Reality Check: How to Control How Old You Feel

A frequent topic at BoomerCafé is how to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle. BoomerCafé Co-Founder and Executive Editor Greg Dobbs is one of us who is not about to slow down despite … gulp! … getting older. Quite the contrary, he feels this is the time of life to be as active as possible … no matter how old you look.

Every time I come to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to cover the space shuttle for the high definition TV network HDNet, I rent a bike first thing in the morning to get a little exercise before the day gets too hot. In its shortest form my route takes me about ten sweat-soaked miles, up and back along the hard-packed beach. But when I have the time, I add in some detours, including a couple of residential complexes for seniors. Except for a few big Buicks which scare the daylights out of me when I spot them over my shoulder coming on from behind, these places usually offer quiet palm-lined streets and light cooling breezes coming off the water.

They also offer a reality check. As I ride through and see men in white shoes and women in wedgies, I think to myself that I’m a long way from a place like this … and fool myself into thinking that if anyone happens to notice me riding by, they’ll think I’m there to visit my elderly parents. But silly me! A glutton for punishment, I stopped strolling seniors in two of these places while I was in town for the late-May launch of Discovery and asked, “What’s the minimum age here?” The answer was like a slap in the face when you’re already sunburned: “55.”

55? Been there, done that! I’m a leading-edge baby boomer, birth year 1946, which means 55 is just a pleasant memory. Try 61. I don’t look like I’m just visiting my elderly parents; I look like I am one of those elderly parents! Just as I learned the other day in a store near my home that they offer a 10% senior citizen discount on the first Wednesday of the month, and I could have gotten that discount for six years already if I had been smart enough to ask, I could have moved into one of these senior complexes in 2002! Who knows? Maybe all my shoes by now would be white too!

But it reminds me of the time a few years ago when I was covering a story in Los Angeles and called a female friend of my wife’s and mine who lives there, and we met for lunch in Westwood, which is the base of UCLA. After lunch we decided to take a walk, and ended up on Fraternity Row. It was Rush Week, so there were lots of college students walking around. And because we are young at heart if not of hair (my wife always laughs when I exclaim with wonder how remarkable it is that neither she nor any of our female friends has a strand of gray), we kind of thought we fit right in, and if anyone were to walk up and talk to us, we figured he’d invite me to “rush” his house. Silly us! When a guy finally did stop us, it was to ask if we needed any help finding our son’s fraternity house. I guess we’re lucky he didn’t say “grandson.”

The moral to the story? You’re only as old as you feel. But of course it’s not quite as simple as that, because age is measured two ways: how you feel, and how you look. Except for moments of denial (and they pop up more and more), I know I look my age. Of course that’s not always a bad thing; my mother is in her mid-80s and lives in a senior complex in San Francisco. Whenever I visit her there and we eat in the communal dining room, I spot some woman looking me over and thinking, “Hmm, fresh meat.” To her, I suppose I am, (and I hope Mom scolds her roundly for what she might be thinking), but the fact is, I qualify to live in that place too. Time marches on, and we can’t do a darned thing to stop it.

So I can’t control how I look, but I can still control how I feel, and here’s why I should: sometimes I ski with my two strong-healthy-fit-athletic 20-something sons. Mind you, they’ve both made a living on skis, so they’re pretty darned good, but I’m not bad either — for my age. However, that’s a key distinction: “for my age.” When I’m skiing, or for that matter mountain biking, with my wife or other chronological peers, we all feel pretty darned good about ourselves. Even young … “for our age.” But when I ski, or bike, with my sons, they’re Ferraris while I feel like a ’57 Plymouth.

Just a month or so ago, three other guys about my age and I made our annual trip to Moab, Utah, the Grand Canyon-like mountain-biking capital of the country. And on our toughest climb near the end of our longest ride, we were struggling up a slick rock ledge that any mere mortal would struggle to summit… when a young couple went racing past us so fast that the girl’s braided blonde ponytail was actually flying in the wind. So, here’s how I can control how I feel: stick to playmates my own age!

But now to the real moral to the story: time does march on, but except for the inevitable toll it may take on our bodies, we don’t have to live by the calendar. Our parents’ generation pretty much took a look at the calendar and said, “Well, I guess I’m too old to do such-and-such any more.” No you’re not! At least we’re not. When you consider all the bumps and grinds our limbs have suffered living the active lifestyle our boomer generation lives, we are obviously too old in some ways to perform as we performed when we were younger — that’s why we don’t see many boomers these days in anything from major league sports to the Olympics — but we’re not too old to perform!

I’ll just keep telling myself that as long as I can. Even if it means I keep fooling myself. It sure beats wearing white shoes and driving that big Buick!