Tag Archives: Medicare

From Skinny to Strong: A Lifetime of Physical Fitness

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I’ve belonged to some manner of fitness club since my parents had a family membership at the YMCA, primarily to ensure we kids learned how to swim in a small town with public pools and nearby lakes. Back then, we called these facilities “gyms,” not health clubs or workout studios; and men seemed to use them more often than women.

At least that was true in my family: Dad exercised at the Y, playing racquetball, jogging on the circular track above the basketball court, doing calisthenics in an era when Jack LaLanne was on TV. In lieu of exercising, Mom would starve herself occasionally on the two-week Mayo Clinic Egg Diet and seemed to perpetually be battling her weight.

My father’s example looked more fun to me (plus, I like to eat), but I credit both of my parents with my instinctive need to move — as much for my mental health as physical strength and stamina. Dad set an example of daily exercise, whether golfing and running or taking us skiing and sledding at Ski Haven (since renamed Mount Kato), which still used towropes when I was a girl. Mom put me in dance classes from the age of 5, pushed us to “play outside” and outfitted all of us kids with bikes, which was how parents back then expected their children to get around.

Almost a quarter of adults engage in no physical activity outside of their jobs, and sedentary lifestyles are an important reason that two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese. 

U.S. Department of Transportation

As an adult, I morphed my physical activities from fun and games into practical purposes: walking, bike riding and using mass transit to get around before I bought my first car at age 25. I still tell my peers about how daily dog walks and active transportation — replacing car trips with human-powered mobility, such as walking or biking — are relatively effortless, enjoyable ways to stay in shape.

Those habits serve me well in my late 60s, at an age when thinning bones and prediabetes are a real risk, even for those of us who pay attention to our health. Like many women of my era, however, I’ve seen exercise primarily as a way to stay thin, a priority I internalized after gaining an unwanted 30 pounds during an unhappy period in my teens.

It’s not too late to get stronger, but it is time. No longer can I deny the physical weakening that comes with age.

Our bodies, ourselves

Of all the celebrities who flew in for the No Kings rally at the Minnesota State Capitol on March 27 — Bernie Sanders, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez — I was most excited to see Jane Fonda, still looking fit and energetic at 88. “She taught my generation of women to exercise rather than starve ourselves,” I told a friend, and I have .

The fitness studio craze took off in 1983, the year after Jane Fonda’s Workout video sparked a revolution and earned enough to support her political causes. I started attending classes at Leslie’s Shape Shop in Minneapolis with a friend and colleague. We’d squeeze into our tights and Spandex leotards, move and sweat to invigorating music, and afterward bond over office gossip, white wine and fatty appetizers. Elizabeth and I remain great friends to this day.

When I turned 40, with two young boys, a demanding career and a long commute, I decided to juggle more balls and become a step-aerobics instructor. Blessed with a natural sense of rhythm, I stole routines from classes at the Life Time Fitness in a former men’s athletic club across the street from my office in downtown St. Paul.

“Physical fitness is a three-legged stool: strength, aerobic capacity and flexibility.”

Jane Fonda’s Workout Book

Word spread, and middle-aged women began to fill my 8 a.m. Saturday classes back home at Olympus Athletic Club in Northfield. Drawn to the camaraderie and the beat of disco-influenced aerobics music, they also seemed to appreciate my mantra: Exercise is fun! The key is finding an activity that you enjoy.

That’s when fitness became not just a personal pleasure but a cause. A way to help myself and other women enter middle age with more agility and confidence and less shame. Not for us the deprivation diets and speedy pills of our mothers’ generation. Exercise would help us own and accept our bodies and claim our place in male-dominated spaces.

But however much I preached to my students about the three-legged stool of fitness (muscle strength, muscle length and sustaining a healthy heart rate), my busy brain and obsession with thinness have always led me to prioritize aerobic exercise. A recent unneeded and unexpected drop in weight, which my doctor and I concluded is a loss of muscle mass, has pushed me toward lifting weights in earnest.

Dumbbells sit side by side in a workout studio with a woman in the background lifting weights.
Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash

Gaining weights

Being thin is not enough anymore. At 68, I want to be strong enough to pick up my grandson, lift myself off the floor with no railing nearby, carry groceries, help move furniture around the house. That has meant setting aside my ego (and fear) and investing both time and money in getting stronger, which includes:

  • Paying the hefty fee for three sessions with a trainer, who has helped me focus on gluteal and hip strength and on rehabilitating an injured shoulder.
  • Learning how to use bands, kettlebells, TRX straps and weight machines for muscle work as well as conventional dumbbells.
  • Listening to my sons — both serious weightlifters — when they instruct me to eat more protein, lift heavier weights with fewer repetitions, and strengthen my bones with beginner plyometrics, a series of jumping exercises that has me jump-roping for the first time in decades.

