on Apr 16th, 2006Boomeritis: Knee and Hip Replacement Bursitis, Arthritis (run, sucker, run)
John Updike ended his famous novel, Rabbit, Run, with the words, “Run. Rabbit. Run.” He was referring to the main character, a man named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom — your basic suburbanite dad feeling trapped in a loveless 1960’s marriage with a drunken wife, secretly longing for his pubescent freedom; unfortunately he ends up sleeping with a hooker who gets pregnant with his child. Ain’t hippie love grand?
The Detroit rapper Emimen also wrote a song called Run Rabbit Run using a similar line. Since you might have missed it, here’s a sample:
Bitch I found my neck, you gonna hear my voice,
Till you sick of it you ain’t gonna have a choice,
If I gotta scream till I have half a lung,
If I have half a chance I grab it, rabbit run…
Hostility ran deep in the 1960’s. Emimen’s lyrics demonstrate the youth of today have not strayed much further from the anger gene. So what’s a frustrated, overworked, middle manager to do?
How about train for a marathon or a triathalon…nothing like getting rid of that physcial tension by literally grinding it out of the body. The only problem: an aging body doesn’t have the resilience of a teenager’s body. You’ve been warned, Mack Daddy. Our bodies, ourselves is more than the title to a seminal book; it’s the label attached to your body parts that reads in fine print: fragile, breaks with overuse.
Encouraged by doctors to continue to exercise three to five times a week for their health, a legion of running, swimming and biking boomers are flouting the conventional limits of the middle-aged body’s abilities, and filling the nation’s operating rooms and orthopedists’ offices in the process.
They need knee and hip replacements, surgery for cartilage and ligament damage, and treatment for tendinitis, arthritis, bursitis and stress fractures. The phenomenon even has a name in medical circles: boomeritis.
Baby Boomers Stay Active, and So Do Their Doctors
By BILL PENNINGTON
New York Times, April 16, 2006