Middle Age Paunch

How can you tell you are in middle ages of your life? Speaking only from personal experience, there are a few physical things that one may notice.

Your weight may be down to what it was a few years ago but your six pack hasn’t come back. Why? Because you now have more subcutaneous fat in the belly area probably due to a decrease in testosterone. You can now pinch an inch or more of your love handles which have steadily grown through the years.

The growth of new hair is no longer catching up with the loss of the rest of them, and there appears to be more gray to the ones that are left. Thanks to Rogaine, there are still a few hair follicles thriving.

You are not as agile as you once were although in your mind you can still chase a ball down on a tennis court or jump as high as you used to do in a volleyball court, even though you haven’t played those sports in decades. You have now relegated yourself to Nintendo WII sports.

You have more aches and pains as soon as you get out of bed in the morning and you don’t know where they came from (maybe you played tennis and volleyball in your sleep).

You tend to repeat sentences over and over when you tell a story as if your listener didn’t get it the first time. Like I said, you tend to repeat sentences over and over. And over.

If you are a runner like me, you get slower even though you seem to put the same amount of effort like you used to when you were still decently fast. Running ten minutes per mile (if that) on a shorter run now seems as hard if not harder, than it used to take running an eight minute per mile pace for a marathon.

You push or pull lesser weights or lesser repetitions in your weight training sessions and feel less of a pump than you used to. Another testosterone related problem.

With all these complaints and ailments, I could just surrender and say “Woe is me”, but I choose not to but am opting instead to celebrate what I can still do and keep trying to do better. To borrow a phrase from Hebrew: L’chaim!!! To life! Let’s keep on celebrating it!