I’ll turn 60 this week, and I decided to mark that milestone by not acting my age.
Three friends and I headed for the mountains last Sunday (and I might add that my friends are even older than I am.) We drove to a trailhead in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, shouldered daypacks, and walked up. And up. And up. By day’s end we had covered 13 miles, gaining (and of course later losing) three thousand feet of elevation.
We hiked like super-athletes, barely breaking a sweat. Coaches for the US Olympic Marathon team should have been there to check our resting heart rates and to interview us to learn our training secrets.
My goodness we hiked like finely-tuned human machines!
And so to AARP and other Senior Citizen groups I say: “Send your Golden Years magazines and your Retirement Investment Opportunity junk mail ads to somebody else. I plan to spend my 60th year leaving forty-year-olds behind me in the dust."
Sixty is the new thirty!
***
I joke of course.
My friends and I did sweat on our hike -- a little.
And 60 is probably just the new 59.9.
The memorable thing about the hike my friends and I did won’t be how fast we moved, or whether we felt in-shape, or even that we did the trip on the week of my 60th birthday.
What we WILL remember is the staggering beauty of the place we visited...the knock-our-socks-off, electric color of the larch trees. And the new, fresh snow on the high country landscape.
We’ll remember the good conversations we had during the drive, and at dinner after the hike.
And I’m sure that my friends and I will all agree that this Hiking Life is a freaking perfect way to spend our Golden Years.
