Off Their Rockers

This just in from Bob Mionske’s “Legally Speaking” on cycling website Velo News. Minoske got it from Andy Cline’s piece (”Two-Wheeled Wonder”) in Sierra Magazine, March/April 2008. It’s not for the over-50 crowd, specifically, but great for everybody with a bike, so I’m passing it along:

What if there was something you could do to improve your health and fitness, save money, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, improve air quality, and reduce your carbon footprint, all at the same time—would you do it?

The idea is simple…Draw a circle with a 1-mile radius around your home. Try to replace one car trip per week within that circle by riding a bicycle or walking. At an easy riding pace you can travel one mile on a bicycle in about seven minutes. Walking takes about 20 minutes at an easy pace.

As Cline writes: “nearly half of all trips in the United States are three miles or less; more than a quarter are less than a mile” Short car trips are the easiest to replace with biking or walking, and they are the biggest polluters, per mile: “Engines running cold produce four times the carbon monoxide and twice the volatile organic compounds of engines running hot. Smog-forming (and carcinogenic) VOCs continue to evaporate from an engine until it cools off, whether the engine’s been running for five minutes or five hours.

Cline cites a recent study: “the transportation sector accounts for about one-third of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Within that sector, travel by personal vehicles accounts for nearly two-thirds of those emissions.”

Try the one-mile solution a few times, Cline hopes, you’ll soon be biking or walking to the store twice a week, then ditching your car for most of your trips inside the circle.

Source: VeloNews.com

 

We’ve got John McCain falling for the spectacled seductress with the sten gun (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker just outed her own husband, “75-year-old scholar and raconteur”, who confessed he was hot for Sarah, making a strong case for old McWarrior having the same hots. Not acting on the hots–just basking in the google eyes (before there was Google)–in McWarrior’s case, hanging on every Palindrone, ageless ploys for which aged men are eternally susceptible. Lately, with vigorous males living longer, more examples of the old guys and young steam clouding their judgment. Warren Buffett and his bomb biography, I’d heard Fortune’s talented Carol Loomis was in line for the ghost write, instead he opted for the comelier, fleshier Alice Schroeder. Result: flop. McCain result: looking floppy. Heard Boone Pickens on his windmill/natural gas lecture tour a couple of months ago, his new trophy stunner in tow. Not that she’s on Boone’s mind much, but he mentioned her almost as much as the energy crisis. So far, no harm in that, except since that meeting, he’s lost billions on his energy bets–what if the windmills are Quixote windmills, part of the courtship?

History is full of men wrecking themselves on the sirens’ landings, but lately it’s distinguished ancients with waning testosterone, or maybe not so waning.  Something to think about, as we keep up our athletics, and feel younger and friskier.

The new federal “physical activity guidelines for Americans” apply to everybody—old, young, both sexes. This is unusual: most fitness campaigns, going back to the ancients, were inspired by war and designed to toughen up male warriors.

Two famous initiatives launched by Presidents Kennedy and Wilson had a military motive. The egg-headed Wilson did calisthenics in the White House, as prescribed in  “Keeping Fit All the Way”, written by Yale’s high-profile football coach, Walter Camp. Camp’s book became a national bestseller and the basis for Wilson’s campaign to shape up America—GIs in particular.

A study from 1919 concluded that 90 per cent of the would-be recruits couldn’t pass the physical. Wilson’s priority after WWI: train the next generation of grunts for WWII. No mention of women in Camp’s how-to, fitness in the general population was an afterthought.

Kennedy, known for virility and touch football, was the only President to write for Sports Illustrated: two articles coaxing the country to cut the flab. His bad back kept him from heavy workouts—the non-amorous kind at least–but his hyperactive family burned a lot of calories. He created the Council on Fitness and challenged his staff and the nation to take a 50-mile hike. 

We remember him as the sportiest of leaders, but his fitness campaign had a Wilsonian subplot: toughen us up for the Russians so they didn’t get the better of us in space, the Cold War, or WWIII. Again, a male thing, though stronger biceps and abs wouldn’t count for much in a nuclear holocaust.

Europe has a much longer history of exercise crazes and sports programs with a military angle—the two most famous inspired by humiliating defeats. Friedrich Jahn, the “father of German gymnastics” traveled the country in the early 1800s, a Johnny Appleseed of exercise bars and floor mats. Jahn taught a generation of children to tumble and balance—prepping them for the Olympics, perhaps?

No chance of that, the Ancient Games were out of business since 394 A.D. Napoleonic backlash, not Greek revival, set Jahn on his manic mission: his country overrun by Napolean, he gymnified it to give the future defense department a better crop of recruits. 

