S2:E32: a good age
Thursday, May 13, 2021
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Episode description: In the face of physical decline, how is “acceptance” not just “resignation” dressed up in zen clothing? After an injury forced him to step back from the sports that helped him feel young, Nate Davis started to reckon with his own aging--and explore how other people feel about their age.
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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Nate: Why is our society so obsessed with youth if old people are actually happier?
Laura: When I was fifteen years old, I discovered that I had a superpower.
My freshman year, our high school distance running coach spotted me among the sprinters and asked me to join his group. I told him thanks, but no thanks. I liked my 13-second race. But six months later, I decided to give distance running a try. My first race was a JV 2-mile. It was the most pain I’d ever been in—but I came in second place.
From that moment on, I was hooked. I ditched the sprints and became a half-miler. All my life I’d been insecure about my abilities, the sensitive kid who got nervous whenever I was put on the spot. But on the track I became powerful, important, exceptional. I set school records, earned an athletic scholarship to a Big Ten school, entertained visions of becoming an Olympian. I felt invincible, like there was no limit to my potential.
My first week at the University of Wisconsin, I ran the fastest mile of my life in practice. My teammates were some of the best middle distance runners in the nation, and in workout after workout I did my best to prove that I deserved to be among them.
But as the weeks turned into months, it got harder and harder to keep up. I was the fittest I’d ever been--but I was tired all the time. At night my aching body would keep me awake; in the morning I’d awake feeling creaky and old. Running became a daily chore.
I taped my goal time to my dorm room mirror and visualized myself winning races, but every time that starting gun went off, I could immediately feel that something was missing. The gears that had once helped me kick past my competitors were gone. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt strong.
When I met with my coach in his office, I tried--and failed--to contain my tears. He said maybe I was psyching myself out. There was a name for that, one I swore would never apply to me. “Head case.” It was the kiss of death for a distance runner. It meant that I’d lost the magic, that my super power was gone.
A hamstring injury cut my track season short and began a cycle of injury and fatigue that would continue for the next two years. I was twenty years old, but I felt suddenly past my prime. Looking back now, I think it’s likely I was experiencing overtraining syndrome, a condition that wasn’t being talked about much at the time, but that some doctors now say can ruin a runner forever. It can make even young athletes feel old and tired.
My senior year, I quit the team even though it meant losing my scholarship. I still went on trail runs with my teammates, but I felt like an imposter. For years I’d been The Fast Runner. Now I was just a has-been with an identity crisis, a young person who suddenly felt old.
That year I ran the Boston marathon with my older brother at a pace that felt easy to me at the time--and it was fun. I joined my college a cappella group and changed my major to creative writing. I met and fell in love with my husband Nate, who didn’t care how fast I could run; he just wanted to know me.
I do still run, but it’s no longer the thing that defines me. I can still finish a decent 5k, but my fastest days are behind me. During this pandemic, I’ve mostly traded running for walking. I’m still nursing those old injuries that started in college.
One of life’s harshest realities is that eventually, we all break down. It’s the problem of aging, the inescapable truth that for the majority of our lives, our bodies are in physical decline. My teenage superpower meant that I experienced that breakdown prematurely, when I was at the prime of youth.
Twenty years later, I can see that quitting the team was one of the best decisions I ever made. It set me on the path that has taken me to now. But a tiny part of me still wonders about what could have been. If I’d gone to a different college or had a different coach, or given myself a chance to recover instead of racing every workout, would I still feel young and powerful today?
I’ll never know. But even if I could go back and coach my younger self, I doubt it would have made a difference, because no one could tell me what it was like to be me. A few older adults in my life tried to warn me, but those cautionary tales were still someone else’s story. That’s the thing about aging; you can hear stories about what’s ahead of you, but you never really believe it until you get there.
Our team here at Shelter in Place includes people from three decades: the 20s, 30s, and 40s. So today, we’re exploring aging from the perspectives of people who are in it right now. We all have our own reasons for wishing we were younger. Or older. Or thinking that the age we are now is a good one. Here’s Nate to start us off.