The average 30-year-old can expect to lose about 25% of his or her muscle mass and strength by age 70, and another 25% by age 90. 

Harvard Health Online

Getting stronger has also meant finding a workout studio that helps seniors feel comfortable and welcome. Not the community center that had a great bone-strengthening yoga class, but where my strength trainer didn’t create a program specific to my needs. Nor the CorePower studio where I reveled in heated yoga classes for nine years, but which clearly was tailored to a younger generation.

Instead, using the Silver Sneakers benefits that come with my Medicare Advantage Plan, I’ve rejoined Life Time Fitness in a neighborhood with a growing amount of senior housing. The Aurora Program, launched in January 2022, offers specialized classes, opportunities for seniors to socialize and dedicated hours for us to work out.

At first, I balked at the limited hours — weekdays, 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; nothing on Saturday before 2 p.m. — and wondered whether Life Time, a for-profit company that markets itself to a young, fit, athletic population, wanted to make money off aging exercisers but keep us out of the way.

Image by freepik
Image by pch.vector on Freepik

Now I appreciate the chance to work on my weights program among people my own age. Invariably we older women exchange smiles and glances, acknowledging one another and offering unspoken encouragement.

I recently saw a white-haired woman walking with a book bag to the city library near my house. Slightly stooped, she moved with a shuffling gait, seeming to favor one foot. “That’s me in 15 years,” I said to my husband. Then I made the conscious decision to admire her determination. Instead of pitying the woman or — worse — turning away from the preview of my own inevitable decline, I kept watching.

“Rock on,” I whispered. “At least you’re out there.” Facing an uncertain future, and moving toward it.

‘Glidepath’: a bridge between work and retirement

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Catherine Spaeth lives in an 1894-era house with a wraparound front porch, carved oak banisters, an abundance of natural light and a high-ceilinged kitchen that suits her latest adventure — a pastry and baking certificate from Saint Paul College that she hopes to parlay into a part-time job or a small catering business.

In addition to the chance to perfect her baking skills, she likes the certificate’s emphasis on classes like “Food Safety and Sanitation” and “Culinary Nutrition Theory.” Her recently resurrected blog, The Butter Chronicles, features posts about how food choices affect our brains, the rise in U.S. sugar consumption and why professional cooks never wipe their hands on their aprons.

At 63, Spaeth (below) has run study abroad programs in private higher ed, taught American history and literature, and co-owned a company that designed college cultural immersion programs. She speaks English, French and Italian and holds advanced degrees in American studies. She and her husband, an athletic outdoorsman, took a six-month pilgrimage walk through Europe in 2022.

With a life that expansive, why go back to community college now, cramming to relearn algebra for the admissions exam only to sweat alongside students young enough to be her kids? The why is simple: Because she can. “It’s been really fun,” says Spaeth, over hot tea and homemade scones.

“Going back to school is an incredible luxury,” she acknowledges, though Spaeth balks at the assumption that she “doesn’t have to work.”

“What that conjures up for women is way different than what it conjures up for men,” she explains. “It’s saying, ‘You don’t have to do anything.’ You can stay at home and everything you do at home is not work” — a stereotype and societal perception that drove me, 40 years ago, to pursue a paid career.

Both Spaeth and her husband, a retired lawyer, plan to forego drawing Social Security until they’re 70. “We’re not big spenders,” she notes, “and our mortgage is paid off.” So, her goal in returning to college is less to earn money than to find purpose after decades of full-time work. “I don’t want a life with no commitments,” Spaeth says.

What happens after 60?

Like many professionals in their 60s, including me, Spaeth is on a glidepath toward retirement. Not ready to quit work entirely but situated financially to have options, we have left full-time careers for a variety of reasons:

  • We earned and saved enough over the course of our working lives that we could afford this choice.
  • Medicare gives us reasonably priced healthcare coverage at age 65 without having to rely on employer-provided benefits.
  • We watched as our peers, deemed irrelevant or overpriced, were laid off or restructured out (yes, it happens to people over age 60, despite the legal risks).
  • We opted to do something different — volunteer, travel more widely, pursue a passion — when the careers became less relevant to us.
  • We have spouses who may be older or are retired themselves.

Glidepath is a financial planning term that references the portfolio rebalancing typically recommended as people get closer to retirement. But it applies to the path that Spaeth and I are pursuing, too: more schooling, in her case; two part-time jobs, in mine.

