On my 28th birthday, my father offered his concolences for my ongoing and rapid decline. Then he tried to cheer me up by stating that on the flip side, now that I offically was an old man, at least I could enter masters' regattas.
Around 30 is where I really felt something change - suddenly I injured myself doing things while working out that I had done countless times before without issue. Recovery after exercse started to take much longer. And then I managed to somehow get an inflammation in my achilles tendons that impaired my ability to train for nearly two years. Took another couple of years to learn how to adapt to this. Changed my training style (avoid training to fatigue; increase frequency instead, variate volume and intensity and manage fatigue, include "feel-good" stuff like yoga and movement practice), and now, in my early forties, I'm in a better shape than ever. (That is, I was until my second mRNA-shot - have arythmia issues ever sinces, that can be really unpleasant. Seem to be promoted both by stress at work and by doing threshold work or HIIT, so I try to minimize that. LISS seems to be fine. I am now slowly getting back top pre-vacc fitness levels.) The trainee whom I hired two years ago thought I was in my 20s and seemed rather shocked when he found out I was more than double his age.
In high-stress phases, some hairs in my beard and on the sides of my head turn grey and I suddenly look 20 years older. First time that happend was in my mid-twqenties. Luckily, this seems to be reversible - at least it always was until now. Lesson: don't get stressed!
I feel old, really old, however, every single morning when I get up. It's just an world of pain for about half an hour to an hour after getting up. Every joint, muscle, tissue, nerve disagrees with my existence. The good thing is that some doubl espressi and a breakfast later they get silent. Kind of a calibration issue - feels like I need to re-calibrate and re-zero every sensor and the signal processing before I start my workday. That is actually a good thing, because now I can simply tune out the pain. I know that my knees and shoulders are screwed up with cartilage damage (diagnosed at age 18 during the medical exam for the army). I used to be able to tell weather changes a few days beforehand, and sometimes I would spent days in pain after some overexertion. This no longer happens. Guess my brain has learned to simply filter the pain out as noise, so that is definitely a nice side effect of having had a bit more time in this body.
Where I really notice my age is when it comes to sleep deprivation. This ties in with the recovery aspect mentioned above. I can still pull an all-nighter if necessary and be sharp and work on a technical problem until the sun rises - but then I crash and I NEED some sleep, and I'll be a zombie for the following three or four days. I can't just take a short nap and then get back up and keep working the next day as if nothing happened, like I could in my 20s. Loosing one night of sleep nowadays means I am messed up for at least half a week.
Oh, and last autumn a teenager at our boathouse offered to help me get my single sculls out of the water. It dawned to me that he must have considered me old and frail. That hurt a bit. Am I really getting old, or is this just that in a 15year-old's mind anybody over 30 is considered an old fart?
Around 30 is where I really felt something change - suddenly I injured myself doing things while working out that I had done countless times before without issue. Recovery after exercse started to take much longer. And then I managed to somehow get an inflammation in my achilles tendons that impaired my ability to train for nearly two years. Took another couple of years to learn how to adapt to this. Changed my training style (avoid training to fatigue; increase frequency instead, variate volume and intensity and manage fatigue, include "feel-good" stuff like yoga and movement practice), and now, in my early forties, I'm in a better shape than ever. (That is, I was until my second mRNA-shot - have arythmia issues ever sinces, that can be really unpleasant. Seem to be promoted both by stress at work and by doing threshold work or HIIT, so I try to minimize that. LISS seems to be fine. I am now slowly getting back top pre-vacc fitness levels.) The trainee whom I hired two years ago thought I was in my 20s and seemed rather shocked when he found out I was more than double his age.
In high-stress phases, some hairs in my beard and on the sides of my head turn grey and I suddenly look 20 years older. First time that happend was in my mid-twqenties. Luckily, this seems to be reversible - at least it always was until now. Lesson: don't get stressed!
I feel old, really old, however, every single morning when I get up. It's just an world of pain for about half an hour to an hour after getting up. Every joint, muscle, tissue, nerve disagrees with my existence. The good thing is that some doubl espressi and a breakfast later they get silent. Kind of a calibration issue - feels like I need to re-calibrate and re-zero every sensor and the signal processing before I start my workday. That is actually a good thing, because now I can simply tune out the pain. I know that my knees and shoulders are screwed up with cartilage damage (diagnosed at age 18 during the medical exam for the army). I used to be able to tell weather changes a few days beforehand, and sometimes I would spent days in pain after some overexertion. This no longer happens. Guess my brain has learned to simply filter the pain out as noise, so that is definitely a nice side effect of having had a bit more time in this body.
Where I really notice my age is when it comes to sleep deprivation. This ties in with the recovery aspect mentioned above. I can still pull an all-nighter if necessary and be sharp and work on a technical problem until the sun rises - but then I crash and I NEED some sleep, and I'll be a zombie for the following three or four days. I can't just take a short nap and then get back up and keep working the next day as if nothing happened, like I could in my 20s. Loosing one night of sleep nowadays means I am messed up for at least half a week.
Oh, and last autumn a teenager at our boathouse offered to help me get my single sculls out of the water. It dawned to me that he must have considered me old and frail. That hurt a bit. Am I really getting old, or is this just that in a 15year-old's mind anybody over 30 is considered an old fart?
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