7:56am June 2, 2015

clatterbane-a-little-while-ago-i-tripped-and

clatterbane:

A little while ago, I tripped and fell over in the hall, right in front of Mr. C. Leaving his office room where he was sitting, actually.

So I was a little stunned, and I was trying to figure out the best way to get up with the miraculously unbroken phone still in one hand.

…

Uh…I’m not sure if our bodys are really supposed to start falling apart in our thirties ?! Wow, I’m going to be 40 in less than two years, and I feel like 83 instead of 38 more often than not because of my fibro but I don’t think that my body is *supposed* to feel “old” (if I was healthy). I mean I still look like somebody in their mid-twenties and 38 still IS young. I didn’t expect to feel the effects of aging before my mid-fifties or so (apart from wrinkles maybe)… I mean there are people in their fifties running marathons and stuff. They sure don’t feel old. I realize I’m not a girl anymore but that realization was based rather on the way my view on some things has changed and has matured than on how my body feels. Doctors have told me before that I’m in pain because I’m fat (noooo….) and stuff but nobody ever has told me “Mrs. Tinytigerstripes, get used to it, that’s because you’re aging”. But then they may forget how old I am as I Iook quite a bit younger.

These changes start hapening to your body in the mid-twenties to early thirties actually. They don’t affect everyone equally, but they do affect everyone. I have hypermobility syndrome, which means any changes that affect joints in particular are going to hit me at approximately 20 years before other people, usually. (We can start getting arthritis in our twenties.) But everyone’s bones, for instance, start changing (getting less resilient, more breakable, stiffer) around age 25 or so, and that’s when things start turning the corner. It’s a very slow turn, but if you have any sort of physical disability, you’re likely to feel it more than someone who doesn’t. The fact that there’s individual variation in how much it’s felt, doesn’t mean it’s not happening at all, it just means that some people are able to push through it in certain areas and others aren’t. There’s a reason that many professional sports don’t have people over their thirties involved very often except as coaches. They’ve been running their bodies really hard, and combined with the beginning of the aging process that means more injuries starting in their thirties and by their forties losing their competitive advantage.

Some sports lend themselves more to older people taking part than others. Long distance running is a very different beast than sprinting, for example (in fact training for one can make it impossible to do the other, I’m reading this amazing book called Why We Run where the author weaves in all his knowledge as a professional biologist and as a person who had a very unorthodox childhood and education by today’s standards, with his experiences as an ultramarathon runner, and it makes for fascinating reading. I think he was middle aged or older when the book was written and doing ultramarathons and doing fairly well in them.

I’m actually considering taking up some form of track myself, it seems more like the sort of thing my body could handle, than a lot of sports that would put me in more danger of hurting myself. Also possibly Tai Chi or some other relatively low-impact martial art (at the beginning levels anyway). I used to know a guy with CP and tremors and motor side-effects from neuroleptics and terrible balance normally, who was otherwise very out of shape, who was able to do amazing things with Tai Chi. Every single newspaper article about him led with how ungraceful he looked when he walked (in fact it was kind of disturbing how much they focused on his appearance as if it was grotesque or something), but they never saw him doing Tai Chi because when he did he was nothing but graceful.

I’m not saying everyone ages at the same rate at the same time, but everyone does turn a certain biological corner in the mid-to-late twenties with regards to bones starting to change in important ways that mean if we do fall (and it doesn’t make all of us more likely to fall, but certainly some of us) it’s not like falling at 18, or 12, and certainly not 3 (when most toddlers just frigging bounce, I’m really glad nature made us relatively unbreakable at the ages when we’re learning to walk or we’d be screwed). People with physical disabilities are more likely to feel these effects sooner than people without, hypermobility syndrome is notorious for causing arthritis at young ages (I’ve been diagnosed with mild arthritis in a few joints since my late twenties I think, which is not uncommon). And other changes start happening when the body turns that corner – grey hair and wrinkles may look cosmetic but they’re signs that certain parts of the body are wearing out, and a lot of people get at least a few starting around age 30. Not all parts of the body that wear out like this affect athletic performance, but some do. And athletes over middle age do have to work harder for the same effects as athletes under middle age. That’s why in most professional athletics you don’t see a lot of middle-aged and old people, even if middle-aged and old people are still playing those sports on a non-professional level. They’ve still (except in some sports which are less affected by this, and allowing of course for individual variation) past their physical peak and working harder for the same results than they would have in their twenties. Professional sports often demand people be at the top of their game all the time, and that’s not something our bodies can sustain past the thirties usually.

