The New Golden Girls

Women of a Certain Age Winning

Chad and I hate a certain commercial showing a woman dancing a jig in her kitchen. Before kicking her heels, the woman states, “Now, keep in mind, I’m in my 60s.” We hate this commercial because every woman we know, well past their 60s, is doing something more rigorous than a little jig. My grandmother played tennis into her early 90s. My mother runs a business in her late 70s. Why the disclaimer?

We—Chad and I—take it for granted that we will still be hiking the Appalachian Trail, playing competitive tennis, building swing sets, moving our children’s college furniture up flights of stairs well into our sixties and seventies and beyond. Part of this assumption is based on our own family members and personal activity. Some is due in part to newer cultural assumptions, like “50 is the new 30.” It’s wonderful not thinking the end is nigh, at least when it comes to mobility.

But perhaps we need to pause and congratulate the amazing 49-year-old Claudia Pechstein, an Olympic German speed skater, for having participated in her eighth Olympic Games last Saturday.

Part of what makes her participation so phenomenal (besides the fact that she has remained that focused and vigilant for thirty-plus years) is that Olympic-level performance becomes drastically harder after 30, when cell-division rates decrease, making regeneration and recouping more difficult and disease and injury more probable. And because she is at the age when women undergo menopause, she is also battling middle-fat, sleep interruptions, heat and carbohydrate intolerances, weakening pelvic floors, poorer eyesight, and slower reaction times.

“With age, bones tend to shrink in size and density, weakening them and making them more susceptible to fracture. You might even become a bit shorter. Muscles generally lose strength, endurance and flexibility — factors that can affect your coordination, stability and balance,” says the Mayo Clinic. “Your heart [must] work harder to pump blood through them. The heart muscles change to adjust to the increased workload. Your heart rate…won't increase during activities as much as it used to.” 

According to Sports Digest, “Aging bodies don’t use oxygen as efficiently, which is a huge factor in particular for endurance sports.” During her 3000m race, Pechstein had about 20% less VO2max to work with than her competitors.

No matter that Pechstein came in last, more than 20 seconds behind the winner; before earning her spot at these games, she’d already won five gold medals, nine medals total, setting a record only beat in her own race on Saturday. “Of the three medalists [she competed against], only Lollobrigida was alive (just one year old) when Pechstein won her first Olympic medal – a bronze in the 5000m – at the 1992 Albertville Winter Games.”

In other words, Pechstein defied gravity and, without caveat, lined up against the best, fastest, youngest (like 16-year-old Alysa Liu) skaters in the world, gritted her teeth, and raced. On the one hand, I want to shout her accomplishments from the top of a mountain. On the other, I love that we’re collectively a little “meh,” as though we all still expect to accomplish such goals at 50.

We can likely attribute some of this expectation to Betty White, whose recent death at 99 opened up all kinds of discussion of what women might accomplish beyond middle age. White famously eschewed Hollywood stereotypes, which expects women to either be done at 40 or transform themselves to look half their age. On her iconic show Golden Girls, White and her costars portrayed post-menopausal women as sexually active, interesting people, considered laugh-out-loud, ironically funny at the time. Perhaps inspired by White, Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker also challenged Hollywood’s double-standards, her reboot And Just Like That addressing many of the same issues and inspiring a new dialogue about what limits age must impose on us and which we can let slide.

All of it leaves me wondering if the middle-aged woman is having a Golden-girl Age of sorts. I hope so. I hope when I reach my eighties or nineties, society will still expect me not only to get out of bed and be a productive member of society, but to produce my best work yet. Because, at 46, I can already feel it gestating, dying to emerge, line up, and—without disclaimer—race.