Nate: Since I was a teenager, a lot of my self-worth has been tied to sports. I’m the son of an über-nerd; my dad was high school valedictorian, state chess champion, Phi Beta Kappa, got his PhD in three years. I didn’t have his singular focus, but at least I could win the camp ping-pong tournament. Jump down a flight of stairs on my rollerblades. Climb our brick building into our second-story apartment window when we forgot our keys.
When Laura and I met twenty years ago, she met one of the criteria on my checklist for my ideal woman: she was athletic. But running? I didn’t get it at all. The weekend we fell in love, she was in Boston to run the marathon. The only time I ran was after a ball or a frisbee on a sports field, but since I liked her, I tagged along for her pre-race easy run the day before.
After we got married, my bafflement at running gradually transitioned to tolerance, then acceptance, then understanding, then identification, then taking the final step: buying those running short-shorts. Growing up, I’d played many different sports, but over the course of our marriage, running gradually crowded everything else out.
(Endurance sports psychology is worth a quick aside, because running—and even more so, running hard!—is puzzling to outsiders. It used to be puzzling to me!). What training offers is immediate feedback, a clear relationship between input and output—in short, a sense of control. With parenting, you often don’t know how well you’ve done until years later. With a relationship, you can put in the effort, but your partner can still be depressed. With work, anything from a recession to a merger to a personality clash with your boss to a client’s whim can lead to a layoff.
But with training? You put time and sweat and focus in, and you get fitness and pride and endorphins out.
It’s a guaranteed mood-lifter, self-esteem booster, and ice-cream justifier. Many of my peers make more money, have more prestige, own bigger houses, drive cooler cars, go on fancier vacations. But I still had my fitness. From my late 20’s to early 40’s, running was what kept the dadbod away. I had my first few wrinkles on my face, but I could still fit into clothes I’d bought in college. I’d worked for that, was proud of it, and it was a crutch for my identity.
Training hard also meant discovering the hidden places of the spirit. I’d traveled thousands of miles under my own power, persevered through shadowed valleys, earned solitary, oxygen-starved vistas. It made me feel special. I thought often of legendary soccer coach Anson Dorrance’s line,
“The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is watching.” That was me. I was in my forties, but I wasn’t old. I was fit.
Almost every run or bike ride for the last 15 years, the idea that I’ve followed out the door is that if I trained right, I could beat yesterday’s me. Unlike Laura, I was still getting faster in my 40’s. There was still a faster, fitter me out there. The capstone was when I ran my sixth marathon at age forty-two and won my age group with a personal best time of 2:47:43. Of the millions of runners in the United States, only about 500,000 of them finished a marathon that year, and my time put me in the 99th percentile.
But then in the fall of 2020, I strained my butt. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but it’s serious: since you use your glute muscles for standing, walking, running, squatting—basically everything —I had to quit any serious exercise involving my legs to try to let it heal. I took time off, biked instead of ran, but even then, that dull ache and soreness in my glute wouldn’t go away. For the first time in my life I felt the age that I was. I felt old.
If youth means potential, maybe aging means accepting that a better version of myself exists only in the past. The phrase “coming to terms” with something sounds so defeatist, so old, but that’s what I’m having to do for now. Pausing is one thing, but the door slamming shut forever on physical possibility? The quest for a better me ending—forever? In the face of physical decline, how is “acceptance” not just “resignation” dressed up in zen clothing? Even after months of being injured, I don’t want to accept the voice that says “maybe you can’t have it all. Maybe you have to be content with less. Maybe your body has finally reached its limit.”
The time since I injured my glute muscle has been the most depressing time of my adult life: no endorphins, no time to myself, no healing ritual of sweat and shower, exertion and then rest.
Training was what had made me burn the brightest, so now I felt like a bulb with the dimmer turned down.
