Code Of The Ageless Warrior

“Run hard when it’s hard to run.” ~Pavvo

Most of us defer to physical limitations somewhere in middle age. I’m not one of those people.

For me there is no age really, only time, and competing is better than any drug. Not because I thrive off of thrashing people in sports, which has its merits. But because I have to test and push myself to feel truly alive, and the oxygen rush and endorphins from sports are better than anything on the planet, except for one thing. Because a life of physical exertion is life to me, and a lack of it is a partial end of it.

I started playing football at eight years old and played until I was twenty-one at Florida State. It was a whole way of life that I relished and at times detested. My father, who’d played at Georgia Tech, inspired me by taking me to Tech games, where the colors and noise and excitement were infectious. He would stride through the house singing “You've got to be a football hero, to get along with the beautiful girls….” And since I liked football, and was crazy about girls, it worked beautifully for me.

I loved the thrill of the game and hitting, the camaraderie of a band of brothers on a mission, and running down the field wide open on an opening kick off hell-bent-for-leather like a kamikaze madman making the tackle.

I tried to quit a few times, once at eleven, unless the coaches let me carry the football. Sure, they said, come on back and we’ll give it a try. They gave me the ball a few times then threw me back into the line where I belonged and stayed.

But there is nothing like throwing that perfect block and watching your running back’s legs hurtle through the line for a seventy yard touchdown, or sacking a quarterback on third down in the fourth quarter of a close game. It’s a high only doing it can give you.

In the off season my older brother and I would go to a field and run a mile, then toss “The Duke,” the NFL ball made by Wilson, running routes and punting to each other until it was too dark to see.

After full pads football there were serious touch football games and so much handball I could grab flies out of the air like they were standing still.

And I was always running.

At 30 I became obsessed with tennis. A friend and I were determined to hit tennis balls like a pro, and for the first few months would run outside the courts and pick up all the balls in the grass every fifteen minutes. Gradually we kept them inside and on the court, and in a few years were hitting topspin and backspin cross court backhands with the best of them. We’d get on clay courts in the middle of the southern sweltering heat wearing nothing but shorts and tennis shoes and run each other literally into the ground.

In my forties I became addicted to softball and every weekend our family life revolved around it. I played a weeknight at Softball Country Club where there were twelve fields and batting cages and some of the teams were bruisers who hit rockets, and afterword we’d sit in the clubhouse watching other games, getting drunk to celebrate or drown our sorrows, or go to Hooters for wings and beer, laughing at our middle age Viking warrior lechery.

Once diving for a fly ball in left field on a foggy February night my right hamstring felt like I’d been slapped with a shotgun. I heard the muscle pop and practically crawled off the field, but as soon as I could I was back out there charging line drives again.

I was always running, running on beaches, running in the rain, running up stadium steps at night, doing sit-ups, push-ups, chin-ups, craving the oxygenated body. I’d worked out with weights in my football years, but my father who had Indian strength and could walk up steps on his hands, said to do workouts that gave you usable strength, and I went back to that. I ran a mile or two quickly just about every day, always got high off of it, and hated to miss it.

When my two boys were old enough we started playing basketball at a nearby gym. I’d played basketball for fun as a kid, didn't have extraordinary court skills, but used my athleticism to become a competitive player in my fifties, running with twenty year olds. When some guy in his forties started moaning about “getting old,” my younger son and I looked at each other and laughed. I was in my late fifties and complaining about “getting old” was sacrilege to me. Complaining was not giving the proper respect and gratitude for the privilege of being able to play, period.

Because if you talk and moan and whine about being old, you will be fast.

Whatever you tell yourself is what the body, mind and spirit will believe. It is a mantra that defines you, not an explanation or fact; you limit yourself and give yourself excuses to do less and less, and pretty soon you can’t do anything at all, or don’t want to.

Others will understand, of course, because most people are with you. It’s time to hang it up. It hurts too much. Nobody plays basketball at your age.

But if doing is ageless, then there is no real age, only experience. There are obvious changes, but compensations too. An older athlete, taking all he’s learned since childhood from other sports, can use his wiles and practical expertise to his advantage, knowing when and where to press, seeing more of the flow of things than the less traveled athlete, and can contribute as a leader and encourager. And if he’s worked out all his life he can play the game too.

To celebrate his 6oth birthday Jack LaLanne swam from Alcatraz Island across San Francisco Bay handcuffed and shackled. To mark his 70th birthday, he towed a flotilla of 70 rowboats during a mile-long swim from Long Beach Harbor to the Queensway Bridge, both in Long Beach, Calif.

The human body is capable of far more than we give it credit for, given everything it needs to perform at its best, not being told it’s time to quit.

No one lives forever, and there may come a time I’ll settle for walks on the beach, but not any time soon. I still crave the exhilaration of wind in my face on a fast break, of sinking a wet thirty footer, of snatching down rebounds and firing laser passes to the other end of the court. I may feel like I've been run over by a truck after two hours on the basketball court, but a day or two later I’m ready to go again.

As long as I can do this, after knee surgeries if necessary to keep doing it, I’m running with the same intensity and joy and unbridled passion I had when I was twenty, because every second of it is another blessed chance to live all the way up. It is the sweet nectar of working out and the game that makes life burn and shine more brilliantly, a kind of contagious laughter of the senses and heart, that precious pumping of blood and breath, that luxurious pouring of hard fought and glorious athletic sweat.

Because there is no age, there is only time.

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Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor, recently seen on True Detective, Hidden Figures, Boy Erased, a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.