It happened just over six months ago, and it now seems like a different age. I am different too, regenerated, changed from the inside to the outside by what happened then.

Beautiful Places, Terrible Times

The setting was the beautiful Savoie region of the French Alps, where I was staying on holiday with my wife and my four year old son. The year was 2004, the month was August, the sun was dazzlingly hot, everything was perfect for having a great time. And my forty-first birthday was only a few days away.

But I was not having a good time, I was not enjoying it one bit. Especially when I looked into the mirror. At these times I might really have made the jump, accepting what I had become. Chalking it down to age. After all, I had already been a quadragenarian for almost a year.

Acceptance of what my body had become would have been fatal. I will never know how close I came to a serious cardiovascular accident, to diabetes or to countless other potentially fatal problems, and I suppose I’d rather not know. I am just happy that I did not make the jump because I believe that it would have made it extremely difficult to save my life. But thankfully, I never adjusted my mental picture of myself to the reality of my body. I always had the idea in the back of my mind that I could do something about it. I just did not know how or make it a priority until that summer. I had not realized the urgency of making a change.

Besides, I had more important preoccupations. Or at least, I sincerely thought I did.

I thought that my long-held interest in the more intellectual and spiritual side of life was more important than my daily existence in the material world. And in truth, having made music my career, perhaps I needed that approach in my formative years. But I seriously overdid it.

Mental Connections

I have long held the belief that mind creates reality, and that the universe can take on the meaning we give it, collectively and, to a degree, individually. This notion runs through many belief systems, from spiritual traditions to physics and to medicine. I have found echoes of it in sources such as Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan book of living and dying, the writings of physicist David Bohm and Deepak Chopra’s inspiring books about medicine. Many of us have personally witnessed enough strange coincidences, synchronicities, to feel intimately connected, be it fleetingly, to the deeper source of “meaning”.

In many ways this belief has helped me shape my life the way I wanted it. I am an ordinary guy, and have no superpowers (I wish!), yet sometimes I have felt some magic taking place and I have felt deeply in control of events. It did not make me immensely rich or powerful. I am simply talking about achieving goals that mattered tremendously to me, for whatever reason. At one point these goals included becoming a proficient musician and being able to make a decent living from music. At another time, I was offered a job I had been dreaming of… without applying for it, just as if it was meant to be.

However much I felt I had achieved by focusing my mind and resources on particular goals, however much my musical training taught me the value of discipline, over the years I lost it all when it came to my body. I was reasonably healthy at twenty years old, but later on gained some weight that was not healthy muscle… at around twenty-five I exercised and became somewhat leaner and very light through starving myself. Only to gain all the weight back, with interest, after a few years.

Physical Shortcomings and The Infamous 4-0

To cut a long story short, I had a some ups and downs, but by the time I reached 40 I was grossly overweight. To the point that it hurt. To the point that looking in the mirror was painful. To the point that I would not wear a tee-shirt without reasonably long sleeves (even my arms had no shape). And as for going to the beach, forget it… there was no way, because I did not want to see myself that way. In fact, just taking off a sweater in a public place would be an embarrassment, in case the tee-shirt underneath was pulled up with it revealing some of the excess flesh I carried. Well… if you read this, perhaps you know how this feels. If not, I hope you never find out. In short, I did not “fit into” this body. It was simply not my mental picture of my body that was sent back by the mirror. And that mismatch hurt, deeply.

During these holidays, the hardest point was when I attempted to play some football (soccer if you are American) with my four year old and we were joined by another kid who was perhaps nine or ten years old.

I just couldn’t do it. I pretended I was okay, but with every step I ran I felt pain shoot up my legs. It felt horrible and when we got back to the chalet I could only sit on a couch with my feet up, totally depressed, wondering what it was… vascular problems? Sure, even walking to town felt difficult, my ankles hurt when I walked a few minutes at a moderate pace. But I did not know I had fallen so low.

The pain I felt when playing soccer was probably shin splints, and it is gone now. But whatever it was, it did force me to face reality. I certainly want to be there for my son, and that includes such simple things as being there to play soccer.

The Role Modeling Breakthrough

Why I did not react earlier, I cannot say. But I can pinpoint the day when inspiration struck.

During this holiday of summer 2004, the Olympic Games took place in Athens. I was watching the games on TV on… (coincidence? Synchronicity?) my forty-first birthday.

And suddenly she was there, on the running track. A sculpture, seemingly untouched by the passing years. I was not particularly “into sports”, you see. I had a casual and occasional spectator interest, but I never made sports a priority. So at first, I just smiled at seeing her again, a beautiful athlete I remembered seeing four years before, taking part in the Sidney Olympics. It was like “oh…, here she is again”.

Then I started to realize, and my world began to crumble, as I found out much more about her, from the live commentary… and later from the Internet. That day of 2004, on my birthday, Merlene Ottey became my inspiration.

At forty-four years old on the day I turned forty-one, I saw her compete against sprinters so young that they were not even born when she competed in her second Olympics. In fact, nearly half of the sprint competitors in Athens 2004 were not even born when she won her first medal in her first Olympics in Moscow in 1980. And on this day she ended… second fastest in her qualifying heat.

The Jamaican federation had let her go and she was running for her new country, Slovenia. She was in a corridor between two young Jamaican sprinters, her “replacements”.

She beat them. She qualified, they did not.

Does thinking about this take your breath away? It did mine.

There has to be a strong mind molding this perfectly tuned body, there has to be unerring focus and a steely discipline. Merlene Ottey won her first medal in 1980 when she was twenty. Her tally includes eight Olympics medals and fourteen World Championship medals. She reminded me that the mind can accomplish anything. It is anecdotal that she never won Olympic gold. What matters is her grace. It is grace when she says her admiration for a younger opponent, Gail Devers, who only just beat her to gold in Atlanta by… five thousandths of a second (Merlene was thirty-six then!). It is grace that such people walk, live and breathe on the same planet as we do. This woman, three years older than me, reminded me that there is still, and always, a chance.

She did not make it to the Athens sprint finals. If she had, I would not have been moved more deeply because the journey matters every bit as much as the destination. Merlene’s journey includes the Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984, Seoul 1988, Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 Olympics.

You may want to read that list a second time. You may want to remember what you were doing in 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004 to grasp the enormity of that accomplishment.

For me, she was a sprinter when I was a student and she was a sprinter when I was middle-aged man and a father, and she was a sprinter through all the years in between.

I any case, my world of negativity was shattered. Any excuses simply evaporated.

At forty-one I could not play football (soccer) with my four-year old.

At forty-four, three years older than my age, she could end second in an Olympic 100 meters qualifying round, competing against the best athletes in the world, all at the peak of their physical powers and hyper-motivated.

This is beyond “normality”, beyond commonly accepted preconceptions. Olympic sprinting is not “supposed” to be a job, it’s supposed to be the peak of one’s career. And then you move on to something else. That’s just how most people see it.

Editor’s Note: Vincent’s article will be continued next month. To read more about how Vincent’s life was impacted, order Fit Over 40 now.