Eighty years later, thanks to aggressive pestering by a civic-minded Parisian baron, Pierre Fredy, the Olympics were revived in 1896. As a global visionary, Fredy saw how friendly competition could promote understanding and international goodwill. As a Frenchman, still smarting from his country’s pathetic showing on the Franco-Prussian front, his subtle objective was to glamorize athletics to the French youth, so they’d improve their physiques and give the Army better raw material.

Going deeper into history, a society that promotes exercise for humanity’s sake is a rarity. Famous examples can fit into a couple of paragraphs: Yoga, conceived by Buddhist monks 5,000 years ago for discipline and meditation; Cong Fu gymnastics, promoted by Confucius and his followers as preventive medicine (Confucians noticed that sedentary types got sicker more readily than active types).

Athens, which franchised the world’s first physical trainers (paidotribes) and, for a time, touted fitness on Confucian principles; Hippocrates (Greek) and Galen (Roman) prescribed exercise for mental and corporeal health; Renaissance Italians, retro Greek in vogue, taught phys ed in schools; opinion makers from Luther to Locke, made the connection between sound bodies and sound minds.

Meanwhile, strong-arm civilizations come to a bad end–their ruling classes wining, dining, reclining—softening themselves up to be overrun by leaner, meaner foes. Low points for civilization (the Dark Ages) were high points for muscle tone and gritty conditioning among the conquering hordes. 

All the more reason to celebrate fitness for health’s sake, now popular worldwide—for how long, it’s hard to say.

Dear Lance,

Your comeback news is a shocker. We had a great relationship when you took a boring Europe sport and got us non-Euros excited—everybody thumbing a ride on your glory.

I bought your bike: a $5,000 Trek! Mostly thanks to you, geezers in the top age brackets are the biggest market for top-end bikes. I guess you know that.

You’ve seen us out there, straddling carbon frames that give us a whiff of extra speed, wearing your team jerseys—or jerseys worn by other teams that look like our grandkids. Entre nous, you’re the Tiger in our cycle fantasies. When the biking topic comes up, say over cocktails, I put you and me in the same sentence as much as possible.

My Lance ego transference hasn’t happened with any other pro—maybe in Europe it would, but here, with Leipheimer, Hincapie, you drop those names, nobody cares. So, for awhile it was sad when you retired: no more amazing guy to brag about in the present tense.

In another way, your retirement strengthened the you-me bond. We had more in common: weekend group rides, noticing the countryside. You were around Aspen this summer, where I might have seen you riding up Ashcroft or the Maroon Bills. A couple of my buddies reported Lance sightings, where they hoped to sneak up on you and get ahead of your front wheel for a couple of seconds. “I beat Lance in a sprint!” If you’d stayed retired, gained a few pounds, got hangovers, got older, eventually you’d slow down at a faster rate than me, since there’s a limit to the slow I’m approaching already. So we’d be more equal.

Now you’re back in the saddle, training for the Tour, what about our relationship? I heard what you said: your comeback is all about funding and publicity for cancer research. I’m with you there, but in the coverage from old Tours, I read a lot about your stage wins, Sheryl Crowe in the team car, and lab controversies—less and less about your cured cancer and almost zilch about fund raising. Anyway, the Tour is three weeks and in the eight months away, what can you do besides speed intervals, strategy sessions, and wind-tunnel immersion?

I know nothing first-hand, except what I read from you in “It’s Not About the Bike”, but lately, the blogospherians are saying it’s not about the bike or the cancer research, it’s about the ego: accustomed to being fed massive doses of adoration and column inches in the papers, craving a refill. Speaking selfishly, for my own ego investment, I’ll feel better as soon as you finish the next tour with your reputation intact. Now that you’re headed back to Gaul, it’s random samples all over again, analyzed by the testy Gaulers who’d love nothing more than stat the allegations.

Already they’ve trotted out the urine bottle from 1999, and threaten to open and retest it. Seems like deja Berra to me: you saying no to the decanting—by the way, does urine improve with age, like wine, or weaken and lose its incriminating qualities? Is there a statute of limitations on it?

Should we have one? I’m sure you’ve pondered these questions. I’d hate to see you and me dragged through the next inquiry.

Philippa “Phil” Raschker is the only athlete over 50 to make the final cut for top amateur athlete of the year—the Sullivan Award. Not only that, she’s done it twice: 2003 and again in 2007.

Three finalists for the earlier locker-room Oscar were superstars young enough to call her mom if not granny: Michael Phelps, Apolo Ono and LeBron James, for his pre-NBA exploits. It’s no surprise LeBron won and Phil didn’t—on the world Masters stage Phil wins everything, but not in the publicity department.

