Painful reminders of teen years in the trenches
I LOVED being young. To give you some context, I’m pushing 40 now, so by young I mean early adulthood.
A time when I was indestructible, the way many of us all felt when the future was a concept we weren’t experienced enough in life to truly fathom.
During those glory years I was hit by two cars as a ped- estrian and was involved in several serious car accidents. Defying the odds, I luckily survived them all without a scratch and gave little thought to them after.
It wasn’t as though I was especially reckless. I just often seemed to find myself in these kind of situations. Scared the hell out of my mum and dad, but I was pretty nonplussed about it all.
I also spent much of my teenage years lugging around concrete slabs and digging trenches for about $4 an hour (sometimes I was just paid in beers) with no thought to proper lifting techniques.
But boy am I paying for it now. My back is absolutely stuffed.
It’s been playing up again recently and I’ve been getting about hunched over and constantly grimacing, resembling someone at least twice my age.
Many octogenarians would probably leave me in the shade if we broke out into a spontaneous athletics carnival.
My mother-in-law — who’s plus 70 with a gammy leg — and I actually found ourselves in a race the other day from the couch to the kitchen.
It was snail’s pace-type stuff and even though I eventually got there first, I felt the op- posite of a winner.
I’m shelling out dollars on physios and the like in a bid to get back to the best physical condition.
I shudder to think how much it has cost me over the years. It’s a long journey and it’s an arduous one.
They say hindsight is 20:20. I just wish my foresight was just as clear 20-odd years ago.