Simply waking up in the morning—stiff back, sore glute, brain foggy—makes me feel old. It’s a feeling I still can’t get used to. It’s not how I imagined myself at this age. For so much of my life I was the guy who looked years younger. When I was a kid, this was often humiliating. At my 15th birthday party at the county fair, my friends suggested I lie and try to sneak in for the 12-and-under price. Short, skinny, and bespectacled, I was a head shorter than all the boys—and many of the girls—in every childhood and teenage picture. In college, I finally reached a normal-range height of 5’9” around my 19th birthday, but I still had the face of a pre-pubescent choirboy and could count my facial hairs on both hands.
At my first job as a copywriter at an ad agency, I remember wanting to be—or at least appearing to be—older. Early in my career, I resented having to pay my dues. Being young and healthy, physical achievements came easily, so why couldn’t professional things? I had SO MANY IDEAS; I was SO SPECIAL; I had SUCH A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE . . . why couldn’t employers see that? Didn’t they know I’d graduated from the honors program? I didn’t know then that being good at school doesn’t always equate to being good at a job—or at life.
Some of our Shelter in Place apprentices are in their twenties, and I’ve often been impressed with how much more perspective they have than I did then.
Alana is a recent college grad—but with a better resume, stronger work ethic, and more maturity than I had at that age. In four months she’s earned a promotion from apprentice to producer at Shelter in Place because we’ve been blown away by her creativity, generosity, and initiative—so I was disappointed to hear that not everyone she’d worked with could see all that.
Alana: Hey, I'm Alana Herlands, producer here at Shelter in Place, and I'm about to turn 25. So far, my experience of my twenties is that people are either really interested in what I have to say or don't care. I'm either very mature and smart for my age--or no one asks me what I think in meetings or takes my ideas seriously.
At my last job at The New York times, I eagerly asked a senior editor, "What do I have to do to make people take me seriously?" He didn't hesitate in his response." You'll have to try to prove yourself for a lot of your twenties."
I can get behind the idea of earning your keep and showing what you're capable of doing, but I sometimes find it a bit demeaning and backward. What if, instead of focusing on age and experience level all the time, we focused on how our differing perspectives coming together could create something powerful? What if employers assumed that the people they were hiring came in with skills and new perspectives that would benefit the team, and saw it as a part of their role to guide and develop those strengths? Companies want to hire younger folks, more people of color, but then once we're there, there's often resistance to change.
As a young woman in her twenties, I also feel pressure to literally be everything at once. Ambitious, and laid back. Intelligent and comforting. Sharp and caring. Funny and sexy. Witty and compassionate. And it's exhausting. I can both look at that pressure from an arm's length and find it ridiculous, and also feel it as a powerful, current, a voice in the back of my head, urging me to do more, try more, be more.
Being in my twenties feels at once like a lot of pressure and also very freeing. It was hard to see my parents simultaneously dejected and proud faces when I told them I'm moving out. I love knowing that my whole life is ahead of me and that I can make almost any decision on my own. But it's also really scary to have so much potential to impress or disappoint.
I feel most at ease during those untethered hours when I'm taking in the world in real time, often forgetting about my body entirely. On the whole, my body at this age feels powerful.
I can walk for 12 miles on a sunny spring day with my boyfriend, and feel brand new the next day. But it doesn't always feel this way.
Every day, more than 50 billion cells die in our bodies. For most of my adult life, I've had recurring upper back pain for two minor herniations in my cervical spine. On the worst days, my headaches and my arms go numb. When this happened for the first time, a few years ago, I went into full on panic mode. I didn't sleep through the night for almost three weeks. When I did fall asleep, I'd wake up gasping and sweaty from nightmares. It was my first dance with my own impermanence, the first time I realized that I can't stop my body's eventual, inevitable decline.
Thanks to great doctors, movement, and meditation, most days I’m pain-free. But for several weeks a year, my upper traps, those muscles at the back of your shoulder blades get so tight that it hurts to move my head. I know now that fear that I experienced that first time made me tense, which made the actual physical pain worse.
Now, when the tingling and numbness come to visit, I pause and surrender. I extend compassion in the face of fear, the unknown. I don't fight it. I say, "Hey friend, nice to see you. We'll be okay."
