Senior track and field

Report from the Sonoma Wine Country Games: Battle of the Shot-Put Titans!

/ Mark Sloan / 10 Comments

Well, that’s quite the eye-grabbing headline, now, isn’t it?

The reality is somewhat more sedate and less bang!/pow! than I may have led you to believe, though. Because, after all, what is senior shot-putting but the solo, semi-leisurely tossing of cannonballs, accompanied by grunting and howling, among grown (often overgrown) men and women? The NBA finals, it’s not. The Olympics? Hardly. On the Spectator Excitement Scale, senior shot-putting is just this side of snail-racing. Except, perhaps, for the competitors’ loved ones, a few dozen of whom gathered last Sunday in the shade of a huge oak tree at the Santa Rosa High School shot-put area in Santa Rosa, California – my home town – to cheer on their elders.

Case in point: Elisabeth Face-Timed our kids and her mom so they could watch my performance live. By the second round of throws, everybody had hung up, with not terribly convincing requests that she send them a video if I won.

I can’t say I blame them. Or Elisabeth, for that matter, for not arm-twisting them into staying on the phone. My poor spouse…there were 22 other guys throwing in the men’s shot put. I was in the second flight, which means she had to sit, wilting devotedly in the heat, through the entire first flight – 15 aged, beefy guys, 90 throws in all – before I ever entered the ring. (“It was bonkers,” she confided later, after driving home with the AC kicked up to “polar vortex.”) She tells me I owe her big for this, and who am I to disagree?

But, hey, I won.

A re-enactment. (Don’t try this at home.)

Okay, truth be told, I didn’t whup all 22 of the others. We were spread over a half-dozen age groupings (the youngest competitor was 50; the oldest, 84), putting shots of different weights (the older you get, the lighter the shot – one of the rarely mentioned benefits of living long enough to watch your body crumble). My group (70-74 years old) consisted of me and two other fellow-graymen: a friendly former coach wearing Velcro braces on his trunk, both knees, and both elbows, and a short-ish man with very long, well-muscled arms and huge, powerful hands. He had clearly not spent the last 40 years trying to coax kids into letting him stick a flashlight into their ears with promises of Hello Kitty stickers.

But I knew I had it won by my third throw, not because I heaved it out of the park, but because one of my competitors – the former coach – had already withdrawn, citing aggravation of an unspecified-but-probably-already-splinted injury. Meanwhile, the man with the big hands was visibly drained by the heat, his distances steadily decreasing with each round. He spent the time between throws in a camp chair with ice packs on both knees and the back of his neck.

And me? Well, my Parkinson’s was on its best behavior that morning. I felt energetic and relatively spry for a change. My balance was okay, but not so much that I dared to attempt a glide – that backward sliding motion that was standard shot-putting technique back in the day. To avoid an unsightly tumble, I just stood there and chucked the thing.

To my surprise, I later learned that I’m currently ranked 24th in the U.S. in my age group, and 5th in California. This sounds pretty impressive until you realize there are only 37 guys ranked nationally in my age group so far this season, which means I’m pulling a C-minus if we’re grading on the curve. (Whatever. I’ll take it.)

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that I’m #1 in my age group for People with Parkinson’s. Maybe we should have our own Olympics.

Rabbit hole No.1 : Senior shot-putting

/ Mark Sloan / Leave a comment

Back in my very first post I said, “There’s more to life than Parkinson’s.” My symptoms are currently in what I’d consider the moderate range – mainly gait- and balance-related issues. But I can still get around pretty well, and I still have enough energy to explore other interests. So, from time to time I’ll drop a “rabbit hole,” a non-PD post, as a change of pace. Here’s my first (not counting the one I wrote about my Covid experience, written last month while in the feverish grip of the virus…).

To paraphrase (and mangle) the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), “In the Spring (a young) an old man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of (love) tossing cannonballs.” Yes, that’s right: this coming Sunday, June 4th, will mark my return to senior shot-putting — after a five-year absence — at the Sonoma Wine Country Games in Santa Rosa, California.*

Senior (in high school) shot-putting, 1971

As I mentioned in my “About Me” post, in 2013 I ranked in the top 50 worldwide in the 60-to-64 year age group. This was helped in large measure by the fact that 99+% of guys my age grew up and quit shot-putting a long time ago. But still…

Senior track and field is a hoot. As you’ll see if you ever attend a meet, there’s all kinds of emeritus-athlete stuff going on. It starts early in the morning: you’ll see gray-hairs (and no-hairs) stretching, jogging, throwing heavy things, warming up for the pole vault, doing run-throughs in the long jump pit. Old friends gather in the stands over coffee and stopwatches. Complaints of sore joints and pulled muscles are met with knowing laughter. I love this stuff.