As a self-described workaholic, I found myself ready to slow down at 65 but not to step away from work entirely. My career has meant too much to me — in identity and intellectual stimulation, in the pride and purpose of supporting a family — to simply flip a switch and say: “I’m done.” Plus, I also want to delay drawing Social Security.

“I love the term glidepath,” says Spaeth, whose study-abroad business ground to a halt once COVID struck. “It was a rough year and a half trying to stay afloat with no revenue coming in.” She calls the pastry and baking certificate her “next project,” one that allows her to look ahead rather than wallowing in the business loss.

That sense of optimism is particularly important as women age. “Part of wanting commitment and engagement is related to an identity,” Spaeth says. “As older women, we’re already invisible in lots of ways, and I don’t want to be out of the world, out of the working world — where, for better or worse, you get your respect or recognition.”

Endings and beginnings

Six months into my own glidepath — a term I prefer to “semi-retirement” — I am learning firsthand about the challenges and benefits of leaving full-time work. The upside of two part-time jobs is apparent in the schedule I have crafted: more volunteering for Planned Parenthood, where I had to operate under the radar while employed by a Catholic university; more opportunities to cook and have people over; more reading and yoga; more coffee and meal dates with my friends and sons.

Still, the expanses of time that I expected to emerge have not materialized. “Busier than I’d like to be” is my standard response when people ask how my new life is going. That’s due in part to my tendency to overbook my calendar.

‘Retired’ is an old word, for men who are leaving manual labor.

Kathy Kelso, St. Paul-based advocate on healthful aging

But it’s also because professional occupations, which my two roles are — managing editor of a Twin Cities–based community blog and executive director of a small, environmentally focused nonprofit — do not lend themselves to hourly contract work.

  • Do you charge only for the time you’re at the computer or in meetings? Or is it legitimate to bill for travel time or for processing and “think time,” as another nonprofit executive director encouraged me to do?
  • Who pays for networking and professional development, for the outreach that yields relationships more than direct, measurable impact on a given project?
  • Most challenging, how do you right-size your ego — your past practice of operating as a doer and decision-maker — so it fits into the box that contract work constructs? When the board differs with your recommendations or does not consult you on a key decision, do you fight it, or recognize that you are not in charge?

The financial definition of glidepath fails to address that emotional turbulence. I am traveling toward a different future, but I lug along my baggage from the past — the habits and ways of working, the belief that my career defined me. I rarely called in sick. I was always pushing for new solutions. I reveled in the résumé-building accomplishments that my career allowed.

None of that matters anymore, because the glidepath leads downhill, to a door labeled “retirement,” which traditionally has meant: That’s it! You’re finished.

Retirement: define your terms

Jim McCartney, 69, a former business reporter and colleague of mine at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, is wary about the term glidepath, given its implication that his career is slowing to a stop. “I’m not necessarily wanting to land,” he says, “if landing means I have to stop writing.”

After leaving journalism for a lucrative career in public relations, McCartney faced a layoff three years ago, at the start of the pandemic. He was 66 and immediately began promoting himself as a writer for hire, even though his wife brings in a full-time income.

“I love writing,” he says. “It’s kind of my identity. I can’t imagine ever stopping writing.”

Unlike me — working at two jobs I enjoy but for significantly less than my full-time compensation, once you factor in benefits — McCartney takes pride in having earned more as a freelancer during the first year after he was laid off. “I don’t necessarily place my self-worth on what I can make, but it’s nice to know that someone is willing to pay well for my services,” he explains. “As long as I like the work, it’s a validation that you’re worth X amount per hour.”

McCartney is now doing business under the moniker JSM Communications LLC, specializing in science, medical and healthcare writing. He will wait until he turns 70 to draw Social Security, subscribing to the common wisdom that “unless you’re really sick and don’t think you’re going to live very long,” it makes sense to maximize the monthly payout from the government.

Two of his close friends from the Pioneer Press are retired and involved in volunteer work at nonprofits, their reporting days behind them. But McCartney, who began his career as a city reporter at the New Ulm Journal (above), likes the word retired even less than he likes glidepath.

“I don’t want someone to think, ‘Oh, I wish Jim were still writing, but he’s retired.’ I don’t want people to think I’m out of the game,” he says, “because I’m not out of the game. I’m still writing, but I’m doing it on my own terms.”

Try this Antidote for Aging: Leave the Car at Home

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I gave up my membership at CorePower Yoga in September, in anticipation of becoming eligible for Medicare. After nine years, I said a reluctant goodbye to the Colorado-based chain that brought fast-paced, fitness yoga to the masses, at least those of us who could afford it.

