Aging Outdoors in the Pandemic
I’ve been adventuring outdoors going on four decades now, but my fifty-three-year-old body has recently been making me stop and take stock.
I started on my outdoor adventures when I was twenty, in an effort to thwart a mysterious illness that had unexpectedly invaded my body. It turned out to be Ankylosing Spondylitis, an systemic inflammatory autoimmune disease that took eight years to diagnose.
At twenty, my impulse was to buy a mountain bike and start riding uphill to attempt to exorcise/exercise whatever it was out of my body. I was living in Santa Cruz, California where mountains abound. I started by biking up the formidable hill to the UCSC campus.
I was so slow, flies landed on me as I pedaled and panted. People on fifty-year-old Schwinn cruisers passed me as I moved at a glacial pace.
It was humbling. But I’m stubborn. So I kept at it, and eventually I went a little faster and flies didn’t land on me anymore.
From then I started guiding people on hikes, working as an environmental educator, a ranger, and eventually as a wilderness guide. I tried to be a badass so the disease wouldn’t get the better of me. That semi-badass way of life stuck for a bunch of years.
Now I am a mom of a senior in high school and a university writing instructor. My lifestyle has changed substantially, especially during this COVID year--it’s been difficult to get enough exercise. I am mostly tethered to my computer on Zoom or grading student work online, my gym is closed, and I no longer have the “built-in” exercise of riding my bike to work every day.
Long story short, my body is not happy. I mean it wasn’t really that happy to begin with, but now it’s pissed off. Plus, did I mention I’m 53? My body hurts. My muscle mass has diminished. I’m suffering all the bodily indignities of middle age.
My situation is not unique; while not everyone has Ankylosing Spondylitis, many of us have been sitting in front of computers for a year without end.
So what do we do? What do aging professional women do to get our mojo back and our yayas out during this most unprecedented time? I walk and walk and walk around my neighborhood. It’s not enough. I do Yoga with Adriene online. It’s not enough. I ride my bike a few miles down the road to visit the herd of donkeys living in a pasture at the edge of town and feed them carrots. It’s not enough.
The COVID vaccine is being distributed, so there’s hope for movement, travel, gathering, but I wonder if, when we’re finally allowed to move around more, whether I will even have the will or the muscle tone to do it-- this sedentary lifestyle has taken over. But my body is still hating it. How will you celebrate the freedom to move around when that time arrives?