Nate: Hearing Alana’s reflections feels like looking back in time through a telescope. Some of her experiences as a bright, motivated recent college grad, are mirrors of my own. But with our society’s double standard for women, she’s facing challenges I never did. When I was young, I thought success at work was just about the work. When I got my first real tie-wearing job after college, I was proud to have some of the respect and money of older adults, but without all the fatigue and ennui.
But being young also meant being among the first to get laid off with the market downturn after 9/11. Last hired, first fired, as the saying goes. In those moments, being young wasn’t all great sleep and infinite possibility.
Like Alana, I can appreciate the good things about my age, but at the same time struggle with the challenges.
As I’ve aged, I’ve grown into myself, become a better friend, husband, father, son. But I’ve also traded my BMW for a Subaru, and now for a minivan. The idea of going out on a Friday makes me tired. And I haven’t even tried TikTok.
Young people, specifically teens and 20-somethings report some of the highest Life Satisfaction levels. People in their 40s, like me, report the lowest happiness. These days I think less about what’s ahead, and more about where I am right now--which sometimes isn’t where I want to be.
Laura: Our fading bodies aren't the only challenges we’ve faced this year. We’ve been calling season 2 of Shelter in Place Pandemic Odyssey, because these episodes have charted our long and sometimes circuitous course from one coast to another, through the challenges of job loss and pandemic parenting to rethinking our future and starting a new business. Like Odysseus, we’ve often lost our way and wondered if we’ll ever get home.
There’s a scene in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus is shipwrecked on the far-flung island of the Phaecians. King Alcinous, encouraged by the goddess Athena, holds a feast in honor of his mystery guest. At the banquet, the bard Demodicus sings about the triumphs of Odysseus’s youth. That song, for Odysseus, is deeply discouraging; he’s no longer the young hero of the Trojan War. He’s so overcome that he puts his head down and weeps, right there at the banquet table.
The young Phaecians look at Odysseus and say, “Looks like a has-been. I can beat this old guy in a track meet.” Odysseus tells them that he was once a great athlete, but the hard knocks of sailing and fighting monsters have beaten him down. He can’t run anymore--his legs have lost their spring--but he can still throw the discus. He reluctantly joins the track meet, wowing them with an epic throw, but his success doesn’t bring him the comfort it used to. He just wants to return to his old life, to another time when he still felt young.
Nate: Part of aging is that reckoning--not just physically, but emotionally--between the person you were and the person you are--and the person you’re becoming.
Michele: My name is Michele O’Brien. I’m an apprentice here at Shelter in Place, and I am in my early 30s. In contrast to Nate, I’ve always looked old for my age. I used to be an actor, and even when I was in my teens and early twenties I was regularly cast as “sassy grandma,” “Mom,” “the old, ugly crone who lives under a bridge and eats children.” Mostly, I wore this “maturity” as a badge of pride, and I always suspected that my mid-30s would be where my true self belonged: that all the painful, delicious, exhausting, transformative capital-B Becoming would be over and done with, and I’d have fully arrived. And, sitting here at 31, to my surprise and delight, I am both more settled into myself and simultaneously not done cooking.
I am, however, finding that I don’t care as much as I thought I would about the big “life in your 30’s” milestones, like having kids or buying a house. My younger self, so adamant about adhering to society’s many “shoulds” and “musts,” would be shocked by this change in perspective. But now I get a secret thrill from my windier journey: my life may not fit norms, but I get to live it deliberately, rather than by default.
At the same time, I’m all too aware that my aging is going to be received differently by our culture than a man’s.
When I was younger, I was always adamant that I’d age “gracefully” —no dying my hair, no botox, no regrets about the laugh lines on my face. And I still believe those things, but … I also have a multi-step daytime and nighttime skincare routine: wash, tone, serum, moisturize, overnight mask, even dipping my toes into the retinoid pool … the kind of self-care that, yes, is fun and rejuvenating, but increasingly feels requisite.