At recent count, LeBron’s got 7 million Googles to her 2,450, which puts their relative media value in perspective. As of this post, swimmer Phelps is a 1.2 million Google guy; Ono far back with 66,000 hits. Compared, even, to Ono, Phil has coped with a huge fame deficit, not to mention a perks and support-system deficit.

LeBron’s a zillion-dollar pro now, but there’s a big difference, say, between Phelps’ “amateur” status and Phil’s amateur status. Phelps can train and compete full-time, whereas Phil did both in her off hours. For instance, she spent three sleepless nights prior to the Sullivan ceremony 2003 catching up on her clients’ tax returns.

Along the way, Phil’s created a gold glut in the trophy case, 10 from the Italy meet in 2007, 58 world championships since 1988, setting records in sprints at various distances; hurdles; high, long, and long and triple jumps; pole vault, shot put, pentathlon. Here we’ve got the most decorated competitor in any sport in Masters memory; yet Raschker is sure bet to stump a Jeopardy panel.

She doesn’t need a press agent or a crowd handler. Sure, she gets the occasional mention in the New York Times, and lots of coverage in the Masters media, but to what can we attribute her lopsided overall lack of notoriety, the falling records hardly anybody notices?

Not Raschker’s sex; two other dominatrixes of track and field, Florence Joyner and Wilma Rudolph, would never stump a Jeopardy panel. On the Google count, Joyner leads Rudolph 425,000 to 271,000 (Rudolph would have more had she not run her races pre-computer) but both outgoogle Raschker by factors of 10 and 20.

What’s the difference here? Not racism or sexism, but ageism devalues Phil’s accomplishments — same story with all the other over-50 record breakers. Her latter-day dominance comes from training and genes, but since lots of other seniors train hard with far less success, credit the genes.As three-time Tour de France winner, cyclist Greg LeMond put it recently in Velo News:

“Your genetic potential does not change in your career. It’s there at 17-18–the only thing that changes when you race professionally&.is that you’re trying to figure out how to be at your peak.”

From what I can gather, Phil played sports in her youth, but didn’t get serious until her late 40s. What if she’d started an Olympic-level regime at 15? If, as LeMond suggests, the same right stuff that makes her great now was in her then, she’d be famous for winning everything in her girlhood. Why is having done it later any less impressive?

At 41, Dara Torres is headed for her fifth Olympics–despite taking several years off, giving birth and having a kid plus two surgeries. She got herself into top shape and into encouraging headlines: “Aging Swimmer Shows There’s Hope for the Rest of Us.”

That was the AP version, and James Taranto, the sassiest blogger  at the Wall Street Journal, takes issue with the wordage. “Great”, Taranto says, sarcastically. “She’s 41, which means she actually shows there’s hope for those of you who haven’t yet hit the Big Four-Two”.

Having just hit the big Six-Three myself, I see can Taranto’s point. Torres is great, but how can a guy my age get athletically inspired—“hope for the rest of us”—by somebody my children’s age? I gather Dana’s got only one body part (eyes) telling her she’s old—she squints at a blurry time clock to see if she’s broken another world record. In my case, at 63, a chorus of body parts is chanting geezer.

Notice the headline: “aging swimmer”—what’s with that? Everybody’s “aging” from the womb on out, so the term doesn’t mean anything, except as a euphemism for “aged”, but with millions of the neo-elderly in our second childhood rebellion (“burn your AARP cards, baby!”) nobody calls anybody “aged” unless they’re over 90.

Whatever you call her, Torres is much to young to spur on a gray-hair of my ilk. For that matter, so is Jeanne Longo, a female phenom in my own sport, cycling, about to turn 50. If you’re in the Big Five-Oh age range as she is, maybe you’ll get a vicarious boost from her upcoming trip to Beijing: five-time world champ, back for another shot at gold. In the trophy case department, Longo’s right up there with Torres; in the publicity department, she’s all be invisible to the public eye. Two reasons for that: (1) cycling has a tiny fan base in the U.S.; (2) the older you are, the less the mass-market media wants to hear about your sweaty feats.

Re the ageism-in-athletic-publishing subject, I called Terry McDonnel, editor of Sports Illustrated, to pitch a column about over-50 sports stars. Here’s a paraphrase of his answer: “We tried something like that. It didn’t work. SI readers under 50 could care less if a 50-year-old breaks some record; and over 50 they care about their own exploits, not reading about anybody else’s.”

Masters-athlete, nee Geezer Jock, survives on the notion that readers ARE interested in other people’s exploits. I’ve been compiling reports on the oldest man and the oldest woman to accomplish great feats: Martin Strel, who swam the length of the Amazon at 52; Nepalese sherpa Min Bahadur Shenchan, who summited Everest last May at 76; Sue Oldman, who swam the English Channel at 61; Bill McKeague, who finished an Ironman (Hawaii) at 80; Dmitrion Yordanidis, who finished a marathon at 98. Stay tuned for the details on these and other aging (by AP definition) goal models for athletes into the triple digits on the birthday log. Do I dare mention the Taiwanese madam, Grandma Chu, arrested at 82 in a red light district? “Very light make-up,” said the arresting officer, “I took her for a 70-year-old”.

