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This is Brent Cushenbery. He came back to track & field and was no longer a star. That’s ok, he said, he didn't have to remake himself. Brent, and others, offer tips from 2025 in quick reads below. Photo Blake Wood.
By Ray Glier
I don’t have a wise end-of-year message…except this.
Y’all make me try harder to deal with What Is.
Thank you.
Quick excerpts re: lessons from nine 2025 stories.
Discipline. Love.
“Just remember, son, you will always be loved in this house, win or lose.”___Omega Collins to her son, Bill, decades ago in Mt. Vernon, N.Y.
Bill Collins, 75, made his mother’s words his foundation for life. He cherished them and leaned on them, especially in 2011 when he was struck by Guillain-Barre Syndrome in the prime of his Masters sprint career. Collins was the best in the world and then, suddenly, he wasn’t.
Would he still be loved? He was.
Collins went into the hospital 165 pounds and came out 101 pounds. He lost so much muscle below his waist, doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of survival because of the muscle wasting and the risks associated with further decline.
“You could touch my bones,” Collins said.
In a wheelchair for two months, Collins dragged himself into a pool and to therapy with the help of his wife, Stephanie. His wife’s care was irreplaceable, he said. So were his mother’s words of unconditional love, which helped burn into him an “ageless spirit.”
Collins, now 75, worked himself back to No. 1 in the U.S. in the 100 and 200 outdoors and the 60, 200, and 400 indoors.
That’s what love and discipline can do for you.
Gratitude
Austrian Gottfried Gassenbauer, the most renowned Masters hammer thrower in the world, was in England for a competition 40 years ago. Javelin throwers had left a javelin sticking out of the pitch. Gottfried walked to retrieve it and reached to grab it. He was momentarily distracted and turned his head away. When he turned his head back to grab it, the javelin pierced his neck.
The tip missed his carotid artery by a millimeter, Gassenbauer said. The javelin missed his vertebral artery by the same whisker.
“Last May 27, I celebrated my 25th birthday,” said Gottfried, who is 67 and still competing. “I am a miracle. I should be gone, or maybe paralyzed for life.
“I thank my Guardian Angels every day.”
In Masters track & field you will not find a more kind soul than this man. He spends time with competitors young and old sharing tips, a lot of them having to do with safe training.
Recovery
Paula Franetti’s crash in 2016 was gruesome.
Her rebound the last nine years has been enthralling.
It takes savvy and a single-minded fortitude—and skilled docs and physical therapists—to survive the crash in Pittsburgh that left her with seven pelvic fractures, five spinal fractures, a collapsed lung caused by a ruptured diaphragm, a punctured bladder, internal bleeding, and a concussion. Paula did not stand up for 57 days.
And now look.
Franetti and her hoops team, The Steel City Pursuit, played at The National Senior Games in Des Moines, Iowa, July 24-August 4. Women’s basketball is huge in Iowa, even before the phenomenon that is Caitlin Clark took over the University of Iowa.
Iowa got a look at another basketball phenom. Franetti.
Read this quote below. All of it. This is what Paula believes. It is useful to Geezer Jocks:
“….when you’re going through a recovery, you have to find ways to set yourself up to succeed, rather than setting yourself up to fail….you’re going to come out of this with a whole new perspective of your capability to control how your outcomes occur.”
It’s why the name of Franetti’s business is The Rebound Planner.
Know Thyself
Six years ago, in a moment of self-awareness and self-scrutiny, Brent Cushenbery, 66, schemed a return to competitive track & field…with conditions.
It was 2020 and a friend showed Brent a video of the 8k run Cushenbery had just finished. Overweight and out of shape, Brent shuffled across the finish line. Once a NCAA Division I cross country runner, and ultra runner in his 40s, Cushenbery felt ashamed that he had to walk a few yards during the race, strained to climb an “itty bitty hill” and finished ahead of just two runners.
“It was pathetic, I thought I was going to have a flippin’ heart attack,” Brent said. “An old, fat man shuffling along. I was just a dude, not a runner. It woke me up.”
He was 60 years old and Cushenbery vowed to get in shape.
And then he said this to himself.
“Forget about everything you were as a child or as a youngster because you’re not a youngster anymore, you are not that great athlete anymore. Don’t compare yourself to what you did as a kid.”
Brent is not a champion in Masters Track & Field, but he enters events all the time and competes as hard as anyone, not to be a star, but just to be a dude out there.
