I plan to pick up a pair of these as well. My left heel's been killin' me. (I'm not touchin' chafing butts, so to speak.)

I first learned of the power of Gold Bond on a hot and humid trip to DisneyWorld, sophomore year of high school. Essential!

You do what you gotta do.

I think middle age is when you hit the realization that you're body is not a renewable resource, and you have to do regular maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Once you figure out how to best maintain it and start taking a more more active role in doing so, it's actually kind of liberating.

I read about something similar called the age of Never.

"My knees never did that before"
"I've never had to rest after that before"

etc.

Writer Doug Copeland called it the "Sheraton enzyme" - when you realize you can't sleep on your buddy's floor any more.

I really can't work nearly as hard as I used to be able to. I worked as a house painter for years until my early thirties and that's hard work if you're doing it professionally. Eight hours of standing thirty feet up on a ladder with only two breaks a day was no problem for me twenty years ago. I remember working from 7 to 3, going home and then working from 4 to 8 on my own house and being tired at the end but not weary or sore. Now, four or five hours of doing painting or carpentry or plumbing on my current money-pit makes me sore for days.

Almost ten years ago now, over dinner with my older brother I mentioned some bodily malady. He eyed me carefully, then said, "What are you, 30 now? Yeeeeah. That's when everything starts going to hell."

He was not wrong.

It just takes a bit more vigilance, people. If you figure out the ways you are abusing yourself, even if those abuses are fun, the time will come when there is enough incentive to not do those things anymore, and life gets easier.

I have slowed down some, but not as much as some my age, and this morning I stuffed a volleyball down the throats (figuratively) of a couple guys 15 years younger than me.

So there is hope.

As I've said before, so far I'm really digging getting older. Sure, I've visited a urologist, my legs creak when I get out bed, and my hair line isn't as low as I'd like it to be, but overall I say thumbs up. Of course, it beats the alternative. Doohickie nailed it - just adjust and enjoy the ride.

Of course, I'm still only in my early 40's, so who knows what's ahead. I might want to recall that "I love geting older" sentiment down the road.

A few years ago I saw jazz saxophonist Von Freeman for one of his 80th birthday performances and somebody asked him what it's like to be 80. He said that when you're 50 you can pretend you're 40, and when you're 70, you can pretend you only feel 60. But when you're 80, you KNOW you're 80. He laughed and then said it's a great place to be.

The very first negative effect of aging that I ever noticed, sometime in my mid-twenties, is still the one that I regret most keenly: I can no longer jump off a swing at the highest point of my arc.

Or, uh, I can jump, but my knees will make a sound like crunching gravel. And my mouth will make a sound like gagged banshees. To sum up, it's bad.

What are you, 30 now? Yeeeeah. That's when everything starts going to hell.

um.

With all due respect, this is pretty much bullshit. Okay so I'll grant that without doing a little more maintenance it may seem like a true statement, but personally I find a lot of this to be merely lazy rationalising. The days of being able to eat whatever, sleep whenever, drink whatever and abuse the system are likely numbered but that's only because your system isn't actively regenerating faster than you tear it up.

sorry for the disagreement. This is coming from a 40 year old with more scars than the skater kids next door, who on a good day can feed her 30yo (male!) cycling colleague his own ass, and who also regularly gets her ass handed to her by chicks ten to fifteen years her senior at bike races.

age is what you make of it, frankly.

hm, I still play jump-off-the-swings, too. I think aside from maintaining fitness, balance and agility thru doing stuff like cycling, skiing, Ultimate Frisbee, dodgeball, skateboarding and generally acting like a fool, a crucial key is weighing less now than I did as a teenager.

lfr, you have a point, but keep in mind that different people start with different material, too. For example, even in my fit youth, my knees were a mess, like my brother's, like my sister's, like my father's, like my uncle's, like my cousin's.

In my case (and my brother's, which is why he mentioned it) it's a combination of factors. There's no doubt that I could maintain my body better, but some inherited problems have substantially affected how my body has aged.

Also, being driven into by a great big car* --- that did some irrepairable damage. I'm not quite forty, and despite diligent and vigorous physical therapy and exercise, some days (today, for example) I move like a 60-year-old.

I envy you the swing jump, and I rejoice in the image of it! Those days were over for my knees by 25, and I probably shouldn't have been doing it at 15. Different bodies are put together differently.

