Rock the Silver

Cycling just got interesting

Today I rode my bicycle for 15 miles in the Tour de Cure fundraiser for diabetes. The ride was at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, and we got to do a lap around the track. That was fun.

I was not among the elite pack riding 30 and 60 miles, but I felt proud that I could do a mean 15, what with all my ailments. It's not a race, it's not a race, it's not a race, but it was snarkily delicious to leave some youngsters in the dust and not finish dead last. I completed the ride in 90 minutes -- a 10-miles-per hour pace won't set any records, but I was pleased.

Although this is as far as I've ever ridden, I had done several 10-mile training rides, so I knew I would be OK. I saw a lot of dead soldiers on the side of the road. I'm wondering if they thought, ah, 15, that's a piece of cake and then found out the hard way it wasn't. I felt great, and now I'm eager to work up to longer distances.

This was also my first group cycling event, and I liked it! The vibe was nice -- a huge range of ages and body sizes and everyone just out to have a good time. Baby boomers were definitely well-represented, and why not? Cycling might be the ultimate pro-aging sport. Easier on your body for sure.

It could be a money pit, though. Sure, there were plenty of people modeling your basic t-shirt or bike jersey and shorts, but many cyclists have some serious style. The freak flag was flying! I loved the eclectic mix of rebels and free spirits and Lance Armstrong wannabes. I'm kind of a loner -- not the serial killer kind -- but not as social as I could be, and this looked like a group of people I'd like to hang with.

At least I have a cool bike. It practically rides itself. Still, I felt woefully outclassed in the fashion and gear department and can't wait to throw money at the problem. I saw a woman about my age wearing an adorable cycling dress and thought, how cute is that? She had little braids poking out of her glitzy helmet, and I got excited thinking about how snappy I would look with gray pigtails against a canvas of purple titanium.

Oh, and my sunglasses suck.

The difference between naughty and knotty

An old man at physical therapy checked me out. It says something when the achy breaky boys in physical therapy are the ones who check you out, but these are my people now, so I’ll take it. I mentioned the incident to my husband, Dale, just to remind him what a catch I am.

I said you know, my longer gray hair, shorter bangs and thicker glasses -- they are not the universal turn-off I imagined. Guys check me out, I explained, trying to make it sound like it’s not safe for me to leave the house. Dale said I have that naughty librarian look.

The what?

The naughty librarian. He saw it on television, and he kind of chuckled and maybe even winked when he said it, like he was proud to be on the cutting-edge of geezer slang.

The problem is, I am more of a knotty librarian. I know this because I just graduated from physical therapy. This was all about my knees, which I hurt participating in a sports clinic two years ago. The PT said my knees were fine. My problem was tight quadriceps, pathetic abs, weak hip flexors and thick knots in the tendons of my legs. Somehow all that just made it seem like my knees hurt.

He said the acute injury started the pain ball rolling, but by my own account, there was a pre-existing pattern of abuse. Then I kept re-injuring them, and that caused all these other problems, some of which are unlikely to go away completely.

Therapy was a lot of exercises to stretch and strengthen the core. He also used cross-friction massage and heated ultrasound to break up the knots in my tendons. I always felt better after the treatment, but as soon as I’d walk or cycle or anything, the pain returned, although not as bad as when I first started therapy. But it never went away completely.

The PT explained. Apparently, I am not young anymore. I realize how dumb this sounds, but I thought I would go to physical therapy, do the hard work, the pain would go away and I could go back to doing all the things I did before. Except all the things I did before are what contributed to this problem! The bottom line is that I have to change.

What’s the quote? People don’t hate change, they just hate being changed?

The PT tells me I can walk, I can ride my bike, I can swim and I can play golf. I just can’t do them all on the same day or even back-to-back. Ideally, I should exercise every other day to give my body time to recover. Walking and cycling count as leg days -- can’t do legs two days in a row. Swimming is “nearly neutral.” As long as I can swim without pain, I can swim all I want. I should probably ride in a cart when I play golf. Me and the Flomax guys.

