Episode Details

Here's some strategies for dealing with midlife athletic injuries and the frustrating, sometimes demoralizing limitations they impose on us. One of the most challenging aspects of hitting my fifties (and maybe you can relate to this) is reconciling the inevitable decline in physical strength and performance with my expectations — unreasonable as they are — that I should be able to just keep doing pretty much what I did last week, last year or 15 years ago.

Not to mention the particular personal psychology that whispers, convincingly, that physical strength and ability are standards that must be upheld. As if they were virtues that, like all actual virtues, don’t ever change.

And the pernicious feeling that if I can’t maintain my athletic standards, well, then, who am I, really?

Of course, these thoughts and feelings are rarely overt; they’re more like emotional microplastics polluting my subconscious. But like all toxins, they tend to accumulate over time, to the point where they can influence my self-perception and, thus, my behavior. And here’s the problem with that: If you’re in a state of continual dissonance between what you want your body to be able to do and what it can actually pull off, you’re all but asking for an injury.

Or, more to the point of this post, a nonstop series of injuries.

Because athletes in their 50s are like the Tom Hanks character in, “Cast Away.” Remember that movie, from 2000? A guy stranded on an island invisible to the outside world. He survives on pure improvisation, lives in a cave gnawing on fish bones, staring at the wall wondering WTF. And then he becomes emotionally dependent on a volleyball and cries when it goes away.

Sound familiar, athletes? If “Cast Away” isn’t an analog to life after 50 I’m not sure what is.

At least we have access to ibuprofen and CBD gummies.

The consequences of “ignore & override” for older athletes

At this point in my audiocasts, I usually offer a disclaimer that I’m speaking not as an expert but as a journalist and curious explorer. But on this topic…I’m an expert. My guess is that many of you are, too.

Or, if you’re not yet, because you haven’t yet hit the 50-something athletic injury wall that no one ever bothered to tell you is approaching, I’m here, now, warning you about the negative surprises that many midlife athletes confront.

Or, as the case may be, simply ignore.

I wrote a post in October that examined the consequences of continuing to fight through athletic pain. And in the months since then, I’ve become a living lesson of what happens when ignore & override becomes your rule instead of the exception.

A brief summary of my 50-something injuries

So let me quickly run through what I’m dealing with, so I can get to the strategies for managing the nonstop injuries after age 50 with credibility.

* My right shoulder now has 2 partial tears that make upper-body training tough. They wake me up, every night. I probably need surgery, because it feels a lot like my left shoulder 8 years ago, when a surgeon stapled together a full tendon tear.

* But now, in both shoulders, I also have severe tendinitis of the long head biceps tendon, which connects the biceps to the shoulder. This is a direct result of my ignore & override habit, after too many rounds of hitting 200 tennis serves at a time.

I was in too much of a hurry to be really good at tennis, and got a repetitive stress injury as a result.

Consequences!

So, now I focus more on lower body and core