Opinion: I used to dread growing old. Then I befriended a superathlete in his 70s - The Globe and Mail

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Dag Aabye stands next to his bus in B.C.'s Okanagan Valley, near Silver Star mountain, in February, 2019.Brett Popplewell/Brett Popplewell

Brett Popplewell is an associate professor of journalism at Carleton University. His latest book is Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past.

On a frosty Saturday in November, 2015, an old man led me to the top of a mountain and reframed the way I think about life, death and the limits we place on ourselves as we age.

I was in the Okanagan Valley, having crossed the country in search of a man who was often called the world’s first extreme skier. He was 74 when I found him: a wild hermit and Norwegian ski legend who had lived alone in a school bus parked in a forest since the start of the 21st century, and who was now apparently forestalling his dotage by reinventing himself into a trail-running superathlete in British Columbia.

I was a 32-year-old sportswriter based out of Toronto at the time. I found richness in retrospection. I was drawn to athletes who were well past their prime. It didn’t matter who I was writing about: I viewed every subject’s life as an arc that rose and fell over time within a set frame. I believed the impermanence of life forced us to seek out meaning from the days we were given. But I didn’t view the different chapters of life as equal. I thought childhood was important because it laid the foundation for all that followed. I viewed the middle years as the peak. And I saw old age as inescapably tragic. Time had a way of grinding people down, removing their gifts, ravaging their minds and bodies. I had bought into, and perpetuated, a narrative that told people that as they aged through life, they aged out of life itself.

I had known countless people who had grown old, slowed down and ultimately died. It didn’t occur to me the slowing down bit might be optional or self-destructive – until I met Dag Aabye.

Although his hair and beard were white and the skin on his arms showed the bruising that’s common for septuagenarians, he was fit. Fit enough to run for 24 hours straight, which he did, on multiple occasions, while competing in the Canadian Death Race. Every summer, Dag ran in that 125-km ultramarathon – one of the most gruelling on the planet. Set in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, the race leads runners up and down three mountain summits and across a river. He trained for the race endlessly, running day and night through blizzards and heatwaves, on a network of deer trails that he’d repurposed on the mountainside near his bus.

He told me that he viewed age as a state of mind more than an actual number. “You should never let anyone tell you that you’re old,” he said. “And you shouldn’t ask people how old they are, either. Ask them how young they are, instead.”

I didn’t know what to make of Dag or his philosophy on aging when I first met him. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to grow old, either. He just wanted to live as youthfully as possible for as long as he could. He was a senior citizen who was determined not to let his accumulating years do to him what they did to others. He accepted the perks that came with his age – Old Age Security, the Canada Pension Plan and the odd seniors’ discount – but he refused to forfeit any of his independence just because other people thought it was time for him to take it easy.

He said that we as a society had a learned habit of prematurely aging each other. He reverse-engineered the old Oscar Wilde quote, the one about youth being wasted on the young; in Dag’s version, youth was abandoned by the elderly.

At the core of his philosophy was a view that people often hastened their demise by lamenting their past, limiting their present and dreading their future. “Every day, we get to make a choice between trying to do something for what might be the last time or not trying at all,” he said. “That’s what it is to age. I might never be able to do again what I did yesterday, but I’m going to keep trying. I’d rather live like that than on a couch with a remote in my hand.”

I spent the past eight years checking in on Dag, trying to understand how and why he managed to do what he did. I climbed with him up and down mountains. I ran behind him over his trails. I pitched a tent and camped with him in sub-zero temperatures. I listened as he spoke.

“Old people need superheroes, too,” he told me at one point. At first, I thought he was trying to position himself as the superhero. Then I understood what he was really saying: that in popular culture, our superheroes are essentially young or ageless. He didn’t understand why, even when we were being creative, we limited our vision for what we could be or achieve as seniors.

“Of all the ways you can limit yourself, self-definition is the most powerful,” he said.

The more time I spent visiting him on the mountainside, the more I began to think about age the way he did. I now view it less as something that defines us, and more as something that we define for ourselves.

I am now 40 years old. As a Canadian male, I am halfway to my life expectancy. I am aware that my body is deteriorating naturally, shedding muscle mass, bone density and maximal aerobic capacity. But while I may run slower than I did when I was 30, I go farther. I’ve begun to view life as an ultramarathon in its own right. Anyone who has ever competed in a race knows that you have to pace yourself, sure, but you also have to push yourself to the finish.

That said, I don’t have the greatest genes. I come from a long line of men who have died early from tuberculosis or dropped dead of heart attacks. At 76, my father is the oldest male on record in his family, and has been since he was 58. Several of my forebears didn’t live to see 30. Knowing this, I do find myself conscious of my heartbeat when I run.

But then I reflect on something Dag told me. “I just want to be movable,” he said. “And if I want to be movable, I’ve got to move every day.”

Dag shared with me once what he believed to be the secret to longevity: avoid the aging effects of stress. “Don’t fill your life with things to worry about,” he said. He also advised me to always keep a journal. Without a journal, he never would have known that he had clocked more hours running on his trails at age 80 than he did at age 60. He liked to start each day by looking back one year in his journals. Then he would go about trying to improve on the previous year’s accomplishments.

He did this because he had read articles about scientific studies that found age-related deterioration to be the side effect of a sedentary lifestyle. He liked to cut those articles out, tape them into his journals and refer back to them as evidence to support his belief that he can modulate his decline through increased training. He isn’t just pushing the limits of his own body. He is challenging our societal understanding of aging.

Dag is now just a few weeks shy of his 82nd birthday. I caught up with him recently to give him a copy of the book I’ve just written about him. It was the last week of March and he had just completed a five-hour run down a snow-covered mountainside into the Okanagan Valley, and then back up the hill to his bus. He was recording his run into his journal and taking a break before heading out to chop some wood.

He said he was still having some of the best days of his life. Then he said something that I quickly typed into my phone so that I wouldn’t forget it.

“Time is a river,” he said. “Never to return.”

“That’s a nice quote,” I replied.

He smiled, and then told me to pass it on in case anyone else needed to hear it.

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Opinion: I used to dread growing old. Then I befriended a superathlete in his 70s - The Globe and Mail
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