I am Getting Too Old For This

Last Friday my wife and I successfully completed a Mixed Doubles HYROX. We put a lot of training and time into doing well, and I was really proud of how we pushed ourselves because it was one of the hardest physical competitions I have done in my life.

As I was doing some of the running, I was going through different ways to motivate myself to keep moving forward and one of them was the fact that at 37, I am probably in the best shape of my life and unquestionably in better shape than I was at 22. When I was 22, I wouldn't have been able to run the first few laps without quitting and probably would've made fun of the people doing it while secretly being jealous that I wasn't in better shape.

Throughout the race I kept thinking about the concept of age because it has been a big sticking point for me lately and seems to be bubbling up everywhere around me and was a theme of the entire race.

Like during the third station when I got a really bad leg cramp and my first thought wasn't, "Oh this is bad, now I'm going to fail." It was, "How am I going to finish this despite what just happened?" There was no way I was going to let myself quit, and there was definitely no way I was going to let my wife down after everything we had put into getting there together.

At 13 years old, way younger than I am today, I would've quit. I quit basketball tryouts because we had to run too much and missed football practice because I got hit too hard. I would've found a reason to stop versus figuring out how to accomplish the goal.

That's the part of aging I think we forget about. Yes, our bodies get older but we also gain things along the way. At 13 my instinct was to find a reason to stop and at 37 my instinct was to figure out how to finish, not just for myself anymore, but for the people counting on me too.

This isn't just limited to physical things. I talk to people every single day of varying ages and there is always some version of the same thing:

27: I'm too young. I don't have enough experience.

37: I'm too busy. Kids, responsibilities, life.

47: I'm almost 50. I should've figured this out already.

57: It's probably too late to start now.

So the question I have is, what age exactly is it that we're supposed to figure everything out? At what age do we peak? At what age are we old enough to know what we're doing but young enough that we haven't missed our chance?

There isn't one.

The answer is different for everyone, and the worst thing we can do is predetermine what is possible just because of the amount of years we've been on this planet.

Listen, I get it. At 22, I could stay out until 2a and be ready to go the next morning at 8a without any problems. Now if I have an IPA at dinner, I'm not fully recovered for 48 hours. Age absolutely plays a factor in what we can do, but it's just that, a factor. It isn't the thing that decides who we are or what we can accomplish, and if we use it that way, a lot of the time it's just an excuse not to do the thing we actually want to do.

Instead of judging the 21-year-old for being too young and not knowing anything or assuming the 57-year-old is wise and has it all figured out, let's just find out. There are a lot of 21-year-olds who are a lot smarter than me on a lot of topics and there are a lot of 57-year-olds who really just have a lot of reasons why they can't do things anymore.

The test is pretty simple: Have you actually found out what you're capable of, or have you decided without testing it?

The same thing goes for beating ourselves up because we should've figured something out sooner. I actually hope 47-year-old me looks back at some of the things I believe today and shakes his head because that means I learned something over those 10 years. We should probably look back at some of the things we thought, decisions we made and ways we lived and wonder what the hell we were thinking because the alternative is going through our entire lives without ever evolving or learning.

I don't know if this is the most physically fit I will ever be in my life, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. My mentality though is that I am going to be better at 38, 48 and even 58, and during the race I saw something that gave me a pretty good reason to make sure that happens.

I saw guys around that age competing with their adult children. When I'm 58, Cooper will be 23, and my guess is he will be into physical competitions of some sort. I'll be damned if I'm not in good enough shape to compete with him because I decided somewhere along the way that I was "getting too old" to do this type of stuff.

Who knows, maybe along the way I find out what my actual potential is physically, in business and everywhere else in my life. That seems a hell of a lot better than deciding the answer ahead of time because of my age.

My hope for the 1,000 or so people who read what I write each week is pretty simple. If you've been telling yourself you're too old to start the business, change careers, get into great shape, compete in something, learn something new or become a different version of yourself, maybe it's time to say Fuck that and actually find out.

I'm officially retiring "I'm getting too old for this."

What about you? What are you done calling yourself too old for?