I’m 54, Getting in Shape, and You Can, Too

From PJMedia.com

Getting older sucks. I probably don’t have to tell you or anyone over the age of 40. But it can suck less with just a little bit of willpower and just 30 minutes of your time, three days a week.

The willpower, I learned the hard way, is the more difficult of the two — especially when you hit a health roadblock just when you were getting really good about it.

Thanks to lucky genes and a long-undiagnosed overactive thyroid gland (that eventually developed into full-blown Grave’s disease in my 30s), weight was never my problem. But an almost total lack of athletic skills and a deep disinterest in weights meant I was never in great shape. 

My wife Melissa, who is five years younger than I am, has always been so dedicated to fitness that on turning 50 I figured it was time to up my game. The problem, as I’m sure many millions of people are aware, was getting started. I put it off for longer than I’d like to admit, but then on one random October day in 2022, I’d had enough of my own procrastinating and got on Melissa’s elliptical in the basement storage/workout room.

I ran as hard as I could against stiff resistance and on a decent incline and…

…six minutes later I was winded, exhausted, and wondering how or if I’d make it back up the stairs.

But I stuck with it, mostly out of embarrassment by my lousy performance on that first attempt.

I found that keeping metrics was inspiring. I put together a spreadsheet that tracked the time my heart rate spent in all five zones, what “distance” I’d put in on the elliptical, how fast I’d run, and against what resistance and the incline.

Within eight or nine months, I was doing five miles a day, five or six days each week. They were decent miles, too — under eight minutes on my fast run days, a little over eight when I took it a little easier.

The challenge became working out hard enough to get my heart rate up high enough to burn calories. I’d quickly developed “runner’s heart,” where my cardio was so good that my resting heart rate was often under 50 beats per minute. I know this for sure because my Apple Watch would warn me a dozen or more times each day that my BPM had dropped below 50 for at least ten minutes.

I looked good. I felt good. It was not good enough!

My older son, then 17, inherited my natural skinniness. But he decided to do something about it and, over the course of one summer, put on 15 pounds of muscle. It’s nice to be that young, right?

I’d topped out on what I was achieving with the elliptical. Precious time was the only reason I’d peaked at five miles a day, so it was time to cut back on the running and make up the difference with weights.

I still hate weights, but I stuck with it for a couple of months… and that’s when everything went sideways.

Just when I was starting to be able to see results, I started feeling weird moving to the weight bench after finishing my run. Weird enough that I went to the doctor — something I prefer not to do for anything less noticeable than a compound fracture. 

Turns out, my blood pressure was bouncing between “Elevated” and “Hypertension Stage 1.”

I’m male, fifty-something, and my hobbies include alcohol, stress, and raising teenage boys. Going on blood pressure pills was pretty much inevitable. But my super-low heart rate, my doc explained, ruled out many of the usual go-to medications for high blood pressure. So he put me on Losartan, which, unlike many of the others, doesn’t slow your heart rate.

It took about two months to get the dosage right and for me to feel comfortable working out again. Worse, it felt like I’d be starting from scratch… AGAIN.

Nevertheless, I’ve been back at it — AGAIN — for a month now. The elliptical is fine. The weights still suck. I don’t yet look any better than I did a month ago, but I know that will change if I just keep up 15 minutes of both the running and the weights, three or four days a week. That’s perfectly doable. It’s getting started that’s hard.

But after years of putting it off, I managed to get started… twice.

If my lazy self can manage that, I bet you can, too.

But hopefully just once.

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