\u201cHe asked how I was,\u201d Bob told us, \u201cand I said, \u2018Well, not 100%.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Neal clapped him on the shoulder, saying, \u201cBob, there is no more 100%.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is how it is! These are the injuries old and new, an alluvial fan of structural deterioration now that many of us have been going hard for decades. We rally to beautiful areas with mountains to ski and hike, trails to run, cliffs to scale, rivers to boat.<\/p>\n
At this stage, I find that nearly every single gathering features talk of replacements \u2014 knees, hips, shoulders, take your pick \u2014 and partial replacements. And scopes, and trims. I pitied a 30-year-old, my young co-worker Michael, sitting mute in a car once as we fell blithely into discussing the driver\u2019s most recent knee surgery. Jim had ski raced through college in Vermont, and lately torn his anterior cruciate ligament playing tennis. I, a climber, had spent the summer doing physical therapy for a bum hip; the conversation skipped from ailment to ailment.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re not just talking about kooks and hammerheads, but healthy enthusiasts who take part throughout their lifespans. My college roommate Catherine, a hiker\/skier and (former) runner, has had both hips and both knees replaced. Karen, a nurse-practitioner friend, walks miles a day on rounds and needs both knees done, if she could just find the time. Peers debate whether to do both knees at once, which doctors may not approve, but which poses fewer weeks down and off work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The conversation with Bob on the chairlift \u2014 after which my husband, Mike, and I exited to do cruisers because Mike had hurt his knee climbing \u2014 and these next events occurred in merely one day.<\/p>\n
After skiing, we had a beer with our older son, Ted, who is a horsepacking outfitter by summer and coaches skiing in winter, and even at age 32 says his back sometimes hurts (a portent).<\/p>\n
\u201cDo we talk a lot about injuries?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cKinda,\u201d he said warily, adding, \u201cand health insurance.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Saturday, and next we met two friends for dinner at a burrito place. As I set down my plate, Mike was already telling Lynn and Jim, \u201cThe MRI wasn\u2019t too bad. Not as bad as the report made it sound.\u201d They listened intently, heads tipped forward. This is the difference between us and poor polite young Michael trapped in the car: We find these conversations interesting.<\/p>\n
Lynn has had both knees replaced. Jim has had two back surgeries and receives cortisone injections to maintain his activity level since early retirement as an educator.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those two and I hastened off to the movies; Mike drove home, to avoid hours stuck in a theater seat. He had been flattened by back pain for two months, after a crash skiing \u2014 and a lifetime of accumulated use as a jack of many mountain sports. Then just as he finally resumed activity, we\u2019d gone to a climbing gym and, though doing nothing rowdy, he tweaked his knee.<\/p>\n
The following day was his next appointment at the spine center, and he hobbled in expecting to sign up for a long-discussed fusion. His practitioners averred. They wouldn\u2019t do back surgery on someone who could hardly walk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI need to sort out my knee first,\u201d he reported back to me. He visited the orthopedic surgeon and scheduled surgery for a torn meniscus. Every visit to the orthopod, he sees friends in the waiting room; it\u2019s quite social.<\/p>\n
60 used to be old. Now we keep chugging.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been in sports most of my life, and in sports and health writing since the 1980s. Among the cultural changes I\u2019ve witnessed are the aging of the athlete and rise of lifelong activity. Thirtieth birthdays were once considered to bear down like freight trains upon pro athletes and citizen devotees alike. My grandparents in their early sixties were sedentary, considered old. Now people keep chugging. I\u2019ve just watched the skier Lindsey Vonn, formerly of Vail, win a World Cup downhill (by over a second) at age 41, the thrilled announcer calling her \u201da shining light for longevity in international sports.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there\u2019s a fountain of youth,\u201d Katie, a nurse practitioner and doctor of nursing practice, says, \u201cit\u2019s exercise.\u201d Exercise benefits circulation and organ function, mood and cognition, as well as fitness, and lowers the risk of many illnesses including some cancers. It is the single best thing you can do for your health.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A study of over 116,000 individuals for 30 years published in Circulation<\/a> journal in 2022 indicated that \u201cany combinations of medium to high levels\u201d of vigorous physical activity done 75 to 300 minutes a week and moderate physical activity for 150 to 600 minutes a week can attain \u201cnearly the maximum mortality reduction\u201d of about 35 to 42%. The findings of a recent study from the University of Sydney, published in Nature Communications<\/a>, suggest that one minute of vigorous exercise is worth 4.1 minutes at a moderate pace for risk reduction for all-cause mortality (and equivalent to 7.8 minutes for cardiovascular disease mortality).<\/p>\n But the bodies of super-active people don\u2019t hold up; they degenerate. Sometimes I protest, \u201cIt\u2019s not the years, it\u2019s the miles.\u201d But I know it\u2019s both.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two years ago, as I finally scheduled a hip replacement, I ruminated one day before going into the climbing gym. For many years, I rock climbed because I loved it and with underlying ideas of learning, improving and gaining fitness. Performance in climbing is measured minutely, with subdivided difficulty ratings, and succeeding or not is all too clear (you fall or you don\u2019t). I had always strived to return from layoffs, whether from having children or sore elbows or work commitments.\u00a0<\/p>\n At some point my abilities had naturally plateaued, but I still climbed. As major surgery loomed, I struggled on an unstable hip, with objectively no reason to try for fitness, soon to be moot.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet I found I still wanted to go. I entered the gym after work, glad to see community and after hours focused on a task, just move: simultaneously relaxing and doing something energizing. I still found myself intrigued by difficult (to me) boulder routes, striving to figure some out, returning to a few the next night.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the surgery, I contemplated when I should have the other hip, also worn, repaired. Sooner could mean the year-long recovery as both surgeries overlapped. A longer interim meant laboring to get back to any capability, only to lose it again. Busy with work and life, I couldn\u2019t help wondering, why even try?<\/p>\n A doctor friend, Kim, gave me the best answer there is. He said mildly, \u201cGotta keep moving.\u201d<\/p>\n That may mean moving at half throttle, but it is still going outside to walk, bike, or run, or leaving the house to swim or do yoga. It means persisting through injuries, which is when, as coming back grows more difficult, people sometimes quit. When you continue, denial and frustration (and\/or fuming, raging, annoying significant others, etc.) may precede acceptance of lesser ability. But do what you can and stick to it, and, Neal says, \u201cHard work may take you farther than you think.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Two weeks ago I picked up a climber friend, Lee Sheftel, at the hospital after a (non-sports-related) procedure. Lee, who is in his late 70s, strolled out bright-eyed, joking with the nurse. Now he\u2019s back to working out.<\/p>\n \u201cAre you feeling like yourself?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n He laughs. \u201cA semblance of myself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A semblance is OK. \u201cNo more 100%\u201d is 100% right. Move on.<\/p>\n Type of Story: Opinion<\/p>\n Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author\/producer\u2019s interpretation of facts and data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We loaded onto the chairlift, whooshing up above the snow-laden ponderosa pines with Bob, a friend of decades.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":523086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[38],"tags":[1081,232665,232666,1198,210,9427,146545,62,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-523085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-aging","tag-climbing","tag-climbing-gyms","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-hiking","tag-skiing","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115911222111369463","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/AP18354416018145-1200x798.jpg\")
In this Dec. 18, 2018 photo, the sun sets behind Capitol Peak in Snowmass near Aspen. Writer Alison Osius summited the peak 12 months after a hip replacement surgery. (Anna Stonehouse\/The Aspen Times via AP)<\/p>\n