A tip sheet for hitting 100
Aging is like sex and home maintenance: done well, it’s a source of pride and satisfaction. Done poorly, it’s a nightmare. Thankfully, there isn’t one secret to doing it well. You can figure out how to excel at this in your own way. But you can also learn by listening to others who have been...
Saturday mash-up: June 16, 2012
This sounds like a fairly ominous collection: detailed maps, rolling protests, killer kilocalories and powerful 80-year-olds. Read closely, though, all is benign. Except the calories. Ever find yourself in a new town and wonder about nearby recreational resources? It’s easy enough to find the national parks, and fairly easy to find the state parks. But...
Older and active: no one knows what you should eat
Older people—including very fit and active older people—will sometimes stand in front of a mirror and say, What the hell? When did that happen? And what do I do about it? The problem is this: you never thought about what you ate. In your youth, you were burning calories like a madman or madwoman and...
Tramps: how travel is like sex
The desire to travel is like the desire for sex. When you aren’t doing it, it seems like the most attractive thing imaginable. If you can’t fulfill your desire for travel—because, let’s say, you are working—it can grow into a mild obsession. Like sex. You start buying travel magazines. You visit travel websites then wipe...
Fitness is the big have
If it seems to you that everything breaks down into haves and have-nots, you are as smart as you think you are. It’s a barbell world. You are at one end or the other. The middle class that connects the two extremes grows thinner and bends under the stress until it adopts a parabolic shape...
Marco Olmo is to the Alps what Caballo Blanco was to the Copper Canyon
Writing about the real and perceived risks of long-distance running for old people, we were reminded of the triumphs of Marco Olmo, the 60-year-old Italian excavator operator who won the grueling, 166-km (with 9,400 meters of climbing) Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc. Actually, he won it twice, in 2006 and 2007. He’s well known in Europe...
How dangerous is distance running for old folks?
Older runners who are in excellent shape, with years of marathons under their collective and not very long belts, can still be cut down in mid-stride by a cardiac arrest. That’s the lesson suggested by the autopsy of famed 58-year-old endurance runner Micah True (AKA Caballo Blanco), who reportedly died from an undiagnosed enlarged left...
Tamae Watanabe is sitting on top of the world. Again. And Everest claims four others.
UPDATED: On Saturday, May 18, Tamae Watanabe became—at age 73—the oldest woman to summit Everest. This is an amazing accomplishment because (1) it is Everest, (2) she attacked the mountain from the difficult north face and (3) she broke her own record, set in 2002, when she was a spry 63-year-old. So congratulations to her....
Saturday Mash-up: May 19, 2012
Like the other photos for Saturday mash-ups, this one is picked not for its relevance but just because we like it. It’s a photo of a “black ice growler from a recently calved iceberg closing in on the shore at the old heliport in Upernavik, Greenland. Such black ice growlers originate from a glacial crevasse,...
104-year-old sets paragliding record
It’s been a good few weeks for achievements by people who are so old that—typically—each new breath would be considered something of a triumph . Fauja Singh finished the London Marathon in late April; he is 101. A week or so earlier, Peggy McAlpine reclaimed the record for the oldest person to take part in a...
Saturday mash-up: May 5, 2012
Yes, yes. A day late. But what is time if life is an eternity? You are exhausted with special events—Tax Day, National Parks Week, Derby Day—so you may have failed to notice that May is Older Americans Month. You should go to the web site, funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration...
Trips your children won’t recommend
Runestone checked in yesterday with a link to Greenland’s official web site (which just won a Webby Award, which is considered the Oscar of the internet). As a travel destination, we had slotted Greenland pretty far down the list, between Somalia and Cancun. Now we’re less sure. We thought of the island as a frozen...
