Jeff Fouse never thought about aging until his 49-year-old knee did.
Within days of increasing mileage to train for a marathon, a needlelike pain shot through his knee. After years of pain-free running, he couldn’t get rid of the nagging injury.
“Too much, too soon,” recalls Fouse, 50, the owner of a printing company in Chicago. “I just don’t recover as fast as I used to.” He misses the level and intensity of fitness he enjoyed in his 30s and 40s, when the double-digit mileage weekend runs, evening workouts at the YMCA and early-morning martial arts classes were a norm.
The pressures of growing a business, the time crunch, marriage, family and other lifestyle changes narrow the path to fitness but rarely obstruct it.
Fitness after 50 can be as much a mindset as the reality of birthdays and aging.
Seniors who stick to exercise as the decades sail by have honed their habit by continually adapting to change.
With more than 62 million Americans now over the age of 50 and retirees outnumbering teenagers for the first time in our nation’s history, there is no shortage of fitness role models. How seniors maintain fitness or get started is about using choices to face changes.
For decades, Carol Coghlan stayed fit by keeping up with her nine children and sharing pressures of her husband’s legal career. When one daughter started a walking program to lose weight, Coghlan, then 45, joined her. The movement felt good. The Chicago resident soon upped the tempo and tried jogging. Soon running around Lincoln Park followed.
Today, the 66-year-old housewife manages up to eight miles a day at a leisurely pace. She doesn’t need a group.
“Sometimes, I just make myself get out there. But running gives me an up feeling,” she explains. “It’s my stress-reliever.” A few physical setbacks, including a serious foot fracture five years ago, plus surgery unrelated to sports, sidelined her for periods of six weeks each. Inactivity wreaked havoc on her mind.
“That’s when I felt old, really old,” she continues. Being on crutches at 61 made her realize how exercise invigorates her. Facing the possibility of runners’ problems, such as worn-out joints and bad knees, she remains undaunted and willing to adapt. “I know I’ll be forced to stop running someday. All runners are. But I’ll do something, anything. Walking or cycling. I’d die if I didn’t.”
Leonard Bailey slid into semi-retirement in the early ’90s by joining the Lawson YMCA in his neighborhood. When the facility on Chicago Avenue closed in 1998, his physical problems began. Not only did the then-56-year-old miss the proximity to the gym, but the sedentary lifestyle slowly added 30 pounds to his 6-foot frame. Gone was the group support from his gym buddies.
Blood pressure shot up. So did his cholesterol. After he suffered a fainting spell, his doctor prescribed blood pressure medication. Though he got the prescription filled, Bailey never opened the bottles.
“Fitness just slipped away, real easy,” admits the father of a college-age son. But the memory of feeling good didn’t. He took action. He quit the junk food habit and pushed himself into power walking around Navy Pier and the lakefront running paths. He now averages about four miles every other day and uses his living room for floor exercises.
“Once you’ve done exercise, your body craves it,” adds Bailey, 58, who is 14 pounds shy of his goal of 200 pounds. Age doesn’t bother him. “I only think about aging when I’m with people my age. They look and think different.”
In 1960, Ralph Paffenbarger was 38 years old when the medical doctor and epidemiologist began studying the exercise habits of more than 50,000 University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University alumni. That project, the College Alumni Health Study, is regarded as a benchmark study in the relation between physical activity, chronic disease and longevity. It demonstrates that people who are more physically active live longer and have a lower risk of coronary heart disease among other ailments.
Today, the 77-year-old professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and Harvard’s School of Public Health continues to practice what he learns from his participants, now aged 67 to 100. Only 9 percent participated in varsity athletics in college, and the majority was not consistently active until middle age or later, he says.
“Fitness only becomes important within one’s own society of friends and family,” Paffenbarger says. Often, a stroke, a heart condition, cancer, the death of a spouse or friend can jump-start a sedentary individual into lifestyle changes. His days of running races are over, says the veteran of 150 marathons. “I’ve slowed down some, but I’m still a survivor compared to others in my family.”
A history of heart disease plagued relatives and eventually hospitalized Paffenbarger for bypass surgery and a pacemaker. Walking, jogging and hiking around Berkeley, Calif., plus his usual work load leave little time to dwell on his own aging.
Paffenbarger applauds all movement at any age. The fitness boom in the ’70s helped spread the awareness of exercise and importance of continual lifestyle modification. The changes people blame on aging, such as diminished strength, stooped posture and increased weight, are not the result of aging, but of disuse, he insists.
The benefits of exercise can only be confirmed through personal experience.
“Exercise is not a total cure, but it does delay or prevent development of diseases (associated with aging),” he adds. “We’ll all come down with something. How you deal with it and the quality of how you age are purely individual. You can’t generalize.”
Hugo Martens, 71, refuses to face life without a good bottle of wine, a great meal and friends to share the experience. The owner of a printing and graphics company in Chicago credits good health plus a zest for life to exercise. The no-frills workout he does three or four times a week at lunch or after work with “the tough guys,” a small, ever-changing group of men who have exercised together at various locations over 28 years, is a source of friendship, motivation and glue.
“You can’t do this stuff alone,” says Martens, who walks or cycles on weekends. “It’s too hard. We push each other. Even when you don’t feel like being there, you show up.” Maybe the sit-ups or presses are less intense than a decade ago, but Martens’ resolve continues to be strong. The social connection helped him through some tough times, especially the death last year of his best friend and cycling buddy.
The social factor is what keeps seniors coming to the gym and swimming pool at Galter Life Center on the North Side. About 40 percent of the 400 classes are geared to older people, according to Francie Habash, program director. People from the neighborhood use the center as their social club. Many are cardiac rehabilitation patients from nearby Swedish Covenant Hospital. All are sources of inspiration to Lois Grossman.
When dance moves once executed so easily by Grossman, a professional dancer, didn’t live up to her standards, she rechanneled her energies in her late 40s. She earned certification to become an exercise teacher. Now, the 56-year-old former dancer teaches a variety of classes for seniors around Chicago. At Galter, Big Band music attracts dozens to chair and water aerobics classes. The spirit of the participants rubs off. The next birthday isn’t something to be dreaded. “They teach me that getting older doesn’t mean what it used to,” Grossman says.
Boyd Lyles agrees. The associate medical director of Cooper Clinic in Dallas says the increased vitality, alertness and self-esteem gained through exercise at any age enables people to better cope with life’s challenges, mental and physical.
“People (who exercise) are more tuned in to their body,” he says. “They detect warning signs faster.”
