Column: The view from 70

I turned 70 on Thursday.

I’m not depressed about it. I’m not wild about it. I am mostly surprised by it.

During the run-up to the milestone this year, I’ve often mused that, although I can’t dispute the arithmetic, it seems that I haven’t been on earth that long. It seems more like 50 years. This has nothing to do about feeling like a 50-year-old.

There are many things, mostly in the athletic/aerobic category, that I either no longer want to do or cannot do as well as I once did. But if I still wanted to do some of them better, I probably could. It boils down to battling the ever-present swarms of sloth demons.

I’ve written before about running. At 50, even later, the Shelter Island 10K (and even longer distances) were mostly a piece of cake. That is because since my mid-20s I’ve logged thousands of miles, pounding down backroads, state highways, sides of canals and abandoned rail beds in Vermont, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and New York City, including dozens of organized runs all over the place.

The same goes for biking, with probably even more thousands of miles logged. In Vermont, if you stayed in the valleys, you were treated to nonstop beauty. If you took on the mountains, you paid for it, but I was young and was more than willing to pay.

When I first landed at a Philadelphia newspaper, I had the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift in the sports department. I would often get up at 8 a.m. and pedal out to the police department horse stables in Chestnut Hill and back, about 30 miles, mostly for the heck of it. But I was young, and possibly mentally unbalanced.

In the L.A. region, as you would expect, there were bike lanes everywhere, even on the banks of the all-concrete Los Angeles River. One time I came back from a long ride into the interior of the basin. The TV weather guy was saying that whatever you do, do not, for God’s sake, perform any serious exercise out there; this a life-shortening toxic air mass. (They are always called air masses in Southern California.) Time will tell about the shorter life. But it didn’t feel any different than any other bike excursion. I was young then with young lungs.

In Washington, D.C. (Alexandria,  actually), is where the canal paths and rail beds came into play, but the jaunt from our house to Mt. Vernon was my favorite. One time, for a large fundraiser, I biked, over three days, from Philadelphia to the Washington Monument. But I was a younger man then and was willing to sleep in pup tents.

In New York, we circumnavigated Central Park many times and took the five-borough bike tour once before buying our Shelter Island house, where the bikes reside today. As one should, we explored every bike-able piece of pavement on the Island. Then the semi-serious trek to Sagg Main beach and back became a favorite endeavor. We were younger then and the pounding surf was well worth the grind over the mini-Alp to get there.

So the physical exuberances have ebbed at 70, although I can still haul myself to the health club every once in a while and put in a taxing hour of hills on the stationary bike.

I don’t feel my mind has deteriorated, but that observation may come from an already deteriorated mind. I mean, how do you know? Furthermore, once I knew my column slot fell on my birthday, I immediately decided to write a column about it, which, as I think about it, could be evidence that I may have suffered a mild stroke and deactivated a medium-size lobe of my brain. I mean who does that — write about turning 70?

Although I’m sticking to my view that I can’t possibly have been on the planet 70 years, recently an old high school acquaintance, Linda Albright, popped up on Facebook, talking about her 70th birthday party. Then it struck me: Not only do they say I’ve been on the planet 70 years, but my whole gigantic high school class, many of whom I soldiered on with, arm in arm, through geometry, French and driver’s education since first grade, are being told that their years-on-planet number is also 70!

Many relatives have kept the 70 threshold forcibly in my consciousness, mostly because they have already hit the plateau and wanted me join their dismal club. Someone with a six in front of his age is really not welcome at holiday get-togethers, they seem to imply. But that’s been going on for a couple of years.

Linda Albright? I didn’t really give a hoot about Linda Albright. But Melissa McQueen? Royal Wainwright? Joan Chiedo? These were beautiful young high school girls for whom I had impure thoughts at a time when I was just beginning to get my impure thought act together.

Surely Melissa, Royal and Joan (and I?) are caught in a terrible age-shaming hoax perpetrated by the Russians that will be investigated and condemned as outrageous and hurtful. These women cannot be hitting 70.

But Linda Albright at 70? Totally get that.