Denver in the low foothills. For decades that was my training go-to, year-round but for blizzards.

Hundreds of steps, blinding blue skies. Vivid, rust-red promontory rocks. Sweet thin air at 6200’ which builds serious endurance. It’s an athlete’s paradise.

Photo by Benjamin Rascoe on Unsplash

That’s where I trained for Kilimanjaro, Everest Base Camp, Macchu Picchu. After knee surgery in 2011, I began my first slow march up those steps. Eventually I was hiking or running between 2400-3600 steps several times a week.

Compared to the real athletes, the senior Olympians who also trained at the Rocks, I was a plodder. Right about the time I think I’m really badass, a true badass in their eighties would blow past me, barely breathing hard.

After landing in Eugene, I pined for Red Rocks. Nothing here like it, I thought. You could, should, point out that Oregon is criss-crossed with gorgeous hiking trails, dunes and mountains.

I couldn’t possibly make the excuse that there was “nothing like it” here. There was plenty even better here.

I was being ridiculous.

In fact I had no idea what was really going on.

The mind has its own agenda, which is what I’m addressing. Since everything begins between the ears, the stories we tell ourselves can only be unraveled there as well. This was one of mine.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the loss of Red Rocks weighed far more heavily on me than the Covid-25 lbs which had temporarily shifted my shape.

I also didn’t know it at the time, but I attached my fit body to that place.

Without Red Rocks, where would I be able to train so well and so hard, get my cardio in Nature’s exuberant beauty? I would never get that body back. Not without Red Rocks.

Ultimately it had nothing to do with Red Rocks at all.

Stories and fibs. Stay with me here.

We identify powerfully with labels, people, places. I’m a Bronco fan (nope, here you gotta be a Duck), I’m a corporate consultant (nope, these days I’m an adventure athlete. Okay okay, when I heal).

For others, it’s that I’m the husband or wife of X, I’m a Coloradan, Californian, Texan, a Democrat/Republican/Indie/Green, you get it.

We love our labels.

Labels lock us in for life if we’re not careful.

They can also rob us of our best final Third Act. Too many of us face backwards as we age forward.

Those identities act like fish hooks in our souls.

Witness Queen Victoria, whose husband Prince Albert died at 42. Victoria spent a decade barely able to speak. In fact, she never recovered from her loss. She had his clothing laid out daily and lived in a state of mourning from age 42 to her death at 81.

Some folks are so identified with their pasts, especially their youth, that they can’t grow emotionally.

In our more pedestrian lives, there are examples aplenty. One reader wrote me that her sister, by this writing 68, is still bitter she’s no longer the high school homecoming queen. She’s so identified with those few compressed moments that she doesn’t exist outside her high school yearbook.

Back to Red Rocks. Was it really Red Rocks?

For the past three years, I was writing all about moving on, working out and being in the moment. Under the surface I missed the amphitheater, unaware that it was symbolic of a bigger issue. Still, I tried for a while.

The Oregon Ducks have a stadium, but non-students aren’t allowed to run the steps. I did some hiking on the trails at Mt. Pisgah, which has plenty. Many are challenging enough to give anyone a good workout.

“But this isn’t Red Rocks. Nothing is like Red Rocks.”

I couldn’t pry my noggin from my nether regions for two years. Then last June, I was benched completely with foot surgeries, hand surgeries, a shattered kneecap and a busted hip.

During that time I lost lean muscle mass and power. I’d also packed on some pounds. Inactivity, even if it’s legitimate, is expensive when we’re older.

Those are important symptoms. Red Rocks was an excuse, a side show.

I was in mourning. I had no clue I was in mourning.

We don’t always know we’re grieving. We have symptoms. I was grieving the loss of a relationship, the friends I’d made, fifty years of living in Colorado and all the memories baked into that state.

Millions of us make such a move when we retire. We’re often not ready for the emotional impact of such a powerful transition. I sure wasn’t. What I had was relocation depression, which can happen at any age. It’s exacerbated when we’re older.

If we’ve inhabited a place for decades, we can leave behind a dense network of friends, family and familiar support systems.

My beloved Aunt Charlee and Uncle Stan, upon his retirement from a large bank in Manhattan, sold their uptown condo and moved to Southern California. Charlee couldn’t adjust; her entire existence had revolved around New York’s high society. After Stan’s death, Charlee motored on alone for a while, then finally moved back East.

By the time she returned, many of her friends had also passed. She wasn’t able to adjust to her new life, and fell into a deep depression. She never came out of it.

You and I can’t always put a finger on what’s causing emotional pain. Sometimes it feels like a general malaise; we lose energy and our zest for life. I had those symptoms; it just took me a while to figure them out.

I blamed Red Rocks. That had little to nothing to do with it.

Mourning has an essential role. We all suffer many small deaths as we age, more of them the older we get. One of those “deaths” is a particular way of life. A big move to another state or another part of the world, such as becoming an ex-pat, can launch us into considerable emotional disarray.

Red Rocks was symbolic, an easy way for me to deflect the grief I was feeling.

But it can, and does, come to an end, if we choose to shake it off.

In just the last few weeks as I’ve been able to start exercising again, I’ve watched the doldrums fall away. Exercise is one of the critical keys not only to recovery, but as we age past our seventies, it is hugely important to enjoy the years we have left to us.

The more I work out, the more friends I make, the more energized I feel about where I am right now.

Work to do.

Red Rocks be damned, at this point.

I’m way Too Old to be spending my time mourning moving from Colorado. It’s time for a brand-new challenge and to embrace my new state.

Here’s how that started.

This past week, having been released by my foot surgeon to hike sand (I guess that’s better than pounding sand but I digress), I drove to the South Jetty. Forty miles of prime sand dunes stretch from Florence south, offering every kind of sport imaginable for those willing to get sand in absolutely everything.

Wednesday, I found the gently sloping hill, above. My busted hip is just at two months out. My legs, having not seen thousands of stairs every week for three years, have work to do. So I worked.

Five laps.

Omigod, hard work.

Lots more oxygen than at 6200’.

Have you ever trained in sand?

A very nice couple, Richard and Betty, both in their eighties and from Calgary, drove up as I began my second lap. Richard’s a serious skier. He and I took off at the same time. He left me behind in no time, just like those senior Olympians at Red Rocks.

Humbling.

Just what the doctor ordered, in other words.

I loved Richard for that.

Photo by Peter Robbins on Unsplash

But wait, there’s more.

On the way out of the park I stopped at a cul-de-sac where Bob, the park host, lives in a shaded spot facing the parking lot. Across from his trailer were serious sand dunes. Buggies were crawling their sides, slipping and sliding.

Bigger dunes than the one I was just hiking. The sand’s deceptively smooth face was like new snow: I itched to get my footprints in it.

I asked Bob if pedestrians were allowed.

Of course, he grinned. Just mind the traffic.

I grinned back. These dunes are a whole lot harder than Red Rocks.

I had just made three new friends (four, if you include Bob’s service dog Lola).

Getting my mojo back. New Big Hairy Ass Goals.

It’s perfect.

I am no Biblical scholar. However there are some phrases so apt they really deserve elevating. This is one of them, excerpted from Ecclesiastes 3:4-5:

A time to weep and a time to laugh; A time to mourn and a time to dance…

It’s time to dance.

Let’s play.

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

You just spent precious time on this article. I hope you got value. If so, consider hanging out with me a while and seeing if we’re suited for one another:

If you think it was worth sending along to a friend, kindly consider this:

You never get that shared time back. Thank you for spending it with me today.