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Senior Surfers stay fit |
| With fitness after 50 as a theme, who better to spotlight than Hawaii’s senior surfers who trailblazed the way for today’s professionals to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. Two are in the International Surfing Hall of Fame; several are board shapers and teachers. One runs the most prestigious pro surfing event in the world. One is a state senator and one is a woman. |
Fit after 50 |
| Two East Honolulu women stay in shape by running, paddling, swimming and competing. |
Fitness advice for seniors |
| Being healthy as we age is more than just eating right. It’s exercising regularly and getting medical checkups. Local health and fitness professionals offer guidelines to living the good life after 50. |
DEPARTMENT:
How times have changed
By Mike Tymn
For
the Nov. 2, 1962 edition of the Times Star, a daily serving the Oakland-San
Francisco Bay Area city of Alameda, I wrote a feature article about
a friend, Joe King. A month or so earlier, King had finished sixth
among some 75 competitors in the annual Dipsea race, a 7.6-mile run
over the crest of Mt. Tamalpais, on the other side of the Golden Gate
Bridge from San Francisco.
In the article, I marveled at how a man King’s age could still be competitive in the grueling sport of long-distance running. King was all of 36 at the time. In those days, athletes in most sports demanding speed, strength, agility or endurance were considered “over the hill” at 35. They were supposed to go gently into the night. But that was primarily the case with professional sports like baseball and boxing, where there was incentive to hang in there.
In strictly amateur sports like track and road running, they were usually gone by 25. Few runners continued competing beyond high school or college, and only a small percentage of them went beyond 30. There were several participants older than King in Bay Area road races, but they were just “joggers,” although I don’t recall if that word was really in our vocabulary then.
When I met Joe six years earlier, in 1956, I was surprised that he was still running at the ripe old age of 30. I had run a little track in high school, but knew nothing about road racing. Joe told me all about it and introduced me to Mike Ryan, the founder and coach of the Santa Clara Youth Village, a club organized for runners no longer in school.
I remember asking Joe about Ryan’s background and he mentioned that Ryan had once won the (1912) Boston Marathon. My first reaction to that was that Ryan must not have been a very good runner to have had to run marathons. As I saw it then, running a marathon was a sign that you lacked the speed to compete in shorter events. The marathon was a plodder’s race.
In 1960, I was administering a physical fitness test for a company of combat-ready Marines. One of the events was a half-mile run. There was no time limit. The Marine had only to finish the half mile at a run. When several non-commissioned officers started off at a very slow trot, I called them back and told them the rules were that they had to “run.” I suggested that they should be able to run the two laps around the track in 3 minutes, 30 seconds (a 7-minute mile pace) before I would consider it a run. They rebelled and complained to the commanding officer, who called me into his office.
“Lieutenant,
those guys are pushing 40,” the colonel admonished me. “You’ve
got to take it easy on them. They’re not jocks like you.”
That was pretty much the way things were until the running and fitness revolution was kicked off by Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s 1968 book, “Aerobics.” It wasn’t until 1969 that I first saw a woman running the roads. In last year’s Honolulu Marathon, 5,959 of the 24,593 finishers were 50 and older, nearly 25 percent of the field. That included 2,001 women 50 and older.
When they hit the roads for the 35th annual Honolulu Marathon on Dec. 9, the 50-plus crowd should again be well represented.
How times have changed!
Joe King is now 81 and still running the roads. Mike Tymn, a native of Alameda, Calif., moved to Oahu in 1971 and covered endurance sports for the Honolulu Advertiser for 24 years. After retiring from the insurance business in 2002, he moved to Oregon but returned to Kailua in 2006. He hung up his racing shoes at age 57, preferring power-walking these days, averaging 25 miles a week. Mike won the 30-39 age division of the Honolulu Marathon in 1975 and the 40-49 age division in 1977 and was the overall winner of the 1979 Maui Marathon. He is the only Hawaii resident to have run less than 2½ hours for a marathon after the age of 40.
Humorous, touching, inspiring, thought-provoking—we welcome your personal observations about Life After 50. E-mail your 600-word essay and phone number to Editor Dianne Glei at dianne@tradepublishing.com.