Miele Man

My gradnfather on my Dad's side was over 100 years old and still saving for his old age. He often told me that a person was only as old as they thought they were.

He was in fantastic health right up until the day he died.

Cheers

tkamd73 

Getting older, not always pleasant, but it sure beats the alternative!
Tim

BlazingPedals

I always wondered if I was going to lose my hair before I went gray. Now it looks like it'll be a tie. I'm graying from the sides up, and I'm losing it from the top down.

rsbob 

When COVID first hit, I needed a safe way to exercise other than my other passion, bagging peaks on the local mountains for fear of encountering other heavy breathers, so turned back to my passion of my 30s and 40s, cycling. At 65, then, I found that I was so grossly out of cycling shape that maintaining 15 MPH was a real effort. Keeping at it and pushing myself, I have watched my speed and endurance increase. 14 mile rides have turned to 30, 40 and 60mile rides while speed has picked up, in part due to a modern light weight bike with better gearing. Now rapidly approaching 67, I am getting really fit, lost weight and just keep improving.

As an aside I saw a podiatrist due to a self inflicted injury - a overly long cleat screw unknowingly poking my fore foot due to some neuropathy due to another self-inflicted injury (moving an overloaded wheel barrow and compressing a disc <- what an idiot) - and when he asked my age, he said, I thought you were at least 10 years younger - just became my favorite health care provider.

But this is a roundabout way of saying, after reading all the posts about how performance really drops off after hitting 70 really has me concerned. Here I am making great strides and facing a big drop-off in the not so distant future is not exactly comforting. But then I know I can’t perform like I did in my early adulthood (no more centuries) either. I may have to just accept that decrease, but it sure isn’t easy when things are getting good.

For the time being I will continue to push myself and for the winter have planned for the first time, doing a structured training plan. Maybe I can hold off the inevitable for a couple more years.

Chuck M 

My experience with this was with my dad. He had a minor car accident and when they took him to the ER they ran some bloodwork and found some things off with potassium and other things that said caused him to go off the road. They admitted him to the hospital to get those things straightened out and when I went to take him home, they wheeled him out in a wheelchair which is common hospital practice. When I went to help him in my car, he couldn't stand up or walk. I made the escort take him back inside and inquired about this. Their response was "He could walk before he came here?" I told them he in fact could walk and there was something wrong. They told me he couldn't stay any more and that I had to take him They assumed he was an invalid I guess.

I took him to another hospital where he was able to get the care he needed and he was back on his feet in two days. There I was told that for every day and elderly person spends in a hospital bed it takes a certain amount of PT to get them fully recovered.

qcpmsame 

Had my wake up moment last week, wife and I met with an agent to go over the various Medicare supplements, and "Advantage" policies. Came home and submitted my SSI and Medicare on-line stuff since I am in the 3 month window for my 65th BD. Wife hits her 3 month in December. I swear that my usual joint aches and pains became worse for a few days.

I took a class and exam to reactivate my engineering credentials two weeks ago, I was easily the oldest attendee there, including the instructor/proctor.

Ahhh, still happy to not be in the obits, and on the green side of the grass.

Bill

bargeon

How can I be 70! I was just getting used to 60.

gobicycling

Individuals with disabilities have a particularly hard time on the medical hospital issue. Some MDS think that someone else's life is not of a high enough quality to work hard to save them. My son is paralyzed from the shoulders down, literally, and he is a Stanford law school graduate and a nationally known civil rights attorney, along with his wife, a Yale graduate. I always worry that some MD in a hospital will not think that my son's life is important or valuable and that he would be better off not alive. This has actually happened in the past.

DiabloScott

I think I've told this story before, but I got my first ever senior discount (river boat ride) and carded for beer on the same day!

Yeah, and I can also visualize them as they probably looked in high school... I didn't used to could do that.

