Stretch Yourself Like These Geezer Jocks

This is Kay Glynn, world champion in Masters track. Her flexibility is incredible for any age, much less 72. This week’s Geezer Jock is a collection of tips/stories to stretch yourself, physically and mentally. It will take four minutes to learn something you can use.

By Ray Glier

I wrote this about Kay Glynn four years ago:

Kay eats broccoli every day, but that is not the most eccentric, or special, thing she does.

Kay pole vaults in sub-freezing temperatures, and there have been days of 0 degrees in her Missouri town. She is a 72-year old grandmother and has her own indoor training facility, a She-Shed she calls it. The 100-foot metal building does not have heat, so if it is 0 outside, it is likely 0 inside, but it blunts the wind coming off the Ozarks and keeps the snow off her runway and landing pad.

Here’s what else is cool (pun intended) besides being a world champion.

Kay had a hip issue. No way, you say, with a stretch like that in the Christmas card picture above. Bad hips?

A high school prodigy, Glynn came back to track & field after family life and developed arthritis in her hips. One representative at a prominent clinic told Kay, “Find a new hobby” because of the condition of her hips.

That was unwise advice to a woman who has her own indoor track facility. Glynn used her track friends to find a South Carolina doctor who expertly resurfaced her hips, one in 2013 and the other in 2016. Check out the Christmas card again. She lost none of her flexibility with the procedures and the spigot of fun is wide open pouring out more holiday cards. It was not hip replacement, but resurfacing.

I wrote once before about Kay, “You cannot be bored around this woman.” 

It’s still true.

**

We should all know by now that “suck it up buttercup” is the fiction that turns an athlete’s overuse injury into a crisis. Its cousin on the make-believe shelf, “no pain, no gain”, can be just as reckless. I’m not talking about your quads burning from taking the treadmill from 5.0 mph to 8.0 mph. That’s discomfort.

I’m talking about playing injured. It is the doom of athletes everywhere and perhaps why we see so many world-class athletes sidelined. Major League Baseball, a non-contact sport, experienced a spike in hamstring injuries, up 193% in 2021, because athletes ignore “twinges.” Athletic training staffs are being fired for not dissecting twinges that keep multi-million dollar athletes from playing.

This Geezer Jock stretch-yourself lesson is about self-awareness and pain threshold/tolerance and managing injuries that can derail our fitness quest.

I talked to the right and wrong Geezer Jock.

Masters sprinter Colleen Barney, 59, doesn’t feel twinges, to say the least. She doesn’t so much as whimper with something just a little more serious than a twinge…

…like a broken back.

“I didn’t even know my back was broken for two months so my ability to discern appropriate levels of pain might be a little bit messed up,” Barney said in a whiff of understatement.

She was 17 and on the track team at Arizona State when she fell with a bar of weights across her shoulders. She was carried off on a stretcher, took a week off, and clueless adults allowed an ambitious kid to resume training. The pain, though, finally reared up and drove her out of track & field for 16 years.

Doctors will tell you, “Let pain be your guide” as a road map when to resume full workouts. When Barney had a serious hamstring injury in Masters track, her physical therapist said about pain being her guide, “That’s clearly not going to work for you.”

But pain as a guide will work for most of us. So do not mix up perseverance with proving your durability and ruggedness. Geezer Jocks should know by now they are not unbreakable. Know thyself.

And then, check out Colleen’s Facebook page. Scroll past the vacation pictures to the workouts. She is 59 and doing this stuff. What’s possible for you? 

**

This will stretch your mind about what’s possible.

You know that conundrum, Nature or Nurture? You might not have genes to leap a tall building in a single bound (Nature), but you have something else (Nurture). 

Jerry Levasseur is 88 years old and still competing in Masters track events because of that something else.

In 1944, Jerry was six years old and lived in Bristol, Conn., when his mother, Marion, took him to the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford. The one thing that sticks with me in this story is how the tents were coated in oil to waterproof them.

Something caught fire. The tents became a death trap as hundreds of people tried to escape a raging inferno. Jerry and his mother were caught in the stampede. He was in a pile of people, his mother on top of him. Just two people stacked at that exit survived and Jerry’s mother was not one of them. He is one of the survivors because Marion laid on top of Jerry shielding him.

167 people died. 100 animals died.

In an emergency area, Jerry heard a nurse say, “He’s not going to make it.”

Instead of soul-crushing despair, Jerry, all of six years old, said to himself, “Yes, I am.”

He has a bald spot where the top of his head was burned. His fingers were badly burned. Jerry played baseball one-handed as a kid. Yes, he did. There were surgeries and rehabilitation and ridicule.

And now you see the miracle of Jerry, the mental stretch, the fortitude. The man still competes on the Masters circuit. His life is filled with gratitude and he gives back routinely.

Jerry is an established Geezer Jock, through and through, because of that something else that has nothing to do with physical skill. Ask again, “Nature or Nurture?”

**

Roger Vergin has a remedy for the pain that starts in your lower back and runs down your leg. This fix worked for him, but maybe you should check with your doc first.

Just run a 100-meter race.

No, really. 100 meters was his prescription.

Vergin, who won seven consecutive USA Track & Field Masters Combined Events Championships, was battling back pain for 14 weeks in 2022. The tenderness hindered his performances at the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships in July in Lexington, Ky.

Roger kept grinding through treatment.

At the Combined Events Championships in St. Louis (August 27-28), Vergin (Ver-jeen) entered the Decathlon (M85) and hoped for the best. His goal when 2022 started was to set a new U.S. record in the Decathlon, but that was in jeopardy with the health issue.

The first event in St. Louis was the 100 meters. He ran.It was as if a stimulator had been implanted in his back. The pain was calmed.

“The pain doctor attributes that to the sprinting increasing the blood flow and somehow quieting down the nerve impulses causing the pain down the leg,” Roger said.

“With a little bit of fast-paced warmup and then the 100 sprint, I was pain-free and stayed that way through the long jump, shot put, and high jump. By the time of the 400-meter, the pain had returned somewhat, but was still not too bad.”

Vergin would not slow down. He went on to set an American record in the Decathlon for Men 85-89 with 6,021 points, breaking a mark that had stood for 11 years. Vergin also broke the U.S. M85 record for the 80 meter hurdles, which had stood for 15 years, clocking 18.75 against the previous mark of 20.00 set by Ralph Maxwell in 2007.

Roger Vergin, in his 80s, in the high jump. Photo by Rob Jerome.