Book Review: Not Too Late

Welcome to the new and improved SecondFifty Newsletter! With new subscribers and lots of ideas for the future, I took the step of migrating our community to a newsletter hosting service called Beehiv. Beehiv provides many features and resources for a better experience as SecondFifty continues to grow and evolve.

Please bear with me as I work through the inevitable glitches of this transition. They say learning a challenging new skill keeps the mind fluid and helps avoid neurodegenerative decline. And that’s what I’ve told myself after hours of trying to figure out this supposedly intuitive software!

Speaking of challenges, check out Gwendolyn Bound’s new book, Not Too Late, which I have review, below.

BOOK REVIEW

Not Too Late, The Power of Pushing Through Limits At Any Age; By Gwendolyn Bounds

I have written often about the importance of mindset in the pursuit of healthy, vital aging. I believe it boils down to respecting the real limitations of aging, while refusing to accept aging as a limitation. This balance is hard to achieve in a culture that either wallows in the frailty and decline of middle age or glorifies the extreme outliers – the 84-year-old mountain climber, or the 90-year-old river rafter.

Gwendolyn Bounds, in her new book, Not Too Late, gives us a nuanced and very personal look into how an average non-athletic journalist in her late 40’s grappled with the emotional and physical crossroads of middle-age, and found redemption in the grueling sport of obstacle course racing. It’s the story of how a skinny little stick of a girl became a badass competitive athlete in the second half of life.

None of this physical stuff comes easily to Gwendolyn. Our narrator struggles mightily to find her footing and fails often along the way.

Admittedly, Gwendolyn’s journey is pretty extreme, but her approach to it is thoughtful, and her writing is good, which humanizes Not Too Late and makes it much more than a one-dimensional recounting of physical feats. At its core this is not a book about obstacle course racing, although obstacle course racing is at the center of the story, and there are detailed and amusing descriptions of the harrowing trials it presents.

This is a book about challenging the limiting beliefs we develop as adults around who we are and what we can accomplish when we settle into mid-life career and family. It’s an encouraging reminder that we can do hard things, at any age.

A series of life events, the illness and death of her dog, the realization she will not be able to have children, and a cancer diagnosis, bring Gwendolyn Bounds face to face with her mortality. All of this leads to her “unravelling”, a crisis point where Gwendolyn becomes consumed, almost incapacitated, with fear about aging, dying and loss of control.

But Gwendolyn refuses to be a victim.  She pushes back hard on the cliches of aging’s limitations. We follow her evolution over the next five years as she applies her journalistic skills to learn about the science of longevity while she trains. And boy does she train. She confers with experts in the fields of medicine, endurance and psychology, and her learnings are woven throughout the book, presented in an approachable manner in plain language.

In the end, our hero achieves peace with her doubts and fears and through her physicality regains her vitality and life force. She attains a realistic balance between stubborn denial and graceful acceptance of the inexorable passage of time.  

This is an inspiring and uplifting book. Bounds has captured the essence of healthy aging, and it has little to do with her chosen sport. Aging well is about embracing new challenges - having goals and passions to stay engaged in life. It certainly doesn’t have to be a physical challenge, although basic functional fitness is a mandatory prerequisite for healthy aging. Your passion might be bridge, pickleball, stamp collecting, hiking, playing piano or fly fishing. If it connects you with others and builds friendships that’s all the better.

We should also acknowledge that while Bounds asserts her “nothing special about me” persona, she is clearly pretty special! What she lacks in natural athleticism she makes up for with discipline and determination. And while she did not excel at sports in her younger years, she definitely excelled in other areas of her life and career, and that tenacity serves her well.  It also serves us well. Her story is compelling and instructive, and we can learn from and emulate her accomplishments in our own lives. Not Too Late is a template we can tailor in a way that fits for us.

I suggest getting the audible version of the book. Gwendolyn is the narrator, and she really brings it to life! Here’s a link to the book.

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Who Sent this Newsletter:

I’m George Harrop, founder of SecondFifty — an online resource for people who want to prioritize their health and wellbeing by taking a common-sense approach to nutrition and fitness.