Turning A Moonshot Into A Moonwalk

Del Moon, aka Moonwalker, near the finish of his 1500-meter Power Walk at the National Senior Games in Des Moines. A "moonshot" is considered an impossible dream. It's not always true. Photo by Archi Trujillo/National Senior Games.

 

*Many of you can relate to the moralization at the end of this story.

By Ray Glier

When Del Moon took the full-time job in 2013 promoting the National Senior Games, which advocates for active and healthy lifestyle among older Americans, he weighed 290 pounds. Del, 72, did not have to look in the mirror to understand he needed a transformation. He could plainly see what you and I could see, which was he was an ill-fit physically for the job, no matter his brilliant branding skills.

And, still, Moon did not act forcefully to get in shape.

“I was really self-conscious about it, but I didn’t do much about it,” Del said. 

Here is where one friend—it only takes one—can disrupt your cruise control. They break through the sluggishness in your willpower, or poke a hole in it. It is really, really hard to do a makeover in your 60s. Sometimes you need that poke.

Del had a friend like none other, the demonstrative and charismatic Leurene Hildenbrand, who was 83.

“She came up to me and said, ‘Del, you're my good friend. You've got to get that off’ and she was poking me in the stomach, hard,” Moon said. “And she said, ‘Now you listen to me. I've said that to every one of my friends back home for the last 20 years, and there's not a damn one of them left with me. 

‘I want you with me in 10 years’.”

Kicked in the gut, so to speak, Del started to shed pounds, which was not easy being schooled in Louisiana (LSU). “They take away your man card if you can’t cook,” said Del, who was also diagnosed pre-diabetic. 

By the time the 2019 National Senior Games came to Albuquerque, New Mexico, Moon had literally and figuratively changed his identity. He did this in his 60s! Many of us think 65+ is too late to adapt. It's not.

The NSGA had added power walking to its vast menu of sports at the national games. Del had shed pounds and taken up power walking. He was an athlete now.

His nom de guerre became—you guessed it—Moonwalker. In Albuquerque, Del became the first NSGA full-time employee to compete in the National Senior Games.

Moon was slow, so slow that Moonwalker was fitting, he said, not just because of his last name, but the fact it appeared he was slow walking, just like the astronauts on the moon in 1969. 

No matter. Moonwalker had a blast the next several years. In Pittsburgh for the 2023 National Senior Games, he had a leg in the torch relay. Some people bike with the torch, or run with it. Del power walked his relay leg with the torch.

Last week in Des Moines, at the 2025 National Senior Games, Moon competed in the 1,500-meter power walk and finished last with a time of 13 minutes, 59.12 seconds.

“I wanted a time, that’s all, something to build on for Tulsa (2027 National Senior Games),” Moon said. 

But there was almost no Des Moines.

After the Games in Pittsburgh in 2023, the wheels came off Moonwalker. 

Del had to be helped off a street car in New Orleans in 2023 by a young woman because the pain from spinal stenosis in his back got bad enough to effect his mobility. The progressively painful bad back meant he couldn’t power walk. The extra pounds returned.

By this time in his life, Moonwalker was an identity and being active was a lifestyle, so Del didn’t fold. He didn’t need to be poked, either.

First came the operation on his back, only for Moon to discover the severe back pain had been “masking a seven-piece hot jazz band playing in my left hip,” he said.

“The doctor said, ‘You're not going to heal and walk properly until that gets taken care of’,” Del said.

On October 17, 2024, Moon received a new titanium hip. 
  
“Through this whole horrible (recovery) process I was sedentary,” Del said.

Slowly, he got back in shape. Moon weighs 238 now, with plans for more weight loss.

Here is where some of us can relate. Something physical or psychological in our lives got in the way of our fitness. 

When he was four years old, his mother took him to an eye doctor, who said Del was a high-risk candidate for detached retinas.

“Back in the 1950s you couldn’t do anything about detached retinas,” Moon said.

Point blank, he was told no roller coasters, no contact sports, nothing, not even dodge ball. That was a lot of fear to lay on a kid. “You could go blind with a knock in the head.”

“That was one factor why I was so sedentary,” Del said. “All my adult life, I was scared to death to play sports.”

The retinas did detach starting with the left eye in November of 2012 and then the right eye in 2013. Surgery fixed both, but Moon had learned a lesson.

“It made me understand that when I see somebody who's quote, unquote ‘fat’ on the street, you don't know what their back story is,” Del said.

Moon’s story is ever-changing. He is now somewhat retired and a part-time communications consultant for The National Senior Games, the official storyteller of the NSGA. One thing that did not change is his devotion to power walking.

Moonwalker still walks one heel forward at a time.

**

Power walking techniques involve the following:
•    The walker must walk straight.
•    The walker must walk doing an alternating movement of feet and arms.
•    The walker must walk with one foot in permanent contact with the ground.
•    The leading leg must be bent.
•    Each advancing foot strike must be heel to toe at all times.

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