Nate and Alana’s stories about feeling their bodies aging brought me back to my own memories of playing in college ultimate frisbee tournaments: we’d play four 90 minute games on a Saturday — minimal stretching and warmups, of course, just zero to full speed ahead — party that night in a dorm basement, crash on someone’s couch, then wake up the next day and do it all over again. We felt elastic, bulletproof. Now, ten years later, my former teammates and I reminisce with chagrin -- how much damage could we have saved our poor bodies if we’d just done a couple of lunges every game or so?!
Nate: You don’t have to be in youth-centric fields like advertising, fashion, sports, or tech to sense how much our culture values youth and appearance more than age and wisdom. You just have to be exposed to any sort of media whatsoever, from Instagram to the evening news to checkout-line magazines.
As professor David Blanchflower found in his research, there’s a universal u-shaped happiness curve around the world. On a graph, it looks, fittingly, like a crooked smile: the left side, representing the teens, peaks, then happiness decreases steadily through the 20’s and 30’s, bottoms out in the late 40s, and then rises, higher than it started, through the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s… and beyond. And in case you were wondering, the research covered 132 countries, and controlled for education, marriage, and job status.
So, if our society is always telling us that being young is the best time of life, why is it that old people are actually happier?
Right now, it’s a lot easier to feel mired at the bottom of that happiness curve. Being 44 and injured feels like just the latest threshold in a stairway going down. As we’ve talked about, that first big “my body’s not working!” moment is one aging threshold. Another is your first big “I could’ve died!” scare, like when Laura and I pinwheeled down a rocky double-black ski slope in Lake Tahoe. Another is your first really bad car accident, seeing that some things can never be fixed. And then of course there’s the threshold where you start thinking about taking care of your parents as much as they think about taking care of you.
If aging thresholds make you think “Wait, I’m not ready for this yet!” then becoming a parent may be the most important one. It’s the wildest feeling ever when they discharge you from the hospital, and you’re just carrying this new human being in a car seat, just like a bag of groceries, and you’re thinking as you walk across the parking lot, “Wait, this is IT? They’re just going to let us go?” Like, nobody is going to check on us—they’re just going to let us walk off with this new person? It’s the biggest “I can’t believe this is happening” moment I can ever remember. You walk in as two people, and you walk out as three.
The weight of responsibility is vastly heavier than the lighter-than-a-gallon-of milk bundle in your arms. Alcohol and cars and guns you’re supposed to have a license for, but they just let any old parents take a baby out of a hospital! And ever after, the young, think-about-myself part of my brain, had to share space with the old, think-about-someone-else part. Not that being a parent is bad! But if being young is the ability to be completely absorbed and present in the moment, then being a parent makes you old, because awareness of your kid is always just around the corner.
I keep thinking about this happiness curve. If our culture is so fixated on youth, then why are older people happier? I understand the research, but in the context of my current injury, I can’t feel it. I can’t live into it. We found this article on aging by psychologist Margit Cox Henderson, who observes that the middle of one’s life — the part typically filled with external demands, from work, comparisons to peers, caregiving for children or aging parents, or both — can feel the most unhappy. And indeed, I can relate to all of those things.
Dr. Henderson writes, “As the end of life nears, priorities shift towards savoring life, love, and this present moment together. This gratitude for what matters most,” she explains, “is more present the more we feel how fleeting life can be. We don’t value what we have until we see that we may lose it.” That last bit — the valuing what we may lose, or in my case, may have just lost — really hits home. She’s talking about older people being mindful of losing life in general, but that quest for hard-won physical excellence is what I’m not sure I can let go of yet. It feels like a highway exit that I just missed . . . can I still turn around? Can I get back on my original route? Or should I just try to accept that I’m on a different journey now?
Dr. Henderson also points out the upside of aging: “With age, the focus turns away from social competition and toward social connection.” During a slow, mellow bike ride yesterday, it occurred to me that I could redefine myself away from competition (i.e. “someone who’s still setting personal bests” or “someone who is in better shape than my peers,”), but instead “someone who chooses to be active every day.” If I can be active with others, then I’ll tap into that insight about trading competition for connection.