Now, my Blue Cross Blue Shield Advantage plan, which supplements the hospitalization and basic clinical coverage in Medicare Parts A and B, offers free membership at certain health clubs. The youth-oriented CorePower is not among them, and so I took another step down the path leading directly to old age and signed up at the YMCA a walkable distance from my house and Lifetime Fitness, a bus ride away.

Exciting, yes, but the busing and walking will benefit my aging mind and body more than any health club membership ever could.

Four reasons why:

  1. I will engage in active transportation — walking (with or without my dogs) or riding a bus or bike — far more often than I’ll get to BodyPump at the Y or the Gluteous MAXout class at Lifetime Fitness.
  2. I notice more about my community and the wider world when I get around in a way that de-prioritizes cars, which separate us from other people. Paying attention makes me aware of how the world has changed, keeping me current on social trends, and that’s good for older people.
  3. I am more likely to engage with others — greeting them on a sidewalk, chatting with them on a bike path — and social interaction sparks my aging brain.
  4. My imagination takes flight and my worries right-size when I am gazing out the window on a bus or train or moving freely outdoors. Speed no longer is the top priority.

Being a daily pedestrian, a regular transit rider and at least a two-season cyclist have become ingrained habits. Because I live in a city — in a neighborhood with sidewalks, bike paths and several bus routes an easy walk away — I can incorporate those practices more readily than someone who lives in a small town or a suburb. And yet a walk or a bike ride can happen almost anywhere.

Active transportation is an ideal way to exercise as we age, at a time of life when we’re more serene and less competitive. (At 65, my last timed run is a decade behind me, and I never bought a computer for my road bike.) I have been keeping a multimodal diary since July, jotting down why I was grateful on any given day to have made the counter-cultural choice to leave the car in the garage and move instead on my own power.

Communal transportation requires patience, flexibility and, at times, humility — having to explain, for example, that a late bus is beyond your control. But all three traits are invaluable to graceful aging.

Consider this:

  • If I hadn’t taken the bus to a volunteer shift at Planned Parenthood North Central States, I wouldn’t have gained 3,000 steps on a brisk and bracing day, warmed slightly by the sunshine, when I missed my bus and had to high tail it to a different route.
  • If I hadn’t walked to the bus stop for yoga on a Sunday morning in July, I wouldn’t have been able to greet a neighbor and introduce myself to another. I would have lost the chance to read an article in that morning’s Washington Post. Still, had I driven, I could have left home 30 minutes later. In a go-go society, that matters.
  • If I hadn’t bussed to a business meeting where I didn’t have the option of running late, I would not have recognized the luxury of having choices. I allowed myself five minutes to get to a bus stop three blocks away: Why did my dog choose this moment to escape from the back gate? But, of course, I could always use my car if I missed the bus. Privilege means having options — and less anxiety than the young man in the back of the bus shouting into his mobile phone about how he was short on rent because he spends too much money (“meals out, shin guards”) on his girlfriend’s kids.
  • If I hadn’t ridden my bike to meet a friend for coffee, I wouldn’t have discovered the private, pristine patio behind Cahoot’s Coffee Bar on a lovely autumn day. It was the safest place to park my new bike, and the barista kindly helped me get it back there.
  • If I had driven to a meeting where the bus did make me late, I would have missed the 12-minute walk to the bus stop and the reminder that I used to commute to work by foot — 17 minutes each way — and need to build that exercise into my new routine of at-home contract work.
  • If I hadn’t taken the Green Line train to a meeting in downtown St. Paul, I wouldn’t have figured out how to feel safe on a transit system wrestling with crime. I sat in the car closest to the conductor, looped one strap of my backpack around my arm, kept my smartphone out of sight and minded my own business.
  • If I hadn’t walked to a meeting at a favorite coffee shop just far enough away to contemplate driving, I wouldn’t have snagged the metal plant stand shaped like a tricycle from a neighborhood antique store just moments before they closed.

We can’t lecture or guilt people into driving less, even though we know it helps cut greenhouse gas emissions. Sure, we can cite climate change as an existential threat, but Americans know that — we’ve been whipsawed all summer by news of drought here, torrential rains there — and still, our self-defeating practices don’t change.

I used to work for a man who left his climate-controlled house in the suburbs, got into his climate-controlled vehicle in his attached garage, drove freeways to the campus where we both were employed and parked in a climate-controlled garage beneath the student center. Once upstairs, he walked the equivalent of half a city block outside to reach his climate-controlled office. That was the extent of his engagement with the outdoors.

I don’t have enough years left on the planet to spend them encased in air-conditioned structures that separate me from what is real, and essential. I want to be out there, amid it all, with the city and Mother Nature, as unpredictable and sometimes scary as they both may be.

Photo courtesy of Jan Huber on Unsplash