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When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

There seem to be a lot of things to worry about when you get old -or is that just me? I cry more in movies than I used to, but maybe that’s because I’ve been allotted more free time to watch them now that I’m retired; serialized programs are also televisual social substitutes on those days when it’s too cold to walk very far outside. Still, I think that may be just an excuse. Perhaps vascular dementia is creeping up on me using a more friendly name. Or, perhaps I’m simply more sensitive to others -to the world– now that I am no longer required to work. But maybe this is just what happens to those of us who make it this far unscathed.

It’s embarrassing though; I suppose it’s fortunate that I live alone, but sometimes I wonder whether that’s the problem. Any conversations I have with myself are necessarily one-sided and seldom offer anything I haven’t thought of before.

There was one thing that worried me however. It was a warning from a friend over coffee when I was bragging about my exercise endurance beginning to shrink as I aged. When I actually have an audience, I tend to go on about the length of my runs, or the time I spend on my elliptical in the basement. I mean there are seldom people who sit long enough with me to listen, so you can’t afford to waste the opportunity, eh?

“You do 14 K runs each week?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Or 2 hours on an elliptical at a time…?” I’m not sure if John was impressed or dismayed at the inadvisability of an octogenarian actually wanting to do that. John is even older than me though, so I suspect he couldn’t understand why I still felt the need to be so active.

My shrug may have suggested unwarranted hubris to him, but I really was worried about my diminished capacity for exercise: I could feel things changing as the years weighed me down.

John stared at me for a moment. I could tell he was uncertain how to respond to a shrug. “G, do you know how risky that is at your age?”

I had to try for a justification, but the only answer I could come up with on the spur of the moment was “I suppose…”

I have to admit that, even though I had been a medical specialist in a former life, the idea that I was now involved in risky behaviour seemed inapplicable. I have always been active; age should have nothing to do with it. Still, I pretended it was news to me “Why is it risky, John?”

As he rolled his eyes, it occurred to me that even eye-rolling might be risky for some out of shape seniors, but I held my tongue.

“Your heart is why, G. I read somewhere that people over 70 have a higher risk of having strokes with too much exercise. It has to do with the heart not getting as much oxygen, or something…” He thought about it for second or two, not wanting to confront an aging doctor with his probable memory loss; then with another eye-roll, he relented. “Something  to do with part of the heart going uncontrollably fast and sending blood clots to the brain… You should know about that.”

He realized he was hopelessly over his depth and stopped talking. He was, I think, describing atrial fibrillation which is more common in older people -10% of people over 80 I recalled from medical school;  it was something to do with the failure of the electrical signals of the heart muscle as it ages – the wiring in an old house they used to explain in the lectures. I don’t think they knew very much about proper wiring in those days though, and anyway I’d forgotten most of what little they did.

“You should try to keep your heart rate down, G… There are age guidance limits, I think. Do you even know how fast it gets when you run?”

I shrugged, hoping to deflect his unsubtle criticism, but I couldn’t let him get away with what he’d implied. “So you think I should give up running…?  I mean if I’m gonna die, I’d rather it be on a trail than in a bed.”

John knew better than to advise me to stop exercising however. “At least get yourself a Smart Watch that’ll tell you your heart rate. You can always slow down if it seems to be getting too high, eh?”

I guffawed at that, but I had to admit that it was a good idea. And anyway, the old wrist watch I wore was acting up, and I had to keep resetting the time each morning; I liked the idea of new kit.

So, after a brief investigation online, I bought a smart watch that monitored my heart rate via some little sensors on its nether parts. Then I checked it by taking my own pulse rate like I used to do when I was in practice and compared it with the value on the watch.

The smart watch and my measurements seemed to agree, so I decided to wear it on a run. The idea is that when you pair the smart watch with your smart phone, it tells you your pulse rate through the phone speaker (or, in my case, via the Bluetooth in my hearing aids). You set the upper limit according to your age and a little motherly voice that tries to sound unconcerned tells you your heart rate every 30 seconds or so.

On my first run, it got me really worried as I started off: I live on a very hilly island, and the first stretch from my home is uphill. The very upper heart rate limit it suggested for someone my age was 140 bpm; the first several announcements, however, were above 180 bpm and even the voice began to sound worried -sort of like my mother when I had done something that disappointed her. I immediately slowed to a walk until the voice seemed happy again; I would have done the same for my mother…

And so it continued: walk, run, walk, walk, run, run… walk, walk, walk… Actually, I felt good with that: absolved perhaps; anyway, I suppose it doesn’t really matter, whether or not it’s a continuous run, eh?

I mean I began to feel so smug about it that I waited for approval from the little voice as I ran along the trail like I would from a coach, watching me from the sidelines. In fact I began to run faster and faster along the uneven, root-strangled forest path, daring it to criticize me.

Then, during what I thought was an inordinately long stretch of silence, I glanced at the phone I was carrying to see if it was still relaying signals to me. That moment of inattention to the trail surface was when I face-planted into a stoney space between the roots and heard the little voice remind me in its usual soft voice, that I had exceeded the limits I had set. It sounded offended, and I felt gaslighted.

I think the smart watch may be a useful tool for some people, but I can’t help but wonder if I bought the wrong kind. I don’t suppose they make them with radar settings nowadays do they? I mean that would be really smart…

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