On Frozen Blog

The dancer slows her frantic pace
In pain and desperation
Her aching limbs and downcast face
Aglow with perspiration

Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire
With just the briefest pause
Flooding through her memory
The echoes of old applause

She limps across the floor
And closes her bedroom door…

The writer stares with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage

Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision

And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more…

Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we’d like to be

Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you, the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee…

“Losing It,” by N. Peart

Yesterday I received email from a college chum informing me that his suburban Cincinnati beer league team was going like gangbusters out of the gate but that he, individually, wasn’t producing anywhere near his normal numbers. Nearing 40, diet and generally fitness conscious, a fairly avid runner, Tim asked me for suggestions to improve his stamina and lower body strength. It seemed as if he wanted to sweat his way back into stardom.

On the sheet at seventeen we stride like Superman. At 27, with an extra gasp, still we double-shift late in the third behind by a goal. But at 37 . . . the conspiracy starts. Our hockey hearts still perfectly pump their passion, but immediately below a menacing mutiny undermines our mission.

“The legs feed the wolf, gentlemen,” Kurt Russell’s Herb Brooks instructs his charges in ‘Miracle’ immediately before that great movie’s first set of on-screen Herbies. But the vexation facing us over-35 beer leaguers isn’t really old legs (see Jagr on Broadway). As I told Tim, what really happens to men in their later thirties ‚Äî hockey or non-hockey playing alike ‚Äî is that our stomach muscles weaken appreciably. Attend any gathering of over 35ers at a backyard barbeque or ballgame and you’ll see the irrefutable evidence: the beer gut. It afflicts approximately 90 percent of us. Even if we don’t drink beer.

The brain and heart order the legs to rocket launch into the disruptive forecheck or spirit-breaking breakaway, but in our aging elevator shaft the once smooth ride today encounters jarring turbulence around floor seven.

The good news is that there are correctives, recourses to combat nature’s cruel and uneven intrusion on our recreating. The bad news is what they are. I told Tim to cut back on weekend beers and to initiate a regimen of stomach muscle strengthening exercises that require the diligence of morning and evening execution in bed. Each and every morning and evening.

Tim replied with an electronic nod of agreement and appreciation but was still mystified at this sudden fall to perceived mediocrity. “I still run great,” he told me. But running isn’t skating. I told him of now-in-retirement Lance Armstrong’s participation in next month’s New York City Marathon. How many athletes ‚Äî even elite ones ‚Äî take up power skating at 35?

The cruelest aspect of this body’s insurrection against itself is that near 40 our sharpshooting and playmaking skills remain largely undiminished. Tim told me that his passing is as crisp, accurate, and productive as ever, and I told him that I am as lethal picking corners now as I was in college. In time and space we still do damage, it’s just that our escort to it now is more jalopy than Jaguar.