This Old Bod …

While working out this morning …

Yes, it was just day three of the new fitness program that has me in love with ‘Teddy the Treadmill’, so even though I’m tossing off the line like Suzanne Whatshername of ThighMaster fame, my midriff bulge proves it’s been a while …

I let my mind drift back a couple of decades, to a time when I was thin and felt fit even though all I did exercise-wise was shovel elephant poop and go dancing occasionally. I was lean and fairly strong at 35, and spending much of most days cleaning up after inhabitants of the Sacramento Zoo did help to keep me that way, but when I took up running sometime around my 40th birthday, I had to face up to the fact that I’d been fooling myself.

(My best years of fitness were my 40s, I thought, but that emergency heart bypass at 47 sort of shoots holes all through that claim.)

So, after three years of sedentary slobdom interspersed with short bursts of intense calorie-burning … ach! Cj’s upstairs with the cat in a stranglehold again! and things like that … I’m working up a sweat on purpose, and looking at what’s different about me now that I’m 55, not 35.

The first thing I notice? My boobs aren’t where they used to be. Even with my stretched out old jogging bra doing its best to keep these puppies in place their shift from side to side with each step could throw a smaller woman off balance, and they’re much closer to my belly button and much further from my chin than they used to be … one more so than the other. (When this asymmetrical business happened, I have no idea, but it gets more pronounced every year with the perpetual move south.)

As I bop along on Teddy, I can’t help but feel the extra old bit of my arms flapping. Like Popeye before spinach, my upside-down biceps wave to the world without my okay, occasionally having a run-in with the aforementioned boobs.

On the positive front, however, my vision is much better than it was twenty years ago. Having always been nearsighted, the increasing inflexibility of my aging lenses … that charming bit of maturity that has folks who’ve enjoyed a lifetime of normal vision doing what they can to grow a couple of feet onto their arms (How’s that for an image?) … has countered my distance impairment and reduced the correction I need by more than half.

Also, my hair is much more lush and full now. I may not look like a Breck Girl, but with each gray hair that much thicker than the brown one it replaced, I have quite a thick and luxurious mane these days.

All in all, I’d say it’s a draw. I might as well, as there’s not a thing I can do about the fact that time marches on … aside from march along with it on my trusty treadmill, that is.

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