I’m not expecting too much from myself this year. I don’t like to make pre-meet excuses, but hey, here they are: My training schedule, laid out with such precision in early March, has been sabotaged by two rounds of Covid, Achilles tendonitis, a family medical emergency, the ravages of age, and, well…Parkinson’s. I’ve only been able to throw the shot twenty times or so, and my coordination and timing are way off. So, if I drop the shot on my foot and break it (the foot, not the shot), you’ll know why.

Okay! Enough with the moaning! I’ll post updates as the track season progresses (or doesn’t…)

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*The reason for the five-year hiatus is pretty simple: you hit a new age group every 5 years. I turned 70 this year, meaning in June I’ll be among the youngest competitors in the 70-to-74-year-old group. One thing that senior track teaches you is that it’s good to be “young” – almost all the records are set by athletes in the first year of an age group, before the march of time marches right over you. I competed at 60 and again at 65; not wishing to witness my own interim deterioration, I took a five-year snooze both times before coming back. I’ll probably do that again once this track season is done, resurfacing (hopefully – knocking on wood as I write this) as a boyish 75-year-old.

About me

/ Mark Sloan / Leave a comment

I’m a writer, a retired pediatrician, a husband of nearly 40 years, a father of two grown children, and, since 2020, a person with Parkinson’s (PwP). My symptoms started well before I was diagnosed, though, meaning that for years and perhaps decades I was a Person Who Didn’t Know He Had Parkinson’s (PwdkhhP)… like most of us later-onset PwPs, I imagine.

I wanted to be a teacher before I became a pediatrician. Looking back, I see that that’s what I became after all—pediatrics is all about teaching. It’s about breaking down sometimes complex medical and scientific concepts into simple, comprehensible explanations…and then pitching those explanations to everyone from inquisitive kindergartners to frightened parents of tiny premature infants.

I got pretty good at it, and it’s in that spirit of demystifying often-complex Parkinson’s concepts—everything from the basic science of the disease, to epidemiology, genetics, treatment, and more—that I’ll approach this blog.

And I’ll warn potential readers–I’m prone to going down rabbit holes I find interesting. That’s how I learned, while writing my book Birth Day, that the first successful cesarean section was performed by a 19th-century woman masquerading as a male British Army surgeon, and that not all of Henry VIII’s wives got their heads chopped off. (Two of them died of childbirth complications.) Hopefully, you’ll enjoy my sometimes random digressions.

Personal Fun Fact:

I’m not McSteamy. I’m not Dick Van Dyke, either.

Biggest writing accomplishment:

My book, Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth, was published in early 2009 by Ballantine Books. It’s partly a memoir (I dragged many a family member into my story), partly an exploration of how humans came to give birth in the strange way that we do, and partly about the historical events that have shaped, and been shaped by, the birth of a child. There’s a lot of humor mixed in, too. Birth Day got great reviews—from the Washington Post, The Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health, the New England Journal of Medicine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other publications. Birth Day was a Northern California Book Awards finalist, and was named a “Top 10 Science Book of 2010” by the Japan Financial Times. (Yes, there’s a Japanese edition. And no, I can’t read it.)

Biggest sports accomplishment:

I was once ranked in the top 50 in the world in that most glamorous of sporting events, the shot put. Granted, this was an age-group thing (I was 60, a relative youngster among my fellow 60-64-year-old competitors), I finished exactly 50th (right between beefy, middle-aged guys from Ireland and Latvia),and there were only about 150 men my age in the world that year still tossing around cannonballs for fun. Which, if you were grading my performance, means I’d get a B-minus or so. Still, I can truthfully say that I once ranked in the top 50 worldwide in something. I’ll probably have that carved on my tombstone.

More about the arcane world of senior shot-putting later…

Biggest pediatric accomplishment:

I loved the continuity that came with practicing pediatrics in one place for a long time. By the time I retired I was taking care of my “grandpatients”—the children of my grown-up patients, some of whom I’d known since they themselves were in the womb. It was a privilege to be a part of so many lives over so many years, both in sickness and in health.

Oh, and I never dropped any kids on their heads. (I’ll probably have that carved on my tombstone, too.)