I'm probably one of the older traceurs you'll meet. I'm the second-eldest in my gym, and I'm 37 years old. Training for something as intensely physical as parkour beyond a certain age can be humbling in ways it's sometimes difficult to accept and process fully, especially while it's happening.

This is one of the hardest things I've ever had to put down on a computer screen, for starters. As a 20-something, I became accustomed to being good at things without too much effort. I used to train intensively in the martial arts as a kid, and then as a rock climber in my late twenties. But my professional development seemed to take over in my thirties, and I let myself go physically. Actually...I let myself go pretty bad. Traveling consultants don't generally eat or exercise well at all.

I didn't even realize what was happening to my body until I discovered parkour. At age 35, I found Primal Fitness in DC, and a great community of people whose company I enjoyed. The physical challenge was awesome--it was just what I needed.

There was one problem, though. Before this point in my life, putting on a few pounds and then losing them again was really no big deal. "Getting back in shape" used to be a matter of a week or so of moderate effort: a few jogs around the block, cut back on the crappy food, maybe a few trips to the gym, and I would be able to handle whatever it was that was coming my way, be it a 10k, a climbing trip, or a long hike.

But suddenly that wasn't working. My body just seemed reluctant to obey me. I could (and have) lost weight, but there were these other obstacles, too. And many of those were also mental. Many of them still are, and I'm not sure that they're exactly something I can "overcome," per se, because age changes how you look at the world sometimes, no matter how reluctant you are to admit it.

One of the hardest things to accept has been this inability to progress the way I used to progress. Before I found parkour, I could tear through a physical discipline by throwing myself into it wholeheartedly, and my body would just follow along, taking whatever abuse I threw at it without much complaint. Now, suddenly I was hearing from my body, and it was forcing me to listen. I got hurt. Then I got hurt again. And again. Sometimes it was single "dramatic" injury, and sometimes it was just a slow "wearing out" kind of thing.

I got shin splints. Then the shin splints became chronic. I worked through them, but they never fully went away. My shins feel like they're at 95% on a good day. On a bad day (after a week of training tic-tacs and landings on hard surfaces), they hurt like hell, and I walk like I've been hobbled. Massage helps; so does some forms of training (and thanks to APK and Travis for all the advice!). I've gotten tons of tips, but really...it's not my shins' fault. It was hard to admit this, but my shins were like a warning sign: your body changes as you age.

The one day I broke my hand, and it was pretty bad. I caught my fingers on a rail, and broke two fingers in multiple places. The four-hour trip to the E.R. was the easy part, in retrospect. The fear of rails it instilled in me, however, is something I've been working to overcome for almost exactly a year now. The first time I got up on a rail after my accident, I got the shakes so bad I had to jump down immediately.

Then I got shoulder pain. I'd injured my shoulders when I was 18, and up until now I'd just "muscled it out." If I worked out a lot, my shoulders wouldn't bother me too much. But suddenly my shoulders weren't taking any more, either. I guess they saw what my shins accomplished, and felt like maybe they could go on strike, too. Between my shoulders and my rail fear, it felt like my training was on hold. I was still going to the gym, still working out as hard as ever, but what the hell?! Suddenly I was only treading water, or maybe even moving BACKWARDS in my training.

I decided to step my training up a notch again. If you're faced with a challenge, my way had been to push through it through sheer force of will. I got cortisone injection for the tendonitis in my shoulders, and adjusted my workout, and...well...

Big mistake.

After my knees decided to develop the same sort of patellar tendonitis that many of the rest of you have, I decided to step back and rethink some things.

For starters, I think I've been competing with the younger people at my gym, sometimes at a subconscious level. It's hard to watch someone who's been training for half as long as I have pull off a move that I still can't do. It used to be utterly galling and impermissible to my own ego and pride. Now it's just a fact of life: I can train and train and I just might never be able to do that thing that I really want to do. Tendons lose elasticity with age, like cracked and stretched rubber bands, but it's even more important to acknowledge this out loud: so does your mind. It may take me a year to learn how to do a front-flip; but now, that's okay with me. I'm just happy that I can learn to do one at all.

Equally important is this idea that I've developed, that some kinds of challenges are just not okay anymore. We had a house party, and a very talented and young traceur traversed our apartment's balcony on the 16th floor via cat hang. I got the cold sweats just watching him, and forbade him from trying it again, even though he really didn't have any problem doing it.

To me (and to many others out there, I hope) this just isn't how or why to train. There's conquering fear, and then there's...well...stupid. Traversing a balcony 16 stories up at a house party becomes an equation of risk and reward in my head, and I know this is my age talking. The risk is obvious: become a pizza decal on the roof of someone's car and totally bring down the mood at the party. The reward is rather miniscule: you traversed a rail doing a cat hang, which just about any beginner can do. You just did it with 150 feet of air under your feet.

In an emergency, maybe you'll have a slight edge when traversing that rail because you got over your fear of heights so entirely that you don't even hesitate to jump over the railing to your cat hang. Maybe traversing that rail wasn't a form of bragging, but rather just more training. Maybe...but somehow I doubt it.

On the other hand, I feel like I might live long enough to deduce that there's a fire before it gets to my door, and maybe wind up just taking the stairs down. It might be less dramatic, but maybe it's an equally effective form of training: to know when you don't need to use parkour.

I guess I'm rambling a little, which is also a hallmark of old age. But since I'm already throwing hypotheticals around, maybe being fearless is just easier when you're younger, and maybe certain kinds of fear are actually good for you in the long run. And maybe this article will be relevant to some of you young back-flipping whippersnappers one day, when you feel that first twinge in a joint or muscle that had never complained before.

We all age, whether we like it or not. Training helps, but training can't push back the clock, no matter how hard you might believe otherwise. But if you know happen to know otherwise, well...come on over and check out the railing on my balcony.

Assuming you're old enough, I'll buy the beer.

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