Working in Movement

I remember looking at a baseball yearbook long ago and seeing the picture of a 39-year-old player. He looked old and grizzled, and by the standards of the day, he was. But today there are more than a few 39 year-olds making their living by being active athletes.

In the Olympics, too, the 30-something athlete shows up more and more. Athletes Slow Down More Slowly explores why this might be so. And it's not physiology, although advances in training, injury prevention and biomechanical efficiency help. The real difference lies more in economics and prolonged activity. Before professional athletes were allowed to compete in the Olympics, few athletes could afford to continue training and competing beyond their 20s:

"What we thought was aging," said Joel M. Stager, a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University, "was really just inactivity."

Today, though, there are lots of ways to get paid for moving your body in an athletic way well beyond the time of athletic retirement a few years ago:

"It's a completely different ballgame when you can make a living," said Rowdy Gaines, a former world-record holder and winner of three gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Games in swimming. He is now a commentator for NBC Sports. "It keeps you in the sport much longer."

A virtuous cycle is then formed: athletes keep competing because they can and because they have new hope of winning as they age.

What's interesting to me here is the idea that when you begin looking at context instead of narrowing on performance, it's possible to reduce limitations. In this case, what was assumed a natural physiological limitation turns out to have more to do with economics than athletics. None of us can exist without context, ourselves as we relate to our total environment. Casting a wide net, going beyond pure biomechanics or physicality can change things, sometime pretty significantly.