Carbonfiberboy 

You got it.

cyclezen

You are exactly where you should be. Nothing to accept or reject. Everything to experience.
The Great Mandala, the wheel of life, which we all ride.
Each place on the wheel is proper.
Each place on the wheel gives a different experience, a different perspective.
Different challenges and rewards.
Acceptance doesn't mean capitulation; the wheel requires energy and commitment to living, in order to turn.
It's your wheel, as we each have our own.
Ride On

Thx
Yuri

Hermes

Welcome back Dudelsack formerly The Weak Link. I always enjoyed your posts and threads that I would put in the dark humor meets tongue in cheek nouveau chic genre. I am 72 and getting to 70 was like getting varsity status in high school. The junior varsity kids just do quite measure up and “get it”. Varsity is a very tough league in which to play as many have pointed out in this thread for lots of reasons. I will just add a couple of observations within your list of stages.

Biker395 

^ Lol ... honestly no ... not for me. The most attractive women I knew in high school didn't age well. The skinny wallflowers are the ones that look hot now.

Biker395 

Oy, does that sound familiar. Cluelessness reigns.

But tell me ... did you really have women in your engineering classes? At that point in my life, I was either in engineering school (sausagefest), surfing (sausagefest), or working (rejection being the norm).

downtube42

Computer and EE classes were 90% male, for sure. But the campus was another story, and my electives were balanced. No, there were plenty of young ladies around.

Trsnrtr

I turned 70 this year and I'm proud of it. I have my health struggles and am over weight but I still ride 7,000 miles a year and enjoy life. When I started my adult riding life in 1982, I never dreamed that I would still be riding and enjoying it at 70. I figure that I've won and it's bonus from here on out.

pdlamb

When my wife went back to nursing school, they had a couple classes where all the nursing students (mostly female) walked across the street to a large auditorium in the engineering building. Every week she said there were engineering students stopping to stare at them. The professor did say something about how it was important to gradually introduce the budding engineers to the opposite sex.

DiabloScott

There were probably 5% females in my upper division mechanical engineering classes (1990), there were a lot more females in electrical and civil. There were quite a few women including high level engineers in my design company which was mostly civil and environmental. Some of the women engineers who had been around a long time had some interesting stories of what it was like in the old days... being expected to type and get coffee etc.

The women engineers tended to be married to other engineers... that was probably a personality thing rather than a lack of other prospects.

Cougrrcj

Geeze,was it really that bad out West? Here in Ohio, I attended Ohio State '76-77, and Cleveland State '80-81 as an engineering student. The OSU year I was even lodged in the all-male upper-classmen Engineering dorm! So freshman year at OSU - lots of Bio- and Chem-Eng females in my classes maybe a few Civils.. ElectEng?? Never saw too many of those... Not much else. Four years later, for my 3rd year at CSU (I took classes part-time in between while working other jobs) the SAE/MechEng 'student lounge' was across the hall from the SWE (Society of Women Engineers) lounge, so we interacted quite often...

rsbob 

What bugs me is when woman around my age ‘give me the eye’. They never did that in my 20s and 30s! Better late than never? Don’t tell my wife.

jackb

At 73 I feel quite a few discomforts that accompany old age. Muscles ache, stamina is reduced, strength is reduced, and overall performance in my outdoor activities is diminished. I cycle more slowly and go shorter distances. My hiking is slower and distances shorter. Ski days have shortened a bit as well. But so what? This is what happens when you get older. No problem. As long as you remain enthusiastic in the things you love to do, you will be fine. I like cycling, hiking, and skiing as much as ever despite the discomforts and aches. Live life as much as you can. It's a mistake not to.

Dudelsack 

This was/is a sore point with me. It’s not for me to determine anyone else’s quality of life. Not everybody agrees with me, though.

rwmct

The "deck" gets reshuffled. That is probably a continual process, but I did not notice it until about fifteen years after high school. By the time you hit your 60s, how you take care of yourself is so much more important than how you looked when you were young. Genetics still plays a big role in various ways, but not in exactly the same way it did at 18 or 22 (having hair, for example).

Jtmav

In our senior years there is a good quote “ Happiness is good health and a bad memory”
Works for me