What It Means When You Suddenly Feel Old

I felt younger than my age for the longest time, right up until I didn’t. Then everything went south, and quickly. What causes that split second when guys our age start to actually feel their age?​​

I spent my 20s running marathons, and my 30s on softball fields and racquetball courts. My 40s were spent as a father of two young children, which was as challenging and exhausting as my earlier athletic endeavors.​​

On the cusp of 50, I started down the CrossFit path. I worked out religiously with a hard-core crew decades younger than me and managed to hold my own — at least until a torn meniscus and rotator cuff sent me back to traditional lifting and cardio.​​

The doctor explained that the cartilage was still fine but both knees were riddled with arthritis. I asked what had caused it, and he said it was quite common for men my age.​​

Men. My. Age. That one hurt.​​

It happened like Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises when a character is asked how he went bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.” That’s how I aged. The slow, lingering maladies of the past few years combined all at once to push me off the cliff of physically fit into the chasm of perpetually sore.​​

The occasional plantar fasciitis flare-up was now full-blown heel pain during any activity. An hour of hard-core racquetball required a two-day recovery. My beat-up shoulders brought me to the point where my travel-baseball-playing son had a stronger arm than me. ​​

Instead of staying quiet about my sudden and rapid decline, I reached out to some of my 50-something peers. To my surprise, they too had their own “falling off the cliff” moments. Everyone I talked to remembered exactly when they instantly felt older. Is there really a switch our body flips to make us feel our age? ​​

“I don’t think the literature or any data supports a precipitous fall-off in the 50s,” says Miriam C. Morey, a professor emeritus at the Duke University School of Medicine. “In general, decline is quite gradual and modified by health status and fitness.”​​

So how to explain that sudden feeling that everything has gone south in an instant? Aging tends to speed up “when you notice the actual cliff itself,” says Thomas Buford, director of the Center for Exercise Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.​​