I leave you with this downer than needs to be Bronx cheered: In a recent New York Times Sunday magazine profile about Torres (6/29/2008) Elizabeth Weil writes: “Let’s face it—compared with the Olympics, even the Masters World Championship is a glorified losers’ round, and holding a master’s world record is hardly an exciting achievement for an athlete who hit the world stage just as she entered high school.”

Oh really?

Eyesight—what do you expect when you’re over 40?

Of course, this magazine/website lives on the notion that over-50 athletes do care about each other’s exploits, and at last count, we’ve to 76 million people

Over 50, who soon will multiply into 118 million by 2020, and given the sports revolution going on, plenty of

I will try to continue to post stories of the likes of Martin Strel, who swam the length of the Amazon (2500 miles) at 54; the 76-year-old sherpa who climbed Everest last year; the TK, the oldest woman to swim the English channel at 65; TK, the oldest Ironman finisher at 80; TK the oldest man and woman to climb Everest, TK and TK respectively. What I’m trying to do with his blog.

Maybe somebody can help me check on this one: is it less an accomplishment to break a world record at the higher age brackets than at the lower? A decade or two ago, before Master’s/Senior athletics took off, maybe you could argue that a world-record time in the 100-yard dash was less of a big deal for a 60-year-old than for a 30-year-old. But as the upper-bracket competition gets tougher, the records get tougher to break. If somebody’s done the math on this, let me Know.

Senior Games and Masters championship, Huntsman, not to mention a steady stream of accomplishments that run through a journalistic nowheresville.

Dying Gaul

“To An Athlete Dying Young” popped into my head last week. I remembered it from high school—not the poem but the title: “dying” and “young” together in the same thought put a brief shiver in our teenage immortality illusion. Who was this dead guy and what did him in: heat stroke? EPO? coronary?, a sidewalk punk shot him for his bling? The poem itself, which I just googled, doesn’t offer much in the way of hard news. Literary gossips pursued the tabloid angle: the unnamed “athlete” was the love object of the poet, A.E. Housman, who hid in the closet and never came out.

As far as I can tell, Housman was in no shape to remotely relate to sports: small and frail, the product of a coddling mother and a Stalinesque father, the sum of these parts a wimp with a facial tic who hung out in reading rooms, studied Latin in the British Museum library and wrote wistful, agonized verse the critics dubbed “romantic pessimism”.

The primary source of the romance and the pessimism was Moses Jackson, the bisexual beefcake who became the poet’s fatal attraction.

Fig-leafers of the time called it a “deep, youthful friendship”–whom were they kidding? We’re talking Nineties here—not the 1990s, when gay was mainstream OK—the 1890s, where even in trendy Europe, an admitted poet and suspected poufta kept a low profile. Soon enough, the divine Jackson dumped Housman for a woman, which may explain why the poet turns him into a dead athlete and buries him in the first stanza.

What’s the point of all this in a master’s athlete blog? The Housman poem is evidence of the traditional mindset about fun and games, where men were manly (no place for girleymen or women) but only for a short prime time, after which they wasted away and lived off their moldy laurels, when they’d be better off as funeral fodder.

As I swallow my daily prostate and cholesterol pills, I’m wondering, why hasn’t anybody written “To an Athlete Dying Old?” Housman couldn’t have, because in his era, “athlete” and “old” didn’t belong in the same thought and more than he and Jackson belonged in the same cot in the Cotswolds. Now we know better, and a contemporary Moses Jackson (if he really was an athlete and not just a hunk) could be out there competing in the Huntsman Games or the Masters or the Senior Olympics and presumably, happy to be alive and sweating.

Scorcese and Jagger

The Rolling Stones/Scorcese docurockamentary is a must-see for anybody with an AARP card. Mick goes anerobic for an hour forty-five, non-stop chicken strutting and herky-jerking around the stage. Put a bag over his head, or give him a mask with his 20-year-old face and you’d think you were at a Stones concert from 1968. Put this guy in the Boston marathon or the Senior Olympics, don’t drug test him, and he’d win his age category in any speed sport. Keith Richards is creaky and sleepy, a typical dude in the retirement home, if you take away his electric guitar, eye make-up, the Johnny Depp pirate hair-do. Has the best in line in the flick, looks out at the crowd and says “nice to see you” (pause) “nice to see anybody”.