(Editor’s note: Second in a series on prepping for the Wisconsin Senior Olympics.)
 
As a 63-year-old, prepping to throw the shot put and run the 800 is way different than would be the case if you were 39 or 22. Over the years, as injuries accumulate and you recognize your limitations, you start to better understand what you can and can’t do, or more appropriately, what you should and shouldn’t do.

But that doesn’t stop the human heart. If you’re a shot putter or runner, you want to perform at your maximum ability. When you’re younger, that means pushing it.  When you’re 63, that means reining it in (to a certain extent).
 
After mentally and verbally committing (by telling other people) that I would compete this year in the Wisconsin Senior Olympics, training had to begin at some point. I lollygagged over the winter. “Too cold. I can’t get outside” were reasonable excuses that only lasted so long.
 
Inertia slowly went away in January and February to be replaced by motivation and action. I started jogging around the tiny basketball court where I work out at the Wisconsin Athletic Club, lifting weights to simulate the shot put throw and then actually taking a 15-pound medicine ball (to be replaced later by a 20-pounder) and shot putting it 10 times against the wall from increasing distances.
 
To balance my body, I threw the medicine ball both lefty and righty, and briefly considered entering the event twice – once as a lefty and once as a righty. Probably illegal, but flirting with the idea was amusing. I’m righthanded and it become clear quickly that was my dominant power and I focused on that.
 
Until your throw a weighted ball against the wall ten times in a row, you have no idea how aerobic and exhausting that is. Try it and see how you feel after three minutes. That was the first of many learning curve incidents and adjustments that have occurred.
 
Trying to run above a slow jog was another story. Over the past 5-6 years, I’ve occasionally entered 5K races, so I knew I could mosey along for a few miles. Picking up the pace is a different story. That implied finding your limits. I started slow, doing four down and backs on the small basketball court. Okay, nothing hurts. Go up to five down and backs. Then six, seven and eight over several weeks.
 
Then it was time to add some circles around the court, so I repeated the process with the back and forths, followed by four laps around the court, then a week later five laps and so on. Over 2-3 months, I hit the generic 800 distance needed to do two full laps around a high school track and I felt a mild degree of accomplishment: “Okay, I made it and didn’t have a heart attack or blow out a groin muscle. Now can I pick up the pace?”
 
Mixing in outdoor paces as the weather became less than frigid was the next step, and this was added to the routine Fridays and Saturdays on excursions with our dogs. Not spraining an ankle on the rougher terrain became another worthy short-term goal.
 
Progress continued. Speed picked up. I felt good. Then, as you probably expected, the body rebelled. More on that next week.
​
(Part 3 in this series coming next week.)

About a month from now I’ll participate in the Old Codger Olympics, in reality the Wisconsin Senior Olympics. Barring injury, the plan is to throw the shotput and run the 800.
 
“You’re nuts,” you might say. Probably so. People have called me that more than once. But the desire to test myself at something new has gnawed at me over the past year. After exploring physical challenges, and rejecting several as too time-consuming and injury-producing to take on, I settled on these two events.

With all three of our kids running track over years, both at the high school and collegiately at the D-III level, their journeys motivated me. Through hard work, consistent training, they all achieved some major milestones, ones that generate tremendous pride in me. And in some ways, it brought be me back to younger days. “What if I decided to compete in a track and field event?”


It’s not like I haven’t done races before. I ran three marathons in my 30s, biked across North America in my 20s, and have run multiple 10k and 5k races over the years. Each held challenges. Typically I wanted to finish or set a time I wanted to accomplish. Now I want to arrive at Homestead High School north of Milwaukee uninjured. That’s my first goal.

That might make you chuckle or smile, but it’s a legitimate concern. Since beginning a very slow buildup of training, I’ve experienced a significant hamstring pull that kept me from running for three weeks. This is a big challenge for the older runner: How to avoid injury. You want to push yourself. You heart, mind and body want to sprint the 800. But you cannot do that. Your body rejects it.
 
Instead, you must figure out how to push yourself, run within limits, without over-extending. Run hard, run smart, know your body, don’t overdo it. That’s hard. Much harder than being 18 and taking off full blast and smokin’ it.
 
When I first broached the idea of entering the over-60 age bracket, our son Kirby told me not to run the 800. I had bone heel surgery in October 2017, and he said I would be coming back from that too soon and would hurt myself. I said to him, “By the time the Olympics roll around, it will be close to two years from the surgery. I can do it.” He suggested I throw the shotput. I agreed. But also added the 800.
 
It’s been an interesting psychological period prepping for the events. That first step is your mental commitment. You have to talk yourself into it. Sounds easy, but you have to get over that hump of thinking you can do it, and “it sounds like fun,” to tackling the task, which includes a full commitment to get your body in shape for the events.

You can just go out there and run.  You can’t just go out there and throw the metal ball. Well, I guess you could, but you’d suck and get injured. So, stay with me on this. Next week, we’ll take up the training regime, the mental and physical rigors. Hope you enjoy the ride with me.
 
