Starting Again at Thirty-Eight, With a Two-Year-Old on My Back

My oldest is nineteen. I was twenty when she was born, which made me the youngest dad in the room at every single thing for about a decade, and I was quietly pleased about it. I could do anything. I never once thought about it.

My youngest is two. I am thirty-eight. I am not the youngest dad in the room any more, and last winter I found out on my own living room floor, trying to get up off it with her on my back that I could produce noises that I never heard before.

Two, then a long time, then two more.

There are fourteen years between my second and my third. That gap is not a plan. My wife and I wanted more, and for years it did not happen — pregnancy after pregnancy that ended before it started. I am not going to write much about that here. Anyone who has been through it knows what those years are like, and anyone who has not does not need it described.

What I will say is that we got to a point where we stopped asking for more and thanked God for the two we had. That was not giving up. It was the only way to hold it.

And then, years after we had made our peace with it, a girl. And a year after her, a boy.

What fourteen years does.

Nobody gets out of shape on purpose. It goes one winter at a time. You stop playing because the season clashes with something. You carry a bit more because you are tired and it is easier. Your back gets stiff and you decide that's just what being thirty-five is.

None of that felt like anything while it was happening. It only showed up when a two-year-old wanted to be lifted for the fourth time in ten minutes and I started working out how to say no.

That is the part I want to be honest about, because I do not think it is unusual. It was not vanity that got me moving again. It was arithmetic. When my youngest is twenty, I will be fifty-six. I would quite like to still be somebody he can throw a ball with...or pass a puck.

Why hockey, and not just going to the gym.

I have tried going to the gym on my own. I am bad at it. It is too easy to decide, at four-thirty on a Tuesday, that today is not the day, and there is nobody standing on a sheet of ice waiting for me to make up the numbers.

Hockey does not give me that option. There are people expecting me. It is also, and I make no apology for this, fun in a way that a treadmill will never be — you are not exercising, you are playing, and then you get home and find out you were exercising for an hour.

The other thing about hockey at this age is that it is honest with you. Ice tells you exactly where you are. You cannot talk your way through a shift.

The garage part.

I built Rink Ready for my older two. Off-ice work for hockey players, written out so they did not have to guess: what to do, how much, what weight to put on the bar.

Then I started using it myself, and found out it was the only thing that had ever worked for me. Not because it's clever. Because when I open it, the decision is already made. There is a session waiting. I do not have to want to design a workout at nine at night, I just have to do the one that is there.

That is also why there is an adults' version of the free sheets, and why the hotel one exists. I wrote those for people just like me first.

What it actually looks like now.

Three sessions a week in the garage, most weeks. Some weeks two. Some weeks, honestly, none, and then I pick it back up without making a thing of it — the weeks you miss matter far less than whether you come back.

I am not in the shape I was at twenty and I am not trying to be. What I can do now that I could not do eighteen months ago is get off the floor without the noise, carry both of them up the stairs at the same time, and skate a full shift without spending the next one apologizing.

That is the whole goal. It was never a number on a scale.

If you are somewhere near the same place — a bit older than you meant to be, a small person who wants lifting, a body that has gone quiet on you — the sheets are free and they take twenty minutes. Start with whichever one fits your week.