Hi, I’m Curtis. I’m a 39 year-old father of two. For a while now, I’ve had this idea of a personal project called “Fitter by Fifty.” The idea is as simple as it sounds. I want to be fitter (i.e. healthier, more active, feel better in my body) at age 50 than I do now at age 39. That would not be the typical thing, since the default narrative is to get less fit (slower, stiffer, more pain, less energy…etc) year-by-year as you get older. That has certainly been my experience, to a large extent, over the last several years. But I also know that that’s not inevitable, and while aging may create more headwinds to being fit, healthy, vibrant, and energetic, there is a lot more to the process of physical decline than simply the passage of time.

Now, if I were an elite athlete at age 39 (say, Lionel Messi or Christine Sinclair), being in better shape 11 years later would probably be quite a tall order. Even great athlete at that level were generally better at age 29 than 39. That’s the time element. But, since I am very far from being an elite athlete or being in peak fitness of any kind — I’m decidedly average by the standards of our less-than-fit culture for a 39 year-old dad — there is plenty of room for improvement, even factoring in the headwinds of aging.

I have a 6 year-old son, and I’ve always said that I wanted to be able to more or less keep up with him physically until he’s a teenager. That means the ability to play sports together, go hiking, kayaking, adventuring…etc at his pace without undue struggle. I would say I am borderline on track for that, at best. AND…we just had another baby, now 6 months old. So, if I want to be able to keep up with him as a teenager, I need to tack another 5 years onto that. So, being fit, healthy, and active, able to keep up with teenagers, into my mid-50s (and then not falling off a cliff health and fitness-wise after than, obviously!).

So that’s the idea! Like I said, I had the idea of this as a kind of personal project/mission for a while, but while swimming in the lake the other night, had the idea to make it a public project. Hence this blog, and whatever else I do with it. Making it public gives me an incentive to keep it up, share wins and struggles, and have accountability. And maybe inspire some other people along the way!

I don’t only want to reverse my own seemingly-inevitable decline in health and fitness as I age, I want to reverse the narrative that this is somehow inevitable or something that just happens to us without our participation in any way. I’ll have more to say about that in future posts, but’s that’s the basic concept for now.

One final word. For the purposes of this project, I’m defining fitness as something like “the ability to enjoy and participate in a wide range of physical activities, use the full range of motion in your body, and maintain healthy and vibrant levels of energy.” It’s not primarily about a photogenic physique or being wrinkle free or larping as a 20 year old decades later. Fitness is something that might look and feel different for different people and at different life stages, but is fundamentally about enjoyment and participation in the embodied experience we call being alive.