Thoughts on Turning 50

Well friends, I’m now fifty years old. 

I’m trying not to let it get to me. Lots of my friends are already fifty, after all, and my wife is actually fifty-five. None of it means much on balance. 

I shouldn’t let it bug me.

But this birthday has still hit me hard. I mean, let’s be real. There was no part of our teenage selves who didn’t think fifty was old. By fifty, everybody is showing signs of wear and tear. And look, even if we somehow make it to a hundred, we’re still every bit of halfway there right now. And being honest, living to a hundred looks like a decidedly mixed blessing at best.

The good news is that I can still do most of what I like to do. My knees don’t like to run much anymore, but that’s not new. Beyond that, though, I still snowboard, and I still mostly do tempo work when I’m in the pool. I lift. I eat. Life is essentially the same now as it always has been -- at least as long as I’m smart about it.

The hard part is that I now have to proactively plan recovery periods after workouts. I don’t bounce back the way that I used to, the way that it feels like I still ought to be able to, and that makes it hard to put in the kind of intense, routine training that made me a decent athlete in the first place. I’m not talented, y'know? I just grind really, really hard. So I can still swim -- hard -- and I can still lift afterwards. But I’d better take a day off after that, or I’m gonna feel like garbage the next time out.

It’s frustrating. I always feel like I can do more, like I should be doing more, but every time I try, well… I’m reminded that I really can’t.

I’ve become a master at pushing my body past its limits.

This was great at nineteen. It’s less productive now that I’m fifty.

I’d like to say that there are things about being fifty that compensate for the loss of physical prowess, that finding some kind of earned wisdom or being an acknowledged adult somehow makes up for the rest of it. Alas, I’m not sure that this is true. 

I became a tank platoon leader, i.e. got a real job, at twenty-two. Got married and bought my first house at twenty-four. Got divorced at twenty-six. Felt like folks started treating me like a serious professional when I got promoted to captain at twenty-seven. Finished my master’s degree at thirty-three. Found my forever home and buried my father both at age thirty-four. Became the patriarch of my family at thirty-eight. Sent a kid to college at forty-eight.

I mean, I don’t know at what point you started thinking of yourself as a Grown Ass Man -- or Grown Ass Woman, as the case may be -- but it’s long since in the rearview by now.

What can you do?

My wife asked me if I wanted a party for my birthday. I’m telling you, friends, I’d never wanted anything less. 

Instead, we went to Miami for a couple of days. Had fun. Spent time on the beach, and for once, I read a lot. It’s unrelated, but I think I might be the only person on Earth who liked Dune: Messiah more than Children of Dune. And that’s okay. I mean, I get why the second book confounded folks and why they were happy to get back to something like the action-adventure paradigm that informed the first and third, but I personally found the story increasingly depressing the longer it went on.

Anyway. I’ve wanted to write something profound about turning fifty for the longest, and now here we are, and I don’t know that I have anything of value to add to the conversation. 

Life goes on. All we can do is the best we can do.