Decrepit No More

I'm at an age when my back goes out more than I do.
-- Phyllis Diller

Flashback:: October 1, 1992. 1:30 AM. After a 500-mile drive to visit relatives, I jerked awake from a deep sleep. Something was wrong: I was moaning, racked with a searing, paralyzing back pain that left me rigid and gasping for breath. My mate thought I was having a heart attack. Then she realized it was one of my recurring back spasms and quickly shoved an Empirin 3 down my throat. As the painkiller slowly kicked in, she dumped a container of ice-cubes into a towel and iced me into tranquility.

Back spasms weren't new to me. But I'd never had one quite this bad, never in my sleep. I'd been plagued with a bad back for years. It got worse when a neighbor asked me to help her in an emergency: her elderly mother had slipped from a wheelchair and needed assistance getting back in. As I lifted the 200 lb. woman off the floor and into the wheelchair, I felt something snap.

A few weeks later, I was out walking, vigorously striding behind my dogs. We were going up a modest hill and suddenly there was a crack like a gunshot and I fell to my knees. My back again. This time it was a muscle spasm that left me walking bent and lop-sided for days.

I was thinking slipped disk or acute ankylosing spondylitis. My doctor told me it was only pulled ligaments and weak muscles. He prescribed a muscle relaxant and urged me to exercise. "You've got to build up strength in your stomach muscles," he said. I told him I walked a lot and climbed in the hills nearby almost every day. He shook his head. "Not the right kind of exercise." He recommended sit-ups, leg lifts.

Now and then I'd try to get into the exercises he'd suggested, but it was painful and boring. I felt like I was doing some kind of geriatric workout. I lapsed. Like the old joke goes, when I felt like exercising, I'd just lie down until the feeling went away. The pain wasn't a joke, and when it struck again, I'd go get a therapeutic massage. My masseuse agreed with the doc: Exercise.

Uh-huh. Sure.

March 1993. I was taking 9-12 ibuprofin daily. A muscle relaxant at night. I was in pain constantly. One day I noticed I had started walking with a stooped posture because it seemed to relieve the pain I was uncomfortable even when sitting, and whenever I'd stand up, I'd mutter, "Oh, my back."

I was almost 56 years old. And I was decrepit.

Then I happened to read an article in USA Today that reported the benefits of weight training for older people. By this time I was far more broken down than my 88 year old mother. I had never exercised with weights, but I decided to give it a try. I bought a fixed-weight pulley system on sale at Sears and installed it in the shed.

My first workout lasted 15 minutes, a very lightweight ordeal. I was exhausted. I was appalled, vaguely ashamed at how weak I was. Yet I had a sneaky feeling that weight training might slow what Winston Churchill called "the surly advance of decrepitude."

I kept it up, working out with light weights for brief periods every day. Then my endurance increased. I could go for 30 minutes. I began adding weights.

Two week after I started training I made an amazing discovery: I no longer had back pain. I stopped gobbling anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants. I began to do situps, painfree. I got an incline situp bench. No problem. Cast iron dumbells, a pair of 20-pounders. Then a pair of 30s. I had fantasies of bulging biceps, rippling pecs, cannonball delts. I bench pressed in my dreams.

I became a convert to iron. My initial goal was to relieve back pain. I needed another goal. It was then I decided to climb Mount Thielsen in the fall.

Only one problem: Now I wanted to go at the weights hard and heavy. I got a little crazy. One fine day at the weight machine, I found myself in the "zone," a kind of euphoric state, my muscles pumped and unfatigued. I was doing heavier leg extensions and seated presses than I'd ever done before. I was getting behind some real weight for a change in my bench press. I kept piling on weight, going for the max. I felt great.

The next day I couldn't move my left arm. Rotator cuff injury.

I kept working out with lighter weights and my injury slowly healed. Meanwhile, I decided that if I was going to hike up Mount Thielsen I'd better do some cardio work, so I bought a stepper. I felt in pretty good shape, but I was astonished to find that I couldn't even do 15 minutes on the stepper. I kept at it, slowly improved over a few weeks and soon was able to do a relatively easy 30-45 minutes on the stepper 3-5 times a week, in the aerobic zone.

October 5, 1993. The mountain. A year ago I was crippled walking up a 200-ft hill. Now, coming down Mount Thielsen, I was merely bone tired.

The next day I could hardly walk, but my back didn't hurt a bit. I was puzzled because it seemed as if all my training and aerobics at 500 ft. didn't prepare me very well for hiking and climbing at 9000 ft. Then I reflected: If I hadn't trained with weights I wouldn't even have made it to the trailhead.

But I was bothered by the weakness in my legs. So I traded my pulley-system for a free weight Olympic multi-purpose outfit. And along with bench presses, pull-downs and other exercises, I began to do squats. Sissy squats. Squatting with the bar, then a little weight. In a couple of months I was squatting 150. Hey, I liked it. My new goal: a 200 squat by my 57th birthday.

In the zone again, a little crazy, I went for a max squat and screwed up my left leg. (I looked it up: the symptoms resembled illiotibial band syndrome. Could happen to anyone.) So back to basics. I wear a knee brace for light squats and aerobics. I tell myself to forget heavy weights. After all, I started weight training to heal, not to keep injuring myself. No more heavy weights, I vow. No more craziness.

As soon as my leg heals, I discover a fiendish book on supersquats. It sounds interesting. I try it with very light weights and it's the damndest full body workout I've ever had. Hey, I like it. Before long I find myself piling on the weight working up to 150 for 20 reps. I'm huffing and puffing, I'm panting and sweating. Is that ringing in my ears for whom the bells toll? I'm in heart attack territory.

Whoa! I'm getting crazy again. So I back off supersquats. Lookey here, I tell myself. All this high intensity training stuff is for young guys. All I want to do is stay strong and fit and free from the pains of decrepitude. So it doesn't make much sense to cripple myself going for the max.

Right.

March, 1994. A month before my 57th birthday. I squat 200 lbs. I feel no pain.