Over the last few months, in an effort to balance letting my glute heal with maintaining mental health, I’ve done various surrogate activities instead of run or bike training. In that time, I’ve learned two things: first, that
any kind of sweat, any kind of movement, any time outdoors, is a good thing.
A mix of push-ups, wiffle ball, snail-paced walks, shooting baskets, and knocking dead branches off trees in the woods have kept me from becoming a middle-aged moper. But second, none of these things gives the same physical relief, and emotional payoff, as pushing yourself to your limits. Doing something hard feels good. Earning that rest afterward feels really good. So while I can intellectually step into the wisdom of redefining myself at my age, emotionally I’m still dragging my feet.
Working through important issues with Laura has been one of the best parts of doing Shelter in Place this past year. The crucible of producing an episode reliably forges some new understanding. And working with Alana and Michele, two talented fellow explorers of the human condition, has been a pleasure.
Yet after months of mulling, hours of journaling, pages of free writing, dozens of voice messages, and multiple meetings, I’m still feeling unsure about aging. Still struggling to rewire that competitive side of my self-image that’s become second nature.
I’ve lost a piece of myself, so I’m not sure now what I’m capable of. I’m surrounded by people who care for me — but I’m not sure any more who I am. I’m safe for the moment, but I’m not sure what I should do next. So I’m going to look for guidance in this quest to understand aging. Until then, I’ll be walking.
Alana: All my life people who are older than me have been telling me how I should live my life, as if telling me what to do somehow redeems or revises their own experiences of youth. It can be exhausting, to constantly be reminded that the clock is ticking on this decade when I’m supposedly in my prime.
As overwhelming as this unsolicited advice can be, I truly appreciate hearing other perspectives. There is such a thing as wisdom that comes with age. There are moments in life when it feels like a total gift to step into someone else’s well-worn shoes.
I still don’t know if the decade I’m in is the best age. I know that in many ways, it’s been a good age. But mostly what I’ve learned in making this episode is that there’s no standard experience of aging. There’s only our experience of aging.
So in the next episode, we’re reaching out beyond our team to people who are looking back at the ages they were--and sharing what it’s like to be the age they are now.
In the meantime, I want to invite you to share your own story of aging. We would love to hear from you! Reach out to us on our website at shelterinplacepodcast.info, or at the handle @shelterinplacepodcast on Instagram and Facebook, and @laurajoycedavis on Twitter. How does it feel to be your age? How has getting older prompted you to redefine yourself? What do you think it means to be a good age--no matter what decade you’re in?
We can’t wait to hear your stories.
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As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes.
But first, I want to thank one of our newest supporters.
Tony Doerr, it’s not every day that a Pulitzer Prize-winning author becomes one of our patrons! More than twenty years after you were my very first creative writing teacher, I still recommend your work to everyone, and you are just as kind and generous as you were then. In other words, you’re still my hero.
To all of you, our listeners, we want to say thank you, because we are a listener-supported podcast. You’re the reason we’re still here. It’ll tickle us pink if you subscribe to Shelter in Place wherever you listen, and ask your friends to as well. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts so others can find us. If you want to see us continue this work in the coming year, including our apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of female podcasters and creative entrepreneurs, donate on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. If you’re an aspiring podcaster yourself, visit the site to hear audio testimonials from past apprentices about why this experience is unlike anything they’ve ever done before.
Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions composed our theme song; additional music and sound effects are from Storyblocks.
Nate Davis was the lead writer for this episode, with Alana Herlands and Michele O’Brien as associate editors. Elen Tekle was assistant producer, and Shweta Watwe was our assistant audio editor. Alana Herlands is our producer, Sarah Edgell is our design director. Our fantabulous spring cohort of apprentices are Clara Smith, Elen Tekle, Michele O'Brien, Samantha Skinner, and Shweta Watwe. Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.