Crossing the Rubicon

Finally I have crossed another Rubicon in my body's reaction to the increased physical training. No I am not training as much as many do normally.  The measure of one's training is rather subjective, it has much to do with the years of increased training. It has only been since 2007 when I entered my first race, the Olympic Standard Triathlon in Farmington, NM, that I began to believe that I could become and athlete.  One obviously does not need to be fast, but simply enjoy the process.

I did not live in a household of athletes, and though my father likely would be an athlete if he were of my generation, my father did not allow himself to indulge.  I have a pair of wooden skis which belonged to him and I have an image, perhaps incorrectly, that he took part in the military training during World War II in Leadville, Co. My father was not in the military for he was working for the telephone company around White Sands, New Mexico. He did not understand the significance that work played in the war, he was young and knew the country side and what was taking place in the mountains of Colorado.

A 62 year old body which has not been involved in sports for most of the first six decades needs time to become tweeked, see "Younger Next Year".  Our cultural concept is that the body changes most dramatically in the aging population.  Do you not remember the changes which we see daily in a baby, then there is the toddler, the growing child with a new body each week or at least each quarter.  The teenager suffers from growing pains and in our twenties and thirties, we are getting used to our now matured body which is new to us and has the strangest demands because there is so much of the world and human behavior to learn about and yes, the passions of the sexual hormones.  Feeling the need to burn the candle at both ends to enjoy all the passion for life that one witnesses in the twenties, that could be termed a change in the body.  So you see the body does not really quit changing.  Our culture conceives that the changes appear to be most dramatic as one moves into the 60's and 70's but these changes are not as rapid as for the child.  Look what happens to a child in their first decade and then again in their second decade.  The changes for one in their 60's and 70's is not so dramatic, really. Thirty somethings feel a change in their bodies and for the women who give birth to one or more children experience massive changes in their body.  Yes, "nothing endures but change," Heraclitus.

Throughout the ages people have hoped to come across a magical potion to regain youth but it's also the case that the wise ones have known for eons that movement, exercise of the body, mind, spirit and heart (read emotion), provides the magic.