Similarly, professional singers start disappearing or drastically cutting down their range, around age 40-45, because it’s hard to sing so much and so long without doing bad things to your voice that set in around that age. It’s possible to preserve your voice into old age, and I’ve heard amazing older singers. One of my favorite singers of all time, Lacy J. Dalton, is in her sixties and her voice has only gotten better with age, more full and complex and soulful. Another of my favorite singers, Gwen Avery, had a voice that was clearly marked by time and hard living (the sort of voice that would discourage a lot of professional singers from continuing), but it was beautiful and she used it up until her recent death in her seventies. I saw her in concert when she was either in her late sixties or early seventies and she was amazing and seemed underappreciated by most of the audience. Kathy Mattea is middle-aged and her voice is doing quite well, and her mature music is light years ahead of anything I’ve heard from her when she was churning out hits when I was a kid. She went back to her Appalachian roots for recent albums and just wow the music is almost perfect. And I remember one singer who managed to take her vocal node (a common problem for older singers, it’s an occupational hazard that only gets harder to avoid with time) and transform the raspy quality it gave her voice on certain notes into a trademark sound that her fans loved (but I swear it hurts my throat to listen to those notes sometimes, even though I find the sound aesthetically much cooler than I expected… and I’m sure she’s been advised it could get worse if she sings those notes but she doesn’t seem to give a shit).

So yeah, there’s individual variation, but believe it or not certain things about our bodies peak in the twenties and then go downhill from there. How much that affects us, and what ways that affects us, and whether we notice it at all, depends on a large number of factors. I’m becoming more capable of a lot of physical activity, but I can’t deny at all that my body has changed since childhood in ways that make many physical activities harder and sometimes more risky as well. The person I was replying to likewise has a lot of physical conditions, including hypermobility which can cause all kinds of joint problems that normally affect older people only if anyone at all. So we start feeling the effects of arthritis generally in our thirties or earlier.

But yeah. Whether you feel it or not, your bones for instance are not as resilient as they were 20 years ago. That may not become an issue for you on a practical level for 20 more years, for all I know, but it’s still there in the background whether you’re feeling it or not. I have to be aware of my body on a really intense level in order to get it to function for me at all. Especially after six years in bed and in a powerchair, going on steroids both saved my life and made me able to be active again. I was soon doing jumping jacks… but I actually injured myself doing jumping jacks, which also wouldn’t happen to a young person so easily. I had the stamina for them but not the physical muscle strength to stabilize my loose joints, add in the beginning of the aging process and stir until completely mangled. But after that my workout consisted of climbing eleven flights of stairs and then doing a treadmill run before climbing back down 11 flights of stairs. So it’s not like I’m totally incapable of all physical activity just because I can feel my body starting to age.

I can guarantee though that anyone who is over 50 doing athletics is putting more effort into it than they would have had to put into it in their twenties. They may even be really good at whatever the sport is, including marathon running, and they may be in good shape in a cardiovascular sense, but it doesn’t mean their bodies haven’t been wearing down for decades now, and generally they have to approach athletics more carefully than a younger person would. And they may feel it more, whether they say so out loud or not, than younger people do. If they have any kind of arthritis they’re going to be in more pain from the same activity no matter how good they are at it. You certainly can’t automatically count people out due to age (there are highly active 90-year-olds, after all, but nobody would even pretend their bodies haven’t started losing things by then), and there’s tons of individual variation, but bodies really, really do start falling apart (slowly, sometimes, but still falling apart rather than being built up like when we’re still growing up) in the mid-twenties to early thirties in most people. That’s when the aging process starts. It doesn’t mean suddenly you’re decrepit – although for some people it can. It’s not black and white. But the changes happen whether you feel them instantly or not. It’s usually slow and gradual.

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