Views From The Leaning Rest Position

From the looks of the people watching me in the gym, you might not have expected the attraction to be 70 years old, unless you got a closer view of his wrinkles and sparse gray hair and heard what he had achieved and what he now hoped to exceed.  Many in our youth-struck land believe once you pass the so-called prime of life you should slump with your peers in resigned decrepitude.  Shunning this view has changed me from a modest exerciser to a blatant show-off.  I enjoyed the belated attention:  the newspaper reporter, radio announcer, photographer, and physical director of the YMCA, along with a few men lured from their own workouts.  They watched as this unlikely performer assumed the leaning rest position:  the misnomer, banefully humorous, that had meant all leaning and no rest to those of us who had suffered through it in the armed forces.

            Ten years before, The Daily Telegram of Adrian, Michigan, had cited me with a front-page headline: SEXAGENARIAN DOES 530 PUSHUPS.  Now, a decade later, the onlookers may have wondered not if this septuagenarian could better his personal record, but, how far he had fallen below it.  My own fear of failure, however, kept me from announcing a far more grandiose aim:  to do at least 700 of that much-shunned exercise.

            I’d already asked Denny, the physical director, not to count out loud and perhaps draw me into a cadence too fast for my secret goal.  Instead, he clicked the lap-counter in his hand for each of my pushups.  With the stop watch in view near my face, I kept my own count pacing myself to more than 20 per minute.  For me, there was no boredom in the repeated movement of only my arms.  I had much to attend to:  the tricks of the mind and the meditation I was still learning to ease the strain on my body.  I’d try to sense the earliest tremor, the first warning of distress, and then relax as much as possible the muscles not needed, and thus opposed to, the work.  Otherwise, they’d spread their tension and fatigue to the ones that had to do the work.  Locked in the strict form of the exercise, hands and feet on the mat, torso and legs in a straight line, I still found a surprising freedom of movement, invisible to the spectators.  I could shift some of the stress from one set of muscles to another by merely changing the pressure points on the palms and heels of my hands.  My breathing matched the flow of the motion; in with the dip, out with the rise, not too deep, no gulping of air as I’d seen others greedily clogging their lungs with more oxygen that they could process. 

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            I’d also welcome clusters of thought that heartened and reminded me of my progress over four decades,

most of it after the age of fifty, long past the time of the socially expected (and deplorably encouraged) decline.

            My count now reached 85 pushups.  I’d first done that many as a young soldier in the Second World War, a member of an elite combat unit called the First Special Service Force, which began what’s now known as the Green Berets.  Back then, I’d never have believed that a man old enough to be my grandfather would one day do more pushups than the combined total of myself and several of my buddies, let alone that I’d be that fugitive from time.

            With my discharge from the army in 1945, there came the too fashionable slump from hard won fitness, the 85 pushups viewed nostalgically, as the ultimate limit by a man already beginning to sink into his own fat.  Five years of college under the magnanimous G.I. Bill, along with the make-up quest for good times, left me in the worst physical shape of my grown-up life, just when I needed to be near my best.  I found work in an iron foundry, loading trucks in a relentless summer heat.  It was a curious job, you could say, for one who’d studied to become a psychologist.  Without an internship, though, I could find no opening in my chosen field and such training paid no more that 25 dollars a week, hardly enough to support a newly started family.

            So, I’d gasp for air as the merciless fork-lift, never late, would drop yet another ton of iron for me to pile into the truck.  Each load was a punishment for the harm I’d done to a body that would have once gloried in that exertion.  There, however, I learned that many are doomed to toil much of their lives in such outcrops of hell, with no chance of the rescue that came for me.  A job at last, in my own field, not as a psychologist,