Why aren’t more old people leaving America?
There’s a lot of loose talk about people retiring outside the United States. It’s not as romantic a conversation as one might think, because the underlying premise is that most Americans don’t have the resources they’ll need to retire comfortably in the country they’ve helped to build. Say you have only $1,177 a month to...
Hiking and the spiff of health
You know the seasons are wheeling around because of all the hiking stories that are popping up online. Over the past week or so we’ve been reminded of the joys of hiking, and the toys of hiking, and the health benefits, including this simple and stunning fact, from a study by a team at the...
The Boston Marathon is thundering toward you
Patriot’s Day is coming on April 15, which means the granddaddy of marathons (well, American marathons) will be run in Boston, which means we’ll see a lot of stories about granddaddies who run marathons. Older marathoners are considered feature-bait, because they are thought to be unusual. Marathon-running preteens are also unusual but also possibly a...
Saturday mash-up: March 31, 2012
Whenever there’s a pile of items that accumulate over the week and we can’t get around to individual pieces on each one, we throw them into a bin like this, which we previously called a stew and then a hash. This time we’re call it a mash-up, which seems like another food metaphor but less...
Bird-watching is the new NASCAR
Mark the date and time: with this post, bird-watching shows up on our radar as a bona fide recreational pursuit for over-50s. We used to think of this as a hobby, but it seemed to lack the physicality we seek in recreation. Also, no gear, no cool jargon, no bracing risk of self-destruction. How wrong...
The good news about your atrophying muscles is that maybe they aren’t
About a year ago one of the networks ran a story about a detective who found people who’d gone missing. The detective advised his colleagues to study the lost person’s photograph, then make a mental adjustment to accommodate the fact that he was over forty and had invariably lost muscle mass over the past few...
You’re “dramatically” more active today than in 1992?
The president of Sports Goods Manufacturers Association says you are, and it’s his business to know. The organization does an annual survey of Americans’ exercise activities, and it sees a boom in boomer sports. “Are the boomers playing more sports than 20 years ago? I think the answer to that is yes,” says Tom Cove,...
Vargas of the trail map gets his due
We are occasionally confined to the great indoor wasteland of the desk, corner office, or garret. There we stare at a computer screen all day, with no opportunity to roam the precious spaces on earth. (Of course there is Google Earth, but the emptiness of that world wearies after a time. And, let’s face it,...
This week, media find old skiers fascinating
We have a new favorite line of the week, from a story in the Edmonton Journal on octogenarian skiers: during the photo shoot for the story, 87-year-old Hanna Andersen “thinks about doing a jump, something she hasn’t done since she was 85….”* Andersen is one of 20 over-80 skiers in Edmonton’s 400-member Rocky Mountain...
British couple lacks the stamina to cruise for a full 40 years
You could spend what remains of your life collecting stories about engaging people who have chucked over their rat-race lives, bought a sailboat, and cruised the world for a year or a decade or longer. That’s because a lot of people actually do this. There are communities of cruisers, in boats of varying degrees of...
Sunday hash: February 26, 2012
Odd lots and bolt ends from the past week: As pointed out in an earlier post, research demonstrates that “exercising with an interactive computer game improves brain function among the elderly.” Now comes news that you might not need the exercise part of that: a study by North Carolina State University...
Century-old Frenchman (with the body of a 75-year-old) sets biking record
There are many, many things to say about this, and there is nothing that is necessary beyond the following: at the age of 100, Robert Marchand—citizen of France, former inhabitant of Venezuela and former Canadian lumberjack—has just ridden a bike 15.1 miles. In an hour. That sets a new record because it...
