I’m sitting with a big mug and coffee with my legs in the air. I look weird, but it’s a trick I’ve learned to let the aches and pains in my legs subside. To complete the picture, there’s a fan blowing cool air at me, I’m still super-heated. My jog this morning was a tough one. It felt like I’ve started from scratch and was definitely a case of doing the hard yards.
But while I sit here pretending I’m recovering like the athlete I’m certainly not, a few things are running through my mind at a faster pace than I was moving this morning. One of them is, there is some actual science behind why, at 61 years old, I feel knackered after a jog.
Being 61 is an interesting experience. It’s middle age, not old age. But when you are trying to stay fit? It feels like old age. But, that’s not me getting rusty. Although, rusty sums up how my limbs let out audible creaks at times.
Let me try and explain the gist of it, without drowning in science. Deep within those muscle fibres, you’ve got these miniature power stations called mitochondria. The snag is, as the candles on the birthday cake pile up, these little guys start to thin out and lose their spark. They begin churning out less ATP—basically the fuel your muscles crave to keep moving—from every breath you take. It essentially means your internal tank hits empty a whole lot quicker than it used to, even when you’re putting in the same amount of graft.
That’s not only for me. That’s ageing in general. My take on this whole fitness thing for older folk boils down to a simple point. Do it, sure. And keep doing it. But set the expectation bar low. If you try to get too keen, you’ll head for disappointment and pain you don’t need.
I’m not, I should hasten to say, a medical professional or a fitness expert. Far from it. If you’re not sure, consult a medical professional, right? Nothing here should be taken as actual advice. What I’m writing is a shared experience.
But to be clear, it’s all our responsibility to try and stay fit and healthy. The question is: how? I chose jogging. Because it worked for me before. And it’s not expensive. Jogging is also low friction. You pull your shorts, baggy top and trainers on and off you go. Simple. What’s not simple is the actual doing.
There are a few things that happen as we age. And they all have an effect. Once you hit thirty, your “engine size”—or what the experts call VO2 max—begins a slow dip. This measure of the maximum oxygen your system can handle generally drops about 10% every ten years, though you can definitely tap the brakes on that slide if you keep up the training. That’s a big “if”. For me, I did well until getting clobbered with a suite of medical problems.
Once you’re firmly in mid-life, another hurdle appears: your muscle mass starts to dwindle. More specifically, those Type II (fast-twitch) muscle fibres, the ones that give you power and keep you steady on your feet, begin to check out much faster than the slow-twitch variety. It basically means the muscle you have left has to put in double the graft just to keep your joints stable and find some force, which is why that neurological exhaustion kicks in way sooner than it used to. I can vouch for that. Based on my jog this morning? All I have left are slow-twitch. Possibly “no-twitch”.
Many folk will say that the trick, as I mentioned earlier, is to stay fit through the ages. I agree. That’s fine. Apart from when your body starts deciding to stop doing the things it did perfectly well for years before. I looped through pulmonary embolisms, cancer and then a hernia, all in the space of a couple of years. That’s why I’m battling to get back to some kind of fitness. It is a battle, but one I’m determined to win. As long as the body doesn’t complain to the upper management too often.
I think I can put my legs down now. Who knows, they might even work like legs again. They’ll need to tomorrow morning, that’s for sure.