Having a purpose

As you plan your retirement, think of what purpose you want your days to have: do you want to learn new skills? Or do you want to volunteer and give back to your community? Do you want to travel, and share with your local school the slides and experiences from your trips? Do you want to get more involved in your neighborhood? Do you want to do philanthropic work? Or do you finally want to learn to play the piano? Whatever you do, think of what purpose your choice will provide in your life and then ask yourself if this is what you want.

Retirement without any planning may lead at best to boredom and disorganization, and at worst to isolation, depression, excessive drinking and disconnection.

Being connected to loved ones is another important element that needs to be included in any retirement plan worth exploring. Being surrounded by loved ones keeps us involved, a part of a group. Loved ones, however, don’t necessarily have to be members of your biological family. They could be good friends, neighbors, fellows in the church or synagogue you attend. They can be people with similar interests to yours, with whom you resonate and feel close. Choosing a community where you can find the kind of neighborhood spirit that makes you feel ‘at home’ is very important, as isolation is dreadful, particularly as we age. So, stay involved in their lives. Ask what’s going on with them. Be interested.

If you plan your retirement right, you will get up each morning looking forward to a new day. You will be active, but not overwhelmingly so. You will feel positive. You will be better able to stay in the present and enjoy it, rather than worrying about what the future will be like for you.

After all, these are the “golden Years.” So, make sure that they are as golden as possible!

In the case of marathon running at middle age, these three stages are evident.

During their rigorous training, people who train  to run a marathon separate from the rest of the group by changing their regular eating and sleeping habits, by shifting mentally and by dedicating a lot of time, thought and energy to exercising and making this endeavor a priority in their lives.  They ally and band together with other men and women who have the same goal and the same tenacity and discipline. If they are lucky, they are supported by family and friends who cheer and support them along the way.

The transitional period is the most difficult one, as it always is at any stage of life because the old rules are no longer and the new ones do not yet apply.  For forty-something men and women this transitional period can be a very stressing one indeed, particularly in today’s society.

The purpose of ceremonies and rituals at social and physical transitional times is to reduce the social discomfort, ambiguity and disorientation that come from not being affiliated to a clearly defined social group with which one can identify. Anthropologists talk about of “liminality” from the Latin “threshold”, which aptly describes the ambiguous social position people have at transitional times. In liminal spaces, one’s social identity dissolves, creating confusion and anxiety. If people have no way of getting incorporated into a social status, this state of liminality can become chronic, leading to severe emotional and social problems.

The stage of re-incorporation consists of membership into middle age, albeit with rules and expectations different than earlier, and alliances based on affiliation to and identification with like-minded people. This re-incorporation is strengthened by the ceremonial atmosphere of the race, with a large participation and the public acknowledgment and rewards for having gone through the tremendous physical feat the marathon race entails.

The body is often the object of the ritual transitional process. In the initiation ceremony video seen earlier, the bodies of the teenagers who were being initiated had to endure terrible discomfort to prove strength and endurance to pain. Running a marathon, as we said earlier, was thought to push the human body to the limit of its endurance, hence it certainly qualifies as a test of discipline and rigor. The runner achieves a recognition that well affects his role in society and, after running the race, it is hoped will create a new position for him or herself in a different social group.

In my experience as a psychotherapist, when a middle aged person tells me “I’m going to run the marathon,” I ask myself “Why do they need to prove themselves now?”

Is running a marathon a means of proving they don’t fit in the traditional view of middle age?

Is it a way of fighting sadness, disappointment or anxiety about what is going on in their lives by moving from an area where they may not have much control to an area where they think they may have more?

Whether is one or the other, or a little of both, should we, as a society, think of better ways of helping people in their middle years who no longer fit the traditional picture of middle age to transition into a social group that better reflects who they are?

In the third and fourth decades of life, training for a marathon race becomes the lighting rod that ignites us and shifts our focus from a bleak future into one full of possibilities and potentials. Women get to this point a little earlier than men. This could explain way the largest group of marathoners in women (35-40) is slightly younger than men’s (40-44).

Getting fit to run a marathon is an act of rejection of anticipated losses that we mentioned in conjunction with a traditional view of middle age. The goal of staying young can be maintained for a while yet, or so we hope. Running the marathon, therefore, can be seen as a rebellion against being incorporated into a social classification – middle age – that does not seem to fit where we currently are.

We see running the marathon as a rite of passage into a new vision of middle age. The person who undergoes it believes he or she will leave youth and be incorporated into a new social status – a new vision of the middle age years – still pregnant with new possibilities and a bright future.

Rites of passage are rituals that societies create to mark their members’ transitions from one social identity into another. Typical rites of passage are birth ceremonies, adolescents’ initiation into adulthood, engagements, weddings, retirements, funerals, and so on.

The video of the initiation rite that accompanies this post is an example of a rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood.