(Editor’s note: This column is the first in a series that will continue to run up through the 2019 Wisconsin Senior Olympics August 18. Next week: Training starts.)
​

​Mad Magazine died. They announced the end of production of new material. We are all poorer for this.
 
For anyone over the age of 55 (more or less) and even for many who are much younger than that (more on that later), the passing of the magazine is worth mourning. The skewering of entertainment, politics and plain shallowness of much popular culture was the target of most of their barbs over the years, and they stuck the arrow in deep.

As a 10- or 11-year-old, I remember our dad reading Mad at our grandparents’ house and him snorting in laughter. He roared and roared. The skit mocked a television show or movie and he found a closing remark hysterical. A guy rode off on a horse, looked back and said, “Goodbye Fred.” The other guy said, “Who’s Fred?” The answer, “The mountain behind us.”
My dad nicknamed our mom “Fred” after that, something I never got until later in life (which was likely true with a lot of other humor in the magazine; it was adult humor, which made it funnier when you did get it, but it often zoomed over your head). Our mom was the mountain behind us.
 
Alfred E. Neuman, of “What, Me Worry?” fame, said it all with his goofy gapped-tooth smile. If you get a laugh, you don’t worry. That’s what the magazine was about. By inciting chuckles, you learn to live with some of our cultural stupidity and inanity. And you better be on top of things, whether you are an adolescent or an adult, or the references pass you buy.
 
As our kids got into their early teenage years, Mad magazine hopped out at me one day at an airport newsstand. I bought it on a lark. It was the annual issue that ripped the 20 of the most stupid things in public life over the past year. I think I LOL-ed at 17 of them (damn good batting average there), and was hooked again. I bought if off the newsstand a few times, our two older kids read it and found it funny (and our third latched onto it later).
 
This led to getting a subscription for them to read. Like me at that age, I imagine much soared above their cognitive powers as a 13- or 15-year-old. But they devoured it. I could hear them laughing. I would point out something, and they’d get it, and there is a joy in seeing your kids developing a keen sense of humor.
 
Spy vs. Spy was an early favorite of mine because it was so simple. Those miniature drawings in the side of the panels intrigued me until I got so old I couldn’t even read them with my x-ray glasses on. Those are meant for the little kids. The foldout on the back page, man what a piece of art! Always coming up some tongue-in-cheek remark that was relevant and amusing. The time they must have put into doing that…..

Now there’s no time. No more news. No more fresh content. They will repurpose old issues. You will be able to buy the magazine at comic bookstores. I wonder if the library will still carry it.

Two years ago in Oconomowoc, Wisc., I stopped into the public library to kill some time and checked out the magazines. Alfred E. Neuman stared back at me with his glassy smile. I was heartened. I sat down, dug in, and thought, “You know, this is a heckuva library.”

​We all have habits. Good and bad.
 
Minimize the bad and you improve your life. Maximize the good and improve your life. Do the opposite and your life heads in the opposite direction.

Seems like simple life lessons. But it seems to me that too often we fixate on the shortcut, that there’s a magical way on the journey to get to your destination which you’ll be able accomplish easily. The human urge focuses on luck or speed. “Man, if I just won that the lottery, then….. I’ve got this great idea for a novel, but don’t have the time to write it up.”
 
We make excuses. Or we pretend outside variables prevent us from certain goals.
 
Having just finished on a book on leadership that included a chapter on the importance of habits, it got me thinking about life ins general and those who succeed at their job or a specific skill or even at simple things like listening to others (ponder that one and bit, and tell me how many people in your life actually take the time to listen to what you have to say and ask a question to find out something more; I’ll bet the answer is “not many.”).
 
Habits are established through repetition and hard work. If you get up every morning and work out for an hour, you’re going t find that you get in better shape. Whether you try to lose weight or increase your speed or strength, that habit of daily workouts will get you there.
 
As a writer, 30 years ago I used to wonder how the people I read, like a newspaper columnist, non-fiction writer or novelist, got so good. There were some younger people who had published works, but they were the exception. Most really good writers take notes, tap at the keyboard, research and edit for years and years. Their skills come from their habits. If they have good habits and stick to it, what happens? Their writing keeps getting better and better.
 
This is true of parenting. I’m not sure we compliment good parenting enough in the world. Good parents have solid positive habits. They demonstrate through their behavior good ways to communicate, treat others and get things done on time and with a minimum of hassle. Our children, as they grow up, watch and learn from these habits.

Do you know someone who regularly shows up late to events? They probably didn’t have that parental role model demonstrating that it’s important to be on time. They didn’t establish that good habit and now they inconvenience others by showing up late regularly.
 
Does a coworker interrupt you regularly and not wait for you to finish a sentence before he has to tell you his next great story? He never developed the habit of listening and waiting for the other person to finish an explanation and actually consider what the person is saying, and perhaps even ask a follow-up question for elaboration. They have the bad habit of wanting to get their word in first.
 
Good habits take time. You must apply yourself diligently and consistently to develop good habits that bode you well over the years.
 
Take one bad habit and eliminate it. Take one good habit and focus on it. See how your life changes for the better.