The rickety runner

At 78 and 73 respectively Trump and I are in rickety territory for sure. But he’s unlikely to concede this. Last year, in a debate with President Biden — then aged 81 — he claimed to be fitter than three decades ago and challenged Biden to a golf game. “He can’t even hit the ball 50 yards,” he teased.

In 2015, he told the New York Times magazine he feared for gym junkie colleagues: “They’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements — they’re a disaster.” 

In 2016, Trump’s biographers, Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher wrote he believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. This theory seems behind his peeved reply after a medical check-up in 2018, reported by Reuters: “I get exercise. I mean I walk, I this, I that — I run over to a building next door. I get more exercise than people think.”

My ricketiness at 73 stems from five decades on my bum at work, sweetened by sunrise on my toes, three or four times every week. I’ve finished 15 marathons, the fastest 41 years ago, and am now fairly content with Park Runs. Unlike most of my shuffling septuagenarian friends, I’ve got one pretty good knee.

But I also feel rickety and a bit pernickety when thinking of how the world’s changed, and hasn’t, in my slice of life. Wars have been a constant — the present terrors of the Middle East and Eastern Europe make a farce of so-called culture wars in the US and Australia.

 Working for a living’s different now than in 1975 — myriad trades, occupations and livings lost in a tidal wave of efficiency, automation and Artificial Intelligence, men and women alike. Guilds, unions and fraternities have vanished, along with jobs for life. Instead, the spur of aspiration drives competition for the Good Life. Earning one’s crust is, it seems to me, an anxious task now, in our era of retraining, multi-skilling and short-term contracts. 

The returning, rickety US President has ridden a winner on nostalgia for Industrial Revolution America and — ironically in a nation of immigrants — a crackdown on the “illegals” who risk life and limb for a share of the Good Life. 

Trump incidentally sees his longevity as a gift from his Dad, Fred, who lived to 93, and also as a pay-off for not drinking or smoking. On the other hand, my Dad, Ted, died at 48, in the midst of a busy life, which propels me and my two brothers to keep on keeping on as rickety runners.