In our society, there is no officially acknowledged and ritualized way of transitioning from youth to middle age.

I suggest that for some people running the marathon has become a ritualized way of coming to terms with turning 40 and wanting to do it in their own terms. This means resisting the current middle aged social identity and attempting to create a new social identity that maintains and values some of the traits about themselves they want to preserve.

This seems to be particularly true for those women and men for whom long distance running had not previously been part of their lives. Quite possibly, this group may not continue to be interested in running once they have proven themselves, just like teenagers in many cultures have to go through a difficult and painful rite of passage to prove themselves ready for their new social identity as adults.

Of course not every marathoner fits into this picture. There are people who have been serious long distance runners all their lives. For them, running a marathon at 40 is not necessarily a rite of passage to middle age, but an activity that has been part of their lives all along.

Also, there are a lot of people who will never be fit enough to run. For them, other events, more or less ritualized, can become rites of passage into a new view of middle age.

Examples of these events are extraordinary trips, new experiences and activities and changes in life style – joining a motorcycle club, for instance – that are seen as journeys marking the passage from one social status to the next. These modern day trips are not dissimilar from the quests people used to go on in more traditional societies, which consisted of journeys in search of something extraordinary.

• Changes in body image. No explanation is needed here, as we are all well aware of them.
• Changes in sex drive. Possible diminished sex drive and sexual dysfunctions can be problematic for men. Menopause and all that comes with it can affect women’s femininity and sexuality.
• Changed view of the future. Up to middle age whatever we had not yet achieved we could push into the future, and hope we could get to it at a later time. But no longer. The future is now, and what we have not achieved by now we may never achieve.
• Conflict between fantasy and reality. Turning 40 is a time of reckoning, of turning inward and examining where we have been and where we are going. Most of us had ideas of where we would be at by age 40, and yet when we get there we seldom feel we achieved what we had set out to do for ourselves. We may be bored and disillusioned in our primary relationship; overwhelmed by work stresses, tired of trying to make ends meet, frustrated by not having any time for ourselves, anxious about what the future looks like, and so on. Maybe we have let our bodies go, as we have been too busy taking care of everything else in our lives. Maybe the ageing process and life in general have not been too kind to us and we suffer from physical and emotional conditions that affect our quality of life.

While most of the losses listed are still challenges facing us today, this reality is changing for a lot of people who are turning forty today, who want to push middle age further back, maybe to 50 or 55. They still feel strong, healthy, full of energy and by no means ready to sit back and become couch potatoes. So they resist being seen as middle-aged and are looking for group affiliations that more closely reflect who they are.

For these people a new way of looking at the future is being expressed in the increasing popularity of running a marathon.

We may know a friend who is training to run a marathon. He looks very fit. He is excited about this challenge. He is full of energy and enthusiasm. He feels good about himself and confident in his abilities to run fast. He becomes our inspiration, a challenge for us to do the same, a goal we become determined to pursue too.

Because of this event, the 26 and 7/32 miles run by Pheidippides were considered the limit of human endurance. And this is still the length of marathon races today.

Running the marathon is not only a physical activity based on the account of an historical event, but in our society it seems to have acquired a particular symbolic meaning for people reaching middle age.

Running a marathon is a metaphor for pushing oneself to the limit and being successful at it. For people on the cusp of middle age, I suggest, this has specific implications for their physical and emotional identity at this transitional time in their lives.

In this and the following three blogs, I explore the concept of running a marathon as a rite of passage into a new middle age.

It is obvious that men and women in their late thirties and forties are flocking in large numbers to run marathon races across the country.

Statistics from the 2005 and 2007 marathons in the U.S. show that the largest groups of attendants and the fastest runners are men between the ages of 40 and 44. For women, the largest and fastest running group is between ages 35 and 40.

Why are so many people in the 35-45 age bracket so invested in running this race?

The process of aging is not only physiological, but social as well, as people belong to different social groups as they go from childhood to old age.

Traditionally, reaching middle age was quite challenging for most people. Even today, with better health, more knowledge and longer life expectancies, this life transition is still fraught with anxieties and resistances. We live in a youth oriented culture where losing one’s youthful looks is perceived as a narcissistic injury to one’s physical and emotional identity. Most people still believe that there are not many gains to be had at middle age that would compensate for the multiple losses of this developmental passage. The emphasis of middle age in our society is still on what is no longer, as attested by the many jokes about turning 40 and being “over the hill.”

I suggest that running a marathon at this stage in one’s life is a metaphor for a new view of the middle age years, a view that challenges the traditional myths of middle age – life is over at forty – and attempts to provide a new direction for desires and wishes to maintain a healthy life of emotional and physical fitness. At a time when traditional views of middle age, with their bleak and lackluster view of the future are still prevalent, it is easy to understand why the appeal of running a marathon.