He also put me on a maintenance plan for stretching and strengthening the core. The exercises take about 30 minutes, and it’s just as important as cardio. News flash! Cardio is not king when you’re over 50 and the body doesn’t party like it’s 1999.

I’ve stuck to the plan for about a week now, and guess what? My knees feel pretty darned good. I am liking this plan. OK, so I have new physical limits, but I can still do a lot if I do it in a smarter way, and I suspect this is what many of us baby boomers are going to face as we age. I'm done fighting it -- now I just want to deal with it.

Knotty is bad, but naughty might be pretty good. I'll give up the punishing exercise, but I maintain that some things are worth hanging onto. The librarian gig sounds rather promising, don’t you think?

The great weight debate

Ex-smokers are known to be especially intolerant of people who still smoke, and it would seem that someone who was once obese might develop a similar intolerance for those who are overweight. After all, if you can lose the weight, so can they.

As a formerly chunky person who lost 55 pounds more than 30 years ago, that intolerant someone might be me. But I am changing.

I like to think I understand things, but in actuality I spend much of my time driving around the planet punch-drunk and ignorant trying to figure out how I made it this far on a half-empty tank. If I didn’t like being fat, and you didn’t like being fat, it was an easy run for my money to assume nobody liked being fat. This is why I’m bad at math.

It has occurred to me that maybe it’s not so much about liking or disliking our weight but loving who we are at any precise moment and realizing that we have beauty and worth, regardless of our size or shape. I mean, I knew that intellectually, but emotionally I’ve always thrown my lawn dart at thin. While being on the slender side was and still is my personal bullseye, it was also a standard I set for others. Like I get to be the judge. With a little willpower, this could be you.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with judgment and profoundly annoyed with the beauty and fashion industry, which has pulled an Al Haig and declared itself in charge:

• 10 Things You Should Never Wear
• Clothes That Make You Look Fat and Old
• Hair Mistakes You Must Avoid

Last week I saw a “beauty and aging” feature in an online magazine, and I struck out twice in Hair Mistakes for 100. My bangs are too short for my age, and I have long gray hair. Oops, I forgot to conform.

The pressure to look like everyone else is intense. And it’s such a losing game, because just open your eyes! Considering that we are one species, variations of the human body are nothing less than astounding. It’s a circus out there. A crazy, wonderful circus.

One of the turning points for me was observing a woman at work who is so utterly petite, you can’t imagine that she has normal-sized heart and lungs. I think, what she eats can’t be all that different than what everybody else eats, but it’s like we’re not even cast from the same mold. She was just born that way.

We don’t typically afford the same courtesy to people we define as overweight. We assume something is wrong with them. Unhealthy. They must eat all the time. Enormous quantities. We don’t assume they are born that way.

I’m a strong believer in free will, but it just has to be that some of this stuff is hard-wired. Maybe my unique biological structure made it possible for me to drop the pounds. It doesn’t make me stronger or better. It’s just who I am.

And maybe someone else’s DNA keeps them at a different weight -- small, big or something in between. Or maybe somebody is larger and sure, they want to be smaller but not that bad. Or not right now. They have other things to worry about. They are searching for their own brand of beauty, and they’re searching for self-acceptance -- not the perfect diet.

Plenty will argue that being overweight is unhealthy -- I’ve believed this myself. And I’ve used and defended the description, “Fat and unhealthy.” But I no longer believe the categories are that clean. There are unhealthy fat people, just as there are unhealthy thin people.

The way we look, whatever it is, whether we choose it or not -- it's simply who we are, and it ought to be just fine. I certainly don't want to wake up every day and think, "This isn't good enough." How exhausting. Better to work at tuning out the noise and judgment, assume we are smart, beautiful, healthy and cool and go from there.

Postponing medical tests

Whatever medical tests you're supposed to get that you've been putting off until after the zombies come ... please just go get this taken care of now. Now, I said. You'll be happy you did.

My oncologist cut me off a couple of years ago. I've outlived his usefulness, I guess. The only thing I really need at this point is an annual blood test called a CA-125. The onc said my family practice guy could do that, and if something came back hinky, he could take it from there.

