Giving Thanks by Getting Fat Makes No Sense, Dying Like Olga Kotelko Does

By Kevin Kolodziejski 

Even though Thanksgiving has come and gone, I still feel the need to share my scorn for what the holiday has become for too many people. A day to eat way too much food — good food, bad food, and any type of food in between — and then snooze off and on while remaining motionless in a recliner while watching way too much football. It’s the scenario that now seems to be the day’s most adhered to tradition.

Sure, many Thanksgiving meals still start by saying grace or giving a toast, and the thanks expressed during either, I’m sure, is heartfelt. But both are only momentary, as well as any subsequent thoughts of gratitude created by them.

And here’s what really gets my goat: The number of acquaintances and friends in the throes of a Black Friday food hangover who say, “Never again” — only to stuff and immobilize themselves the very next Thanksgiving.

Now That My Goat’s Been Gotten

Having admitted my goat’s been gotten, I feel purged, and this article will rant about Thanksgiving overeating no more. Nor will it summon you to exercise more, move more, and recall all you have to be grateful for during the upcoming holidays.

What comes next is only related to Thanksgiving Day because it’s the ideal way to show gratitude every day for everything, including cycling, and everyone you love, including yourself. This ideal way is to go about each day and every ride with the underlying goal of squaring the aging curve.

Since you can’t do what you don’t know, here’s the layman’s lowdown about what’s also known in medical circles as compressing morbidity.

The Way to See Compressed Morbidity

Picture a graph in your mind (or maybe get pencil and paper and draw one) where the vertical line indicates health and fitness, the higher the better. A number line representing age beginning with 30 and ending at 100 serves as the horizontal line.

Place the average American lifespan upon it, and the line resembles the arc from 12 to 3 on a round-face clock, and it touches bottom just before 80. Graph the lifespan of someone who’s squared the curve, however, and the arc stops curving at whatever age that someone decided to get serious about health and fitness.

At that point the arc straightens, maybe even ascends a bit, stays fairly straight for a while, and eventually dips gradually. And then, somewhere after the age of 85, it creates close to a 90-degree angle, dropping like an anchor to the bottom of a lake.

What’s Just Been Graphed?

In the best-case, real-life scenario as it applies to you, the dropped anchor represents one night.  After a rather pleasant and fully functional day, you go to bed and don’t wake up. No protracted illness and hospital stay. No time spent in an old folks’ home.

Instead, you pass suddenly — but only after spending the last 30 years or so being far more active than your contemporaries. So active, in fact, you just might’ve started competing in sports later in life and kept competing in the one you came to love most right up until the end. Like Olga Kotelko.

Olga Kotelko and the Art of Squaring the Aging Curve

Olga Kotelko truly mastered the art of squaring the aging curve, so much so that in his book about her, Bruce Grierson writes she “squared [it] with a ruler.” She also dominated Masters track and field competitions so thoroughly that at the time of her demise at 95, she held every world record in every event she ever attempted, a total of over 30 age-group world records in all. Moreover, in just the five years before she died, she garnered over 750 gold medals at Masters track and field competitions.

I tell you about Kotelko’s accomplishments, however, not so you search for a Christmas sale on track spikes or cycling stuff, but so that you consider a single question. One that Kotelko once asked an interviewer. “Do you want to have years in your life, or life in your years?”

Years in Your Life or Life in Your Years

She asked this question rhetorically, of course. For why in the world would you not want the second?  Maybe because of the constant and coordinated effort achieving it requires.

“For what is each day,” my favorite motivational video asks, “but a series of conflicts between the right way and the easy way?” And to square the aging curve, you need to string together thousands of days where the winner of these daily conflicts is rarely the easy way.

That means you exercise, at least for a bit, on days when you’d rather not but know you should. Say, “No thanks,” about 90 percent of the time when coworkers offer you birthday cake or similar goodies at coffee break and lunchtime. Reduce your preferred form of late-night screen time and increase your sleep time when you’ve had a low-energy day or sense an illness coming on.

To live like this day in and day out is a tough task, no doubt. But it does much more than add life to your years.

It expresses gratitude for everything and everyone you love — and ultimately allows you to die the right way, retaining all your dignity, most of your functionality, and without ever becoming a burden to your family.

Squaring the aging curve is a concept worth considering today and talking about on any holiday. Right before your favorite football team commits yet another turnover and your uncle starts snoring.

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Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.

A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.