They Told Me There’d Be Days—Weeks—Like This

 When you’re young, people in midlife tell you about things you dismiss as “old people stuff.” They include what most grown-ups do: work mundane jobs, pay bills and navigate adult relationships, including those with the family you’re born into or create.  

Then there are the changes in your body.  Dieting and exercising but still gaining weight? Hair growing in places you didn’t know it could—or falling off the places you want to keep it? And discovering you need glasses to read books and menus?

Then there are those “mysterious aches and pains.” You know, when a limb, joint or some other part of your body hurts for no apparent reason. Did I land too hard when I stepped off a curb? Reach for something without using a step-stool or ladder? Put too much weight on one side when I got out of bed? Bump into something a little harder than I thought I did? Or is some injury I brushed off decades ago coming back to nag  me?

Of course, my cycling always gets the benefit of the doubt. I never want to blame it for any of my aches and pains, especially since it’s accounted for most of my physical conditioning and, along with my cats, nearly all of my mental health.

So what, exactly, caused that ache in and around my left ankle:  the one that’s kept me off my bike for most of this week?

I can live with mysteries about the big questions:  you know, the meaning of life, whether there’s anything after this one and why JFK, RFK, Martin, Malcolm and John were murdered. (Actually, I know who…wait, is that a sniper on the roof?!) But, dammit, I want to know why my body develops more glitches than my workplace IT system or breaks down like a Yugo when I think I’m doing everything right.

They warned me there’d be days—weeks—like this. But they never told me why, except that it’s part of “getting older.”  But as a wise old philosopher said, “I ain’t dead yet”: I am in midlife.  And I want to keep on cycling.