*And I'm aware that you've had some body vs. car experiences, too, and that you've come out of them better than I have. That, too, is good news for you, but not true for everyone.

Yeah, it's not like we all start out with exactly the same body. I was born with a ton of crazy-ass shit (connective tissue issues, heart problems, mild scoliosis, hemophilia, and a propensity for autoimmune disorders -- all on top of the cancer I got in my 20s), so the fact that I eat extremely well, exercise, and am on the low end of the BMI scale exactly hasn't saved my knees or hips, for example. That's not "lazy rationalizing," that's a reflection of the particular set of fragilities I have. And make no mistake -- we all have fragilities. The details may differ among us, but their existence does not.

I've been a physical wreck since the age of 16, and frankly, at 42 I'm happy to say that I can metabolize alcohol more efficiently, I have better appetite control, my dick still gets hard most of the time, and I've never felt the urge to go to the gym. And, unlike many of my peers, I'm only 30 pounds overweight. (Damn you, beer!)

I also have high cholesterol, whack liver function, and the shakes.

And on my deathbed, I'll be able to say that I was out having fun instead of planning for a future that never came.

er, I don't know where that "exactly hasn't," rather than "hasn't exactly" came from in my comment... is it possible to develop whole-word dyslexia in your late 30s as well?

At 47, I feel fitter and stronger than ever in my life. I haven't been to a doctor to determine whether this is like the way light bulbs burn brighter just before they pop, though and I don't want to know. When my number's up, it's up and I'll live my own life until that time.

I feel like I'm about 30 and act like I'm 12 a lot of the time - age is more about a state of mind than a state of time and, as long as you are doing as much as you can of what you want to do, you aren't old. When you start making up excuses not to do the things you want to and are physically capable of, then you're old no matter how long ago you were born.

I honestly don't know what it would be like to be normal or healthy. I was in a bad accident at 19, and haven't been the same since. I don't know if you can really compare being a teenager to being a healthy adult. But, for as long as I've been an adult I've had arthritis and a limp whenever I'm tired, or cold, or sore.

It isn't really something I focus on constantly, it's just the cards I've been handed. Although I find it interesting as my friends and I age that they're slowly dropping down to my level, starting to walk a bit slower and so on.

But I guess having the legs of someone twice my age has done wonders for me otherwise, since I'm staring down the barrell of 30 and got ID'd for smokes this morning. ;)

I got ID'd the other day too kellydamnit, for the first time in years. The cashier acted shocked when I gave her my license. The older women at work tell me I look like a schoolgirl (at almost 32), but when I was a kid I was always told I looked older than my age. And the first time I was asked for ID for alcohol was on my 18th birthday (legal age), after buying alcohol and frequenting pubs and clubs for years without a problem (I always had my older sister's old ID just in case, but never had to use it). I have real trouble guessing people's age from their appearance, so it's all good - there's a 73-y-o Jamaican woman I work with who I first pegged as early-40s, for eg.

I..... can't drink as much as I used to, nor get by on only a few hours' sleep - and the senior moments are more frequent. The rest is still generally okay.

yeah, the drinking....

BoP, I do not know how you do it. When I was in college I could put away a bottle of vodka so cheap it had a plastic handle and an American name.
Now? I can't even handle cheap beer, much less hard liquor.

Shit, I used to DJ until last call (which is 4 am here), and be to work by 10 am the next day. Now I go out until three and I'm lucky if I see noon.

I don't trip about the getting older thing as a rule, although there is a new voice in my head that occasionally says, "You're 40, you know..." and then I pause to consider that.

The thing I'm most freaked by is how much I'm starting to resemble the khapioca (think the word khaki plus tapioca) set at work (the dudes in their middle-age who shlump around the halls with their soft-serve bellies hanging over scrawny little legs).

Oh, LT, you've reminded me of something I've thought as middle age approaches/ hits me with a sledgehammer - I've turned into a woolly liberal! There was a cartoon we had to interpret in the aptitude test I took to get into uni, I can't find it on the intertubes now but it was essentially a clash between the young anarchist, activist daughter and her woolly liberal parents. I used to be the anarchist daughter and now I'm the woolly liberal parents. I'm reminded of it whenever I wear natural fibres (most of the time) and realise that storming govt offices and sitting in isn't my automatic response to shitty policy decisions any more. Sigh.

I saw this special on the world's best waterslides last weekend and all I could think was I don't think I can do that anymore. :(