To Be Young

Watching the Olympics, you realize that many of the athletes are very young. There are gymnasts too young for high school, but even in other sports there are few if any competitors as old as thirty. When someone starts mentioning ages like that, the natural thing is to think of one's own age and compare. There's no sense in denying that now most of the athletes in the Olympics are probably younger than I am. Some of them are much younger.

Even veterans are a little younger in many cases. I gather that Michael Phelps is in his third trip to the Games., and he's a couple years younger than I am. I don't think that way about him, though. I still think as I did when I was a child watching sports. The athletes were all bigger, stronger, faster and older. All of that is still true except for the last part, really. That's just not something that I have really taken to heart. I still feel younger than them.

Of course, I know better. I'm older than most of them, and will never manage to do what most of them are doing, no matter what I change in my life. The thing to do is not to bemoan that fact, but to be aware that the regrets may well go both ways. I think it's fair to observe that I can do and am doing things that they never will be able to do as a consequence of how they've spent their lives. There are no medals in my future, but what can you do with those anyway? You can't spend them.

Anyway, it's not utterly out of the question for me to excel at an Olympic sport. After all, there's target shooting. Some of the most prolific medalists are in such sports, which one can participate in at the highest level for a long time before age takes much of a toll. What is there to keep me from doing well, except that I was fair at best on the shooting range in Boy Scouts and that my eyes are now considerably worse? I just have to have heart.