Last year when I turned seventy years old, I felt the need to complete a birthday physical challenge. The challenge was to swim my age. In other words, I would swim for seventy-minutes. That was fun. This year turning seventy-one left me uninspired. Doing anything for seventy-one minutes didn’t seem like much of a challenge. I wasn’t ready to ride my bike for seventy-one miles and doing seventy-one bench presses with dumbbells didn’t grab my imagination. So, I decided there would be no challenge on my seventy-first birthday.
Then my brother Chuck called to wish me a ‘Happy Birthday’ and inquired about my birthday challenge. Hmmm!
The wheels began to turn in my brain (not as rapidly as they used to). A little research brought me to an article that began with this, “the birthday challenge game as we know it dates back to the early 1990s when a debonair super-athlete named Steve Edwards was running a video shop in Isla Vista, CA. One day, he saw a video clip of the original fitness guru, Jack Lalanne, pulling a boat from Alcatraz to San Francisco to celebrate his 60th birthday. Lalanne had his hands and feet tied and was towing a 1,000-pound boat!
That got Edwards thinking about doing something monumental for his own birthday. His goal—running 23 8,000-foot-plus peaks in California’s San Gabriel mountains.”
Well both those guys were nuts. But the article got me thinking.
It dawned on me the challenge didn’t have to include seventy-one of anything. There is no rule about what a valid birthday challenge needs to include. So, I came up with a challenge for my seventy-first birthday plus three days. It is a challenge that does not require me to have my hands and feet tied. This challenge also doesn’t require me to visit California.
My challenge this year is to complete a ‘Tin-guy Triathlon’ so named in homage to The Ironman Triathlon Championship held in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. The ‘Tin-guy Triathlon’ will consist of a sixty-minute bike ride (not 112 miles), followed by a thirty-minute swim (not a 2.4 mile swim) before ending with a walk around our neighborhood (approximately 1.3 miles not 26.22 miles). The plan also includes writing about the event on the same day. So, the remainder of this blog will be composed while I am in a state of exhaustion. This should be ‘verly inter-resting’.
The challenge has been met and I am upright in front of my computer. The bike leg of my triathlon began under clear skies with a temperature of 53 degrees. There was one brief stop to catch a picture at ‘Give The Kids The World’ before I finished my sixty minute ride in sixty-three minutes. The ‘Give Kids The World Village’ is a nonprofit resort in Kissimmee, for children with critical illnesses and their families. The resort’s focus is providing accommodations and access to donated theme park tickets.‘ I arrived at the entrance just as three buses were jockeying through the gate so I took the photo from the other side of Bass Road to avoid being run over.
We had a slight glitch when I arrived back at the house. My garage door opener didn’t open the garage door. I went to the keypad thinking the battery was used up in the handheld opener. But nothing happened here either.’ The power must be off,’ I thought. Sure enough, My Jane answered my knocking and said the power had been off for about twenty minutes. My favorite Mother-in-law opened her bedroom door and exclaimed, “We are in the dark.”
Of course, the triathlon was put on pause while I checked the switch box before contacting our utility company. There wasn’t anything else I could do about the electricity. After receiving the okay to continue I donned my bathing suit and stepped outside. The air temperature was still only 57 degrees but, even with the break in power the water temperature was above eighty degrees. Thirty minutes later I climbed out of the pool into 61-degree air and hurried inside. The power came on about ten minutes into the swim, so the ladies had been able to brew and enjoy a cup of coffee while I was swimming.
I quickly dressed, ate a spoonful of peanut butter, drank some water and set out on my walk. I chose to walk due to a series of leg injuries and aging issues that prevent me from running more than half a block at any given time. Today was a beautiful winter day in Florida and I reveled in being out and about. Halfway around the neighborhood my right hamstring began reminding me why I can no longer sprint to first base. My left knee started to suggest that I do not suddenly decide to engage in any games involving a court. But both body parts let up and I finished the walk with no pain. Twenty-two minutes after beginning the walk I returned home. (Alexa: Play, I Get Around by the Beach Boys) In my late twenties and early thirties I could run sub six-minute miles. My times in road races, except one, averaged under eight minutes a mile. The one exception was the eleven mile Pagoda Run in Reading, PA. My time for that race was an even eighty-eight minutes. What a difference a ‘few’ years make in physical skills.
I showered ate some soup and had a piece of my birthday cake to celebrate completing this year’s birthday challenge.
I’m pretty sure it is now nap time. When I wake up it will be time to plan my next birthday challenge.
See you next time.