Weight-bearing exercises

and other midlife indignities

Every other day I go to the YMCA and do weight-bearing exercises on the e-gym circuit. I started doing this about a year ago, after my husband David told me that without weight-bearing exercises, women of a certain age tend to collapse like an underbaked soufflé. (Way to compliment your wife, David. Try flowers next time.)

For the record, that’s not me. My hair is blonde now, the better to disguise gray roots. Photo by John Arano on Unsplash

David is right, of course. I’m a woman of a certain age and I need to do weight-bearing exercises to keep my already porous bones from turning to dust. I also need to take a collagen supplement and fish oil capsules in the morning and rub retinol cream on my face at night and invest in expensive cosmetic products for “mature” women so I don’t look like Lorna Raver in Drag Me to Hell. The tricky part is not overdoing the expensive cosmetic products, because then I end up looking like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Left: when you don't use retinol creams. Right: there comes a point where there is not enough light-diffusing foundation or bright lipstick to hide your age.

Midlife is a whole thing. Now that I think about it, I’m not even in midlife anymore, unless I plan to live to 112, which is probably not going to happen. But anyway, I’m taking the supplements and using the retinol creams and doing the weight-bearing exercises, even though I hate going to the gym and I hate weights. The good thing about the e-gym circuit is that it’s designed for people who hate gyms and weights. You don’t have to adjust the machines or tinker with weights or think. All you have to do is scan your special wristband on each of the nine machines and everything automatically adjusts for you. The only thing required of you, as a woman of a certain age, is that you align your pulls and pushes and lifts with the sine wave on the screen. If you do, the big yellow circle that mirrors your movements consumes the yellow dots on the sine wave, like the world’s most depressing game of Pac-Man.

Each of the machines has a sign on it that says “Orientation required before use.” I think middle age should also come with such a sign. Like, a helpful staff member walks you through the different milestones (loss of collagen, plantar fasciitis, inability to find the glasses you are wearing on your face), explaining which muscle groups and cognitive functions are most likely to call it quits and in what order. Except that nothing and no one prepares you for middle age, not even those who are middle-aged. Oh, they try. They tell you about their aches and pains and their memory lapses. Nora Ephron told us that she felt bad about her neck. When I was a teenager, my Grandma Tsilya told me that aging was the worst disease in the world. I shrugged and thought, “Why are old people so cranky?”

Old people are cranky because their back hurts and they forgot why they walked into that room just now and they can’t read the small print on their expensive retinol cream and also because THEY TOLD US AND WE DIDN’T LISTEN. Of course we didn’t. Who wants to listen to someone complain about plantar fasciitis when you have healing powers like Wolverine? Who can imagine drooping jowls when you’re bursting with collagen and unearned confidence? Speaking of old people, do you know who’s old? Everyone who uses the e-gym circuit at the YMCA.

I don’t know why I thought that hot young people use the e-gym circuit. Maybe because I secretly thought that using the e-gym circuit would make me young and hot. I’ve been doing the e-gym circuit for a year, give or take, and I am sorry to report that I have become neither younger nor hotter, unless you count occasional hot flashes. Anyway, there are no hot young people on the e-gym circuit. The hot young people are in the free weights room grunting as they lift the equivalent of a car or running so fast on the treadmill that their feet are a blur. The e-gym circuit is not for them. The e-gym circuit is for the elderly and the slow-moving who go around and around, struggling to align their movements with the big yellow circle and the yellow dots on the sine wave so as to consume as many yellow dots as possible, and when they’re not doing that, they’re struggling to consume as much protein as possible. (Seriously, when did consuming protein become everyone’s full time job?)

There’s a meme floating around on the internet that says something like “Inside every old person is a young person saying, ‘WTF happened?’” and boy is that is the truth. You feel 17 inside and then you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror or a plate glass window or, Lord have mercy on your soul, the Target security camera, and you’re like, “Dear God, what is that thing?”

It’s you. That thing is you. That thing is your karmic comeuppance for ignoring your mother when she said “Don’t make that face, it’ll stay like that.”

Time is a thief. Time spares no one. Not even Cary Elwes, whom I will always remember as a hot young person in The Princess Bride. Wanna know how old Cary Elwes is now? 62. I mean, he looks pretty great for 62, but he no longer looks like a baby-faced farm boy. Now he looks like Dread Pirate Roberts’s handsome grandpa. I wonder if he does weight-bearing exercises.

I think I know the real reason for doing weight-bearing exercises, and it’s not to preserve muscle mass and bone density and help with balance. Sure, it’s for those things too, but it’s also for helping us bear the weight of the life we’ve already lived. Losses, regrets, disappointments—that shit’s heavy, y’all. The older you get, the heavier it is. But if you go to the gym every other day and focus your attention on a yellow circle as it travels up and down sine waves, one minute per machine, nine machines total, eighteen times if you do the circuit twice, you get a short reprieve. It’s a distraction and it’s good for building muscle mass and balance! Win-win!

Late last year, I wrote about hunting for a pair of overalls that I used to own in the ‘90s. They were perfect—Old Navy, probably, or maybe GAP, slouchy but also casually sexy. They went with my unguarded smile and my golden skin and my sense that anything was possible. Then I stupidly gave them away and they were gone forever. The post went low-key viral, in part, I think, because it was titled “How not to dress like a middle-aged woman desperately looking for her lost youth” and some people thought it contained actual fashion advice. (Haha, joke’s on them—I used to unironically wear leg warmers in the ‘80s and I wasn’t even a dancer.) Some readers were like, “Girl, wear whatever you want” and others were all, “Don’t tell me how to dress” and still others were like “Here’s a link to overalls I really love” and because of that, I met some truly amazing people. But in the end, it wasn’t about the overalls at all. It was about nostalgia for my younger self and about the friendship at the heart of my quest to find my original overalls and ultimately about finding others to help carry the weight of everything we’ve accumulated.

There’s a saying about getting older—that sometimes, age comes with wisdom, and sometimes, age comes alone. I disagree. It’s never either/or, all or nothing. Age comes with extra flesh around our once-taut waists, deepening grooves on either side of our mouths, clothes that no longer fit, or fit differently, tormenting reminders of what we got wrong. It comes with wisdom (sometimes), and it comes with weight (always), but it also comes with lightness. I no longer take myself as seriously as I did when I was younger. I notice beauty more. I still ask, “WTF is wrong with people?” on a regular basis, but I also recognize that something is TF wrong with all of us. I care less about the things that used to seem vitally important. There’s a reason the We Do Not Care Club is having a moment on social media.

It can get lonely here, in midlife or whatever this is. It’s heavy. Occasionally, it’s hot, and not in a good way. We can try to explain all this to the young (anyone under age 50 is now practically a child in my eyes), but they won’t listen, or if they listen, they won’t understand. Whatever. We do not care. Okay, maybe we care a little bit, but we have more important things to care about, and to carry.

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