Running amok and other golden age pursuits

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Don’t quit before the miracle.”

The other day I heard two old duffers dragging their sorry carcasses off the golf course muttering, “We shoulda quit before the disaster.”

The first 18 holes, they reported, went swimmingly. So they gamely labored on until their bodies, if not their wives, began to howl in protest.

The point is, diminishing returns catch up with all of us, eventually. And it’s not just in exercise. When we work too much, play too much, eat too much at the church potluck, we will reach the diminishing point, or what I call The D Point.

Most people when starting an exercise program panic, try to do too much too fast and reach

The D Point almost before they get started.

Why lose a pound in a week, they reckon, when you could lose a pound in an hour?

 Go to any Loud Grunting Health Club and you’ll see some 50 or older man squeezed into a too-tight outfit exercising with grim determination until he quits and takes up Checkers.

Note: Get a doctor’s OK before engaging in a rigorous fitness program.

Most of us by the babyhood of old age — that is, our early 50s — are as slow moving as the Federal Trade Commission.

Our muscles, atrophying from years of disuse, from regular feedings at the fast food trough, howl when we try to regain our youth.

Exercise, though, may be critical to having a high quality of life when we reach 50 and better. The book “Younger Next Year,” by Chris Crowley and Dr. Harry Lodge, seeks to help people live as if they’re 50 until they are 80 or older. The authors recommend building to the point where you do aerobic exercise four days a week and weight train two days a week (45 minutes a day).

It’s like a second job.

Of course, even the most rigorous exercise program offers no guarantees. You will still need to see a doctor, but probably not as often, and you still may die, too soon.

What’s more, exercise can’t stop all aspects of aging. The hair will still go white and the skin begin to resemble dried plums.

Nevertheless, most of us would benefit from regular exercise. You don’t have to be a great athlete. Even those of us with the raw leaping ability of a Studebaker can benefit from aerobics and weight training.

Some people will say accept old age and its rickety scaffolding. Be happy as a sedentary plump lump of humanity.

But with a lot of fun profuse sweating, prolonged misery and some Popeyed heaves, the 50 and older crowd can feel younger next year.

Whether you look good in spandex or not, it’s time to become a perpetual motion machine like our hunter-gatherer forbears. It’s time to give yourself some quality “golden years.”

It’s our choice. We need not reach The D Point — not yet anyway. Even if we have the foot speed of a daisy, we can do more in “old age” than just run amok.

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