In 22 months, I'll be 55; the day I turn 55, I'll be closer to 60 than I was to 50.
Even though psychologically, I still count myself around 28, I have had many 5-year increments since I was 28, and every 5-year increment takes a little bit of a chip off the marble statue that is your life wears you down just a little bit, and that needs to be taken into consideration.
I read some research recently that said we don't age incrementally in a linear fashion. There's a big age increase around about 43 physically, and then a big physiological age increase around age 60 (these are averages also, obviously)
I've been through the first one, and I'm heading to the second. I think we have to be honest with ourselves about what happens in the five-year cycles.
When I was a late teenager, and I went to university at 17, I was super fit and then got super fat, and so at 20, I was extraordinarily unfit.
I was fitter at 30 than I was at 20 and fitter at 40 than I was at 30 but by the time I was 50 in my 50th year (after my ageing at 43) my thyroid had blown and I did not have the best 50th year.
I'm on a trajectory to try to be fitter at 60 than I was at 50 and I was at 40, but is that realistic?
What happens every 5 years is recovery takes a little bit longer (physically and emotionally), your ability to push out the big numbers in work time and training time gets less, you get weaker (that's just a fact of life), and things start to break down because they've been overused.
It's possible to mitigate this, and it absolutely is, but it's not possible to deny it, it's not possible to stop it, and anything you do now has to be a conscious decision.
And so this morning, as I was coming into work to carry out some interviews for our no superstars required project, I realised it was pretty challenging to button the shirt that goes underneath my waistcoat, that goes underneath my jacket. Difficult but not impossible, not yet at the stage where I can breathe out and fire buttons at people, but it's a shot across the bows again.
Whenever I reach a stage where I put on a little bit of weight, it's harder and harder to get it off again.
It would be much better, wouldn't it, to not put it on in the first place, to just live a life of routine where I constantly trained, ate well, slept well, and had no interruptions, but let's be clear, that isn't me.
So what I need to do is understand that every 5 years, it gets a little bit harder, and I need to be conscious of that, always returning to my diary, to my conversations with myself about what I really want and what I want it to be like and then moving on from there.
Even more important now is not to spend time with idiots, not to waste time on things that aren't important to me, and much more importantly, to do the things that bring me joy and make me happier, healthier, and better.
Blog Post Number - 4110
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