Willingness To Adapt
Dick McCord, 97, doesn’t power the ball with the putter, rather his stroke resembles a pendulum, a weight that swings back and forth from a fixed point due to gravity. It is an easy draw back of the club with a slight upward tilt and then a measured strike of the ball with aim. He uses this stroke when he is closer to the hole, not on the other side of the green from the flag.
It works. It’s one reason why McCord stayed competitive in golf into his 80s and 90s. He was losing distance on his drives as he got older, but while younger golfers hit past him off the tee, he scored with the putter.
Dick said his putting improved when he switched to the pendulum swing about 15 years ago.
This is how Geezer Jocks unbreak ageing. We find new ways, new methods, new remedies to slow down the breaking of things. We don’t cave. We recalibrate.
Discovery
It was not a full-grown rebellion against age. It was a mystery poke, a curiousness.
What if Phil Shipp, 90, spiked his pre-workout drink with five grams of creatine?
It was the third week in June and Shipp, who has been doing Masters track & field for about 20 years, was looking for some more strength before the USATF Masters Outdoors Championships in Huntsville, Ala.
What about creatine? It is perfectly legal, but it has some stigma because of alarmists and over-use and a general lack of understanding.
For a span of about 28-29 days, whenever he hit the weights, Phil mixed into his pre-workout drink five grams of the endogenous amino acid derivative (creatine).
Early the week of the USATF nationals (July 17-20), he sat on his machine bench press where you push forward with your arms to lift weights on a pulley system. Shipp did 12 repetitions at 90 pounds as a warm-up. He went to 115 pounds eight times and then 130 four times.
He finished with a one rep of his max, 145 pounds.
That week in July, Phil did 145 once. He felt something good. There was something left. He did a second rep at 145, and a third, then a fourth.
“It was like ‘wow’,” he said.
“I had built muscle mass at 90 years old.”
Recovery II
Many tips Chris Hickey learned came from the book The Athletes Guide to Recovery, which is in its second edition.
“A big thing I stole from the first edition was the creation of a competition plan for this upcoming week, which is four pages long,” said Chris, a hurdler for the Potomac Valley Track Club in the D.C. area. “I suffer from a bit of performance anxiety, and I started creating these competition plans back in ‘21 when we came out of COVID, and it’s basically an itinerary.”
If he has a running event at 5 p.m., he has to be at the track at 3:00. He can then start his warm-up list.
“It’s like a prescription, so I don’t have to think,” Hickey said. “Being retired military, it kind of appeals to me that way. I don’t have to fret. I don’t worry. There’s my plan, and I execute it.”
After the event, Chris has an immediate regimen to recover.
*He walks until he can get his heart rate under 120.
*He does a yoga pose “legs up the wall” for three to five minutes, longer if he can.
*He does a series of five stretches.
*Last, he uses the roller for his legs, a staple for 14 years.
Breaking Norms
Barb DeAngelis, 77, is a national award winning weightlifter and she understands there is something much more profound going on than her lifting a steel bar. She is reminded daily that “little old ladies”, like her, are invisible in society and their place is in our hearts, or in the kitchen, not in a gym standing over iron.
Barb says she is routinely profiled by the baggers at the grocery—“I look like any other little old lady’’—and she has to beg them to put more than the bananas in one bag.
So she crushes the monolithic screed of frail Grandma one deadlift at a time. She raises eyebrows, not just for herself, but for older women who have endured one too many “Be careful, sweetie, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“They have been clobbering us with messages that seniors should do weight training, but the message is not getting to older women,” DeAngelis said. “Maybe they think it is something we can’t do, won’t do, or that we are afraid of getting big muscles and look like men.
Great Followed By Humble
“There is no greatness without humility,” Earl Fee said. “If you let it go to your head, you won’t be very popular.”
What he allowed to go to his head was “confidence.”
Fee’s confidence helped him become a pioneer of nuclear power for civilian use (electricity) for 35 years. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto (undergrad and Masters) and worked in atomic energy in Canada, which once had a limited number of people with that expertise.
Where Fee was a pioneer in track in Canada was training. He was one of the first to simulate the 800 meters race in the pool. In his 60s, with a belt strapped around his waist, he ran upright in the water at 100 percent.
“It gives the legs a rest, there is no pounding,” Earl said. “I would simulate an 800 in the water, same time, same effort, and with good form.”
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