Let me be old.

I'm almost 50. Brian is 50. We still rock climb. This is not a surprise to anyone, except to us, occasionally, when we are picking up our creaking, aching bodies up off the mats again and again, or trying to stand up straight after being the car for more than an hour on the way to the crag. We wonder, should we still be doing this? How can we still be doing this?These are rhetorical questions so we're not looking for advice or someone to say, Oh you're not old. The fact is, we have hit middle age, and feel ourselves picking up speed on the downward slope of the hill of life (Annie Dillard was NOT middle aged at 35, I just want to say, though she wrote beautifully about it in "Aces and Eights," but I digress), and we are still climbing. I want to acknowledge that I feel like an "old climber," and I want to call myself an "old climber," and I want people both older and younger than me to stop telling me I'm not, or I'm not YET. I love you all, I know you are being kind, but quit it.

When I started climbing as a 20 year old, I just took it as it came. The fact that I ever rock climbed at all is a pretty astounding occurrence. I planned ahead a little bit. I had ideas like, I want to send a 5.12 in my third year of being a climber; or, I want to climb a 5.13 in my fifth year of being a climber. But as a young climber, I never really thought much ahead of that. Until one day, Brian and I were climbing at Central Endless, over by Hellbound for Glory or something, and we spotted a man a bit older than us (maybe mid-30s, and yes, as 20 -year-olds, we probably thought he was old) climbing with a woman we assumed to be his mother. She looked like she could have been in her 50s or so, but it was hard to tell because she looked so good. And she had light blonde hair which hides the grey well. They were climbing Hellbound, a 5.11d (maybe; this detail is a bit blurry in my memory), and the woman followed her assumed son up on top-rope. This was the first "old person" we had ever seen climb what we considered “hard” at the time, except for some folks in the local gym. This was absolutely the first time I ever saw an older woman climbing hard sport routes at the New River Gorge. Both Brian and I stopped what we were doing and commented on it, something like, Man, I hope I'm still climbing that hard when I'm her age. Also we didn't have kids yet, and I had the thought, Wouldn't it be so cool to climb with your son? This encounter opened up my world in a new way.

So here we are. We are the old people climbing now, and there are a lot more of us out there than there were in the 1990s. All of us who got started climbing in the 80s and 90s, we're the old folks now. And, we're out there climbing pretty hard (some harder than others) for our age. Some of us are climbing harder at this old age than we did in our days of youth. I never could or would have imagined that. And now I'm trying to embrace it. I'm trying to explore what this means, me as an old lady climber.

So when I call myself old, just let it be. Let me be old. Because I'm not complaining; actually, I'm reveling in it.