When I tell you how ridiculously unprepared I was as I began this journey, try to imagine that I was even less well informed. In a lucky turn of fate, I connected with a gifted personal trainer half my age who agreed to ride along with me as we navigated a path to health and well-being.
Like many personal trainers, Reuel Tizabi, who left personal training to pursue physical therapy studies full time after working with me for nearly eleven months, had been an athlete with childhood dreams of playing professional sports. In Reuel’s case, it was soccer.
Is this really happening? Reuel thought as the medics carried him off the soccer field on a stretcher after he suffered a tear to his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a common knee injury.
As Reuel told me his story, I didn’t say anything.I was listening to him talk while he was trying to distract me during a wall sit, but I was thinking, I’ve been there. Once you hit your fifties, you’ve probably been there too.
Is this really happening?
With Reuel at the helm at first, and then by my side as an unexpected friend, I started training in the gym in the winter of 2014 and took up running to burn calories. By now I’ve run ten half-marathons, and I finished my first marathon in Negril, Jamaica, in December 2015. And, yes, I completed my first triathlon on June 12, 2016, in Cape Henlopen, Delaware.
What began as a journey to weight loss and getting fit turned into a path to self-confidence and wellness that has had an enormously positive impact on every aspect of both my personal life and my professional life. I fall asleep at night grateful for each day and wake up each morning full of optimism and good will.
Although I was a gymnast and a competitive swimmer as a teenager growing up on Long Island, I never considered myself an athlete. Until Title IX, schools and coaches rarely provided athletic guidance and support to girls’ teams, and later, when I attempted to get fit, small injuries piled on top of each other like domino bones.
Yet even women who have been exercising for years face challenges when it comes to getting results. Often experts such as trainers and physicians enable us to take a comfortable approach to our fitness regimen because they do not take women seriously. Unless we had been athletes as kids or young adults, and few of us were, we do not know how to find our edge. Learning how to carve out time to meet our own fitness needs or how to “be the dog” and dig in, pushing ourselves physically and mentally, is one of the greatest challenges to aging well.
Since Day 1, I’ve continued to work with a series of first-rate personal trainers. And in another turn of fate, in the summer of 2015, when Dr. Katie Taraban Mahoney, my early physical therapist, left Washington to relocate to California, I met Dr. Kevin McGuinness, a sports medicine specialist at Washington Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. Kevin has put me back together after multiple small injuries and setbacks, and he is often a collaborator in my wellness writing. Kevin has helped me to enjoy becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the science of exercise, especially how exercise relates to aging well.
Early in 2016, I was taking a group exercise class at the gym when the teacher began, as many teachers do, by asking what was bothering us.
“Does anyone have any issues?”
I was used to thinking about these questions, especially in yoga, because I’m forever devising ways to modify poses.
“Knee problems?”
“Raise your hand if you’ve got back issues!”
“Hips?”
I looked around the studio, and I was surrounded by a super-fit, ultra-fashionable group of women. Even so, there were a lot of hands in the air.
The instructor, Jennifer Blackburn, was wearing a Madonna-style wireless headset, and her voice dominated the room, even above Flo Rida’s “Low,” which I remember was playing because oddly, the song had popped up on my mix during my morning run. I instinctively touched my ears to see if I was somehow still wearing my wireless earbuds.
“This is the year you want to fix that.”
I have some ideas why it can take more than a sea change in a regular woman’s life for her to develop a serious exercise routine. Off the top of my head, raising children often plays havoc with any routine, let alone a healthy one. When my children were young, it was a good day if I shaved both legs in the same shower.
This is the year you want to fix that.
But another challenge is addressing all of our little issues that have a way of distracting us and diminishing our self-confidence or level of endurance. I remember early in my training in 2014, Katie stared me straight in the eye and told me my knee was FINE. I’m using caps because she was kind of yelling at me.
Two years earlier, an orthopedic surgeon had removed 70 percent of the meniscus around my left knee, and every time I got out of a deep chair (squat) or bent down to pick up the morning paper (lunge) since then, I felt that bone-on-bone sensation you read about.
“Your knee is fine,” Katie said, exasperated. “YOU’RE FINE.”
Katie showed me how to strengthen the muscles and tissues around my knee so I could exercise vigorously, including running. I still do these exercises, and finally in 2016, under Kevin’s guidance, I added actual squats and lunges to my regimen. Both of these exercises are fundamental for strengthening the glutes, which is at this point also critical to achieving nearly all of my fitness goals.
So here is what I want to say about getting in shape.
We can’t accomplish anything until we (1) address and fix our issues, and (2) establish a meaningful fitness habit.
Over the past three years, I have rarely had a clear sense of when I needed to deal with an issue or put it aside, so I know this isn’t easy or simple. If my shoulder was bothering me, I skipped the pool and focused on running or cycling. If my knee felt wonky, I stopped running and was back in the pool.
In our everyday lives, this kind of working around problems is a good thing. We’re creative and flexible and we’re efficient at getting things done any way we can.
But in terms of our health and well-being, we need to figure out why our knees hurt and fix them. Sure, we may still need to work around them and bike instead of run, but at least we’ll know what it is we need to do and make a plan.
Because exercise is not optional.
You don’t need me to tell you that becoming fit in middle age is critical to preventing or at least putting off some of the most common serious medical diseases as we age, including Alzheimer’s and dementia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and many types of cancer. These stories pop into our social media newsfeeds nearly every day.
As women, we talk a lot about what we want. We want to lose weight. We want more energy. We want better jobs. We want tighter skin. What we should be talking about, in the words of legendary coach Dan John, is what we need to do to achieve any of this.
For me that means that on a regular basis I’m finding myself in a room with a sports medicine specialist, as well as a physical therapist who understands my need and desire to be active. I’m continuing to learn about strength training from my trainers and also from Kevin, because he has me addressing and fixing my issues one by one.
The idea is that the better we get at exercising by addressing and fixing our issues, the more we’ll hate it less and ultimately begin to take real pleasure in the activity.
I began my fitness journey in earnest in 2014, and as I look back it occurs to me that my greatest achievement then was what I needed most: to develop a serious fitness habit.
Developing a habit was not what I wanted.
What I