Fit at First

Anyway, during those first few years after turning fifty, I managed to stay pretty fit. I was going for long swims at the gym nearly every day. I was running in 5 K's and 10 K's on a regular basis. I found a "hiking buddy" and was hiking in the mountains every now and then. And the weekends I wasn't doing a race or a hike, I usually ended up at the beach for a good swim in the ocean.

I wanted to learn to surf, but that didn't happen. My overall fitness improved, though!

I did learn to snowboard. It was very painful for the first three years or so, but I finally mastered the necessary skills well enough so that I wasn't falling down all the time, and then snowboarding got to be fun.

For my 55th birthday, I decided to try skydiving. In tandem, of course! It was a great thrill, and besides, when I landed, the man I had been dating for the past several months presented me with a ring and asked me to marry him! That was in June, and we married in August! (By the way... we met on a ski trip!)

With best wishes for a long and healthy life,

The Jogging Grandma

What Have I Done?

We're going to fast forward a little here... I'll tell you how I got to the point I'm at, a little later.

For the time being, let me tell you that there is a 178-mile relay race coming up, April 23 and 24, from Ventura, California, all along the coast down to Dana Point. This is called the Ragnar Relay Race, and the same people organize similar races in other parts of the country, too. (Check them out at ragnarrelay.com.) The race begins Friday morning and runs approximately 24 hours :) Fun!

This is a really cool race. You get together 12 teammates, and divide up the 36 legs of the race, 3 per runner. It's great, because some legs are longer, others shorter; some are steeper, others are flatter... You work things out with your teammates, so you can include novices as well as more experienced runners, just by distributing the legs appropriately.

And no, I am not running in this one :) But I AM supporting my team by signing up as a volunteer. Each team that has at least one member living within a hundred miles of the race is responsible for finding three volunteers to help out with the organization. Or, in our case, one volunteer who is willing to work three shifts...

So when the time slot for signing up as a volunteer opened this morning, I was right there on my computer, ready to sign up. My main goal was to find three shifts I could work consecutively, all in the same place in the race. I frantically scanned through the available shifts (which were being filled by the minute) and found three that looked compatible. I sighed with relief as I finished signing up for all three.

Only then did it hit me what I had done. I am now signed up to work from midnight to six a.m., then six a.m. to noon, and then one-thirty p.m. until seven p.m. If you had told me fifteen minutes before that, that I would end up agreeing to such a crazy schedule, I wouldn't have believed it! But that is what I signed up for!

This is going to be some adventure!!!!

With best wishes for a long and healthy life,

The Jogging Grandma

How Running Became Fun

I had never seen the sense in running--during all my childraising years, I was so exhausted at the end of the day, I could not see the sense in expending more energy unnecessarily.

But now, of course, it was different. First of all, because other than my evening-shift 8-hour-a-day job, I had no other obligations, and my weekends were my own. The question now was how to fill them profitably.

One weekend, a friend invited me to a race he was running. I went to cheer him on, and the truth was it looked like fun. The next time he entered a race, I signed up for the 5 k. After that I began to participate regularly in 5 k's and 10 k's. I loved it! It was more than just running. There was the whole race ambiance, meeting other runners, the excitement of the starting gun, the tension of the competition--to see who I could pass or who was passing me--, the euphoric feeling that comes with exertion, the sense of satisfaction at the end, and then the after-race browsing at the booths or local shops, and a well-deserved brunch. It was all extremely enjoyable and rewarding, and my fitness was improving!

With best wishes for a long and healthy life,

The Jogging Grandma

P.S. When you're ready to start strength training, you might want to check this out!

Getting Fit

Over the next four years, my fitness level slowly increased. A friend had told me that when I could swim a mile, he would teach me to scuba dive. That sounded like a lot of fun, so I started training. Again, the first time I got in the pool, I couldn't even make it across once! I had to stop half-way across to catch my breath! But with scuba diving on my brain, I kept at it. Day after day, little by little, I got to the point where I could do all 66 laps which constituted the mile. Sadly, he never did come through and take me scuba diving, but I was swimming in an outdoor pool with beautiful scenery on the horizon, so I enjoyed the swims, anyway, and they really helped me improve my fitness level!

With best wishes for a long and healthy life,

The Jogging Grandma

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Exercise, who me?

Fast forward twenty-some-odd years. The empty nest struck. And I mean REALLY empty.

Our house had always been a rather hectic place. We were both teachers at a small private school in the Spanish countryside. It seemed our home was always filled with students, friends, family, or visitors of some other kind. We sometimes slept on an air mattress out on the balcony for months at a time, because every bedroom and every sofa was filled with guests. It was a happy, bustling place.

In 1997, our older daughter married, and flew off to another country with her beloved the following day. Later that same year, our younger daughter started hanging out with her first serious boyfriend, and in full throws of adolescence, basically stopped sharing her life with us as she had done until then. In 2000, our marriage of 26 years gave signs of disintegrating and my then-husband moved to his own apartment. In 2001, the younger daughter decided to follow her sister to that far-away place (which happened to be California), and I was left alone with a very, very empty nest.

I explain all this only as a basis to say that at that point I found myself in the grips of a deep depression. It was all I could do to move forward each day, go to my job, attend to my students, and return home in the evening to my big, silent house, with everything and everyone I had ever lived for gone forever.

At Christmas time, I took some time off to go visit my daughters in California. I stayed with my eldest and her husband. They were pained to see my pain. Every morning my daughter would say to me softly, "Why don't you trying getting out and exercising, Mom? It would make you feel better."

After about of week of her urging, I decided to give it a try. I borrowed some sports clothes from her and went out walking. The truth is that the sunny blue California sky and the fresh air DID cheer me up some. The next day, I decided to jog around the block. Ha! Did I say jog? I got as far as the corner, and then had to go back to a walk.

I did this every day for the rest of my visit, and by the time I left, I could actually make it around the (rather small-sized) block at a slow jog.

When I returned home, I signed up for some aerobic and step classes at a local gym. For an hour a day, I huffed and puffed and jumped and stepped and skipped with a whole lot of younger--and fitter--girls and guys. But it really did help. I would get a very pleasant high by the end of each session.

In 2002, I signed divorce papers, resigned my position at the school where I had worked for exactly 30 years, packed my favorite clothes in two suitcases, and returned to California, where I had lived as a child, and where my two daughters were now living. I was 51.

With best wishes for a long and healthy life,

The Jogging Grandma

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Fit After Fifty

I never really worried about fitness until I turned fifty. Even then, it wasn't foremost in my mind.

I had the good fortune of enjoying an excellent Physical Education program at my High School. We had one hour of gym class every morning, five days a week, plus an hour of voluntary after-school sports, Monday through Thursday. We always practiced a different sport each month of the school year. My Southern California church youth group organized activities such as snow skiing and water skiing that I probably wouldn't have had a chance to participate in otherwise. My friend Pauli had horses we rode, and our family did a lot of camping and hiking. In college, I fulfilled my P.E. requirements with gymnastics, volleyball and sailing! So I had always been fairly fit.

Then it got down to the nitty-gritty of life. Of course, you get a lot of exercise carrying around toddlers and lugging baskets of wet laundry out to the clothesline (no dryer for me where I raised my children). And what about that wonderful up-and-down motion of bending down to pick up each piece of laundry, then reaching up to hang it on the line ? And surely ironing an average of two dress shirts per day must help develop the triceps!

But no, I was never really concerned about fitness for all those childraising years. I had too many other things on my mind.

With best wishes for a long and healthy life,

The Jogging Grandma