Swimming And Exercise Hold Off A Demon

Jim Rosborough, 89, finished this sprint triathlon in 2 hours, 25 minutes (the clock above is the time of day). He was competing at the 2024 USA Triathlon Sprint and Olympic Distance National Championships September 15. He was diagnosed around the same time with Alzheimer's.

By Ray Glier

Jim Rosborough’s mother rolled him from the sandy beach into the sea water when he was just nine or ten months old, he said. The family lived in Aruba and the moms would gather on the beach to sit and smoke and make sure their just-able-to-crawl children didn’t take on too much water as they splashed about.

“I learned to swim before I learned to walk,” Jim said.

Rosborough turned 89 years old this past Monday and says he still feels more comfortable swimming than walking. Swimming and exercise, he insists, is why he has stayed vibrant and alive in his gene pool, which contains the dreaded brain disorder Alzheimer’s.

His maternal grandfather died of the disease in his 50s. His mother died of Alzheimer’s, among other causes, in her late 70s.

Jim wasn’t diagnosed until this past September at 88. He has short-term memory issues, but that hardly mattered on September 15 when he competed in the 2024 USA Triathlon Sprint and Olympic Distance National Championships, which is a 750-meter swim, 20k bike ride, and 5k run.

Rosborough has so far kept the disease from tyrannizing him. You should hear from Jim:

Rosborough is correct. There certainly is data that a sound body leads a sound mind around the block all day and every day. You can look it up for yourself, or scan this link, which specifically talks about swimming.

Alzheimer’s was first diagnosed in 1906 and it is still baffling researchers and causing anguish for families. Rosborough doesn’t have a cure, but he has a means to take away some of disease’s fuel.

Three weekends ago Jim entered a swim meet in Houston, where he lives, and swam six events, the 50, 100, and 200, breaststroke and freestyle.

Rosborough swims and runs three days a week. Jim and his wife, Naomi, are at the YMCA at 5:30 a.m. weekday mornings for a Body Pump class. To get the full training for the sprint triathlons he does four times a year, Jim rides a bike indoors these days because of the chill.

Rosborough’s best leg in the over 200 triathlons he has competed in is swimming, naturally. Besides his mother’s nurturing, Rosborough had the clear waters off Aruba in the late 1940s to play in.

His game was spearfishing.

These days Jim dives into the water from a boat, not just a pool deck, and he scuba dives. Last year at 88, he and a friend left Galveston, Texas and sped out to the Flower Garden Banks, 100 miles south of the Texas/Louisiana border in the Gulf of Mexico. It is a National Marine Sanctuary and a site to behold.

The inhabitants of the Flower Garden Banks, a reef in the Gulf of Mexico.

There was a time when Jim got more of his exercise on land. From 1970 to approximately 1986, he ran marathons, including the big ones in Boston and New York.

Rosborough was living in Houston and was working for the oil giant Shell when the Olympic torch came through on its way from New York to Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics. Jim and a friend got to handle the torch on a short 4-5 mile jaunt.

“These marathons I'm running are taking too much out of me,” Rosborough told the friend. Jim was 51.

“Buy a bike and do triathlons,” the friend said.

Jim bought a bike and started with half Ironmans and now does the sprint variety.

Geezer Jock tells you this background because you better believe, as we have said over and over, your body is a health bank. It collect deposits that rush to your aid when late-life calamities, like Alzheimer’s, strike.

There is something else Rosborough has that helps him deal with the diagnosis with poise.

His father, Jimmy, worked as a chemist with Exxon in Aruba. Jim’s father was a fine tennis player and played often. Jim was a young boy when there was an explosion in the lab and a fire. His father had to stick his hand and arm through flames to turn off the gas so there was not a bigger catastrophe.

“The burns took away the tennis he loved,” Rosborough said, “but he never complained about it.”

I asked Jim about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis interrupting his fun.

“I’m not happy about it, but it’s not surprising given my family’s history,” he said.

His message came through loud and clear on the Zoom interview. Jim is dealing with Alzheimer's just as Jimmy dealt with his misfortune. Poise rules most days, not the disease.

Then we talked about swimming and triathlons and his career as a mediator around the world for Shell. The disease did not come up much in the 69 minutes we were on Zoom.

Rosborough is not giving Alzheimer’s space to tyrannize him. Jim has minimized that window to the disease, like we would minimize something less immediate on the computer. It’s a lesson for all of us.

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