I am not a doctor, but I play one on the internet, so I explained the deal about lab tests to him. I said my family practice dude uses a different lab, and I will get a slightly different result. The onc said that's true, you'll just have a new baseline. I said that will freak me out. He said it's not a problem. I said that will freak me out. He said just do it, so I didn't. Fuck him.

So, uh, two years go by or is it three? I haven't had a CA-125, and it's really the principal tool for detecting a recurrence of ovarian cancer. Well, that and symptoms. I had no real symptoms to speak of, but ovarian cancer is a sneaky bastard. The simplist things like being a bit, well, farty, can be a symptom.

What can I say, it was a farty party this spring. I now think it was the glucosamine I was taking for my knee issues and possibly the cucumber in my juicer drinks. It's not easy being me. I knew it was time for me to bite the bullet and get the blood test. I almost went back to the onc and begged just so he would send it to the same lab, but I told myself to man up and do this thing.

I went last week and told the family practice dude what was up. I said, look, my lucky number has been six for years now. I know it could go up a little with the new lab. Anything more than a few points of deviation will freak me out. If it comes back abbie normal, I don't want some stranger nurse calling me on the phone and cheerfully announcing that my new lucky number is 3,465.

The doc said, "I will call you if something is hinky."

The nurse called. She called the house first, and my husband freaked out. It was almost like, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" He was scared for me. He called me on my cell, then she called me on my cell and said everything was normal. I said what's normal? She said 10. Ten is normal. Ten is good.

I called my husband back. I said hey, guess what? I get to live another year!

He said don't screw around with this anymore, OK?

Commenting on my blog

Hi everyone,

I've been tinkering with the comments settings on my blog. I wanted to be able to create a threaded discussion, and I think I've done that. I just hope there aren't any unintended consequences!

A sign-in is required, but I want it to be as easy as possible. I can't quite figure out how to add what I love when I comment on other blogs -- and that's simply the name and URL. Still working on that. I could try no authentication required, but then I worry about all the handjob porns out there. Another option is for the comments to await moderation by me. For those of you who moderate comments, how is that working for you?

Please email me at donna@rockthesilver.com if you have any trouble commenting. Or comment here (if you can) and let me know how it's working or share any other suggestions you have for improving this feature.

Thanks,

Donna

Livin' the anti-aging lifestyle

Braids are all the rage. Love braids, but my hair and my hands have to be in the right mood. I played around today trying for something exotic and braidy but failed miserably. This double pony emerged from the braid graveyard, and it turned out to be a pretty good fix for weekend hair.

Cruising around the internet today, I found this article about the biggest beauty blunders by post-50 women. It's probably all true, but #4, not starting a retinol product soon enough, left me feeling sad and weary. It's not that I'm super-excited about wrinkles, and a bit of Vitamin A seems like an easy fix, but then I see myself tumbling down the slippery slope of lost causes.

Wrinkles or no wrinkles, aging will happen anyway if we're lucky. Do I want to spend quality time sifting through a minefield of expensive products that might shave off a few years? Wouldn't I rather be doing something fun? When it comes to anti-aging advice, part of me says go for it, and part of me says go to hell.

Please don't get me wrong. I do want to look my best, and I'm not giving up. After all, I started this blog partly to engage in a discussion of how to look good with gray hair. But I don't want to be a slave to beauty, and I'm not into livin' the anti-aging lifestyle.

And as far as hair goes, I've almost come full circle. Gray hair is one color among many, and I'm not sure we need to start with the assumption that we have something to overcome. Sometimes we need a little inspiration, but we don't need validation to be who we already are.

American Apparel's new gray-haired model

American Apparel is featuring its first gray-haired model. Her name is Jackie. The pose is what one might call spread-eagle and has been characterized as controversial. There's a poll -- so far the majority are happy to see the gray hair but think the pose is unnecessary.

I don't really see what the big deal is, do you?

Here are some less controversial images of Jackie, who is a silver stunner.