Staying on Path
CRANBERRY TWP — Charlie McChesney, 81, likes a challenge.
That's why he skis, snowboards, sails and rows. He spends his summers rowing and sailing on Lake Chatauqua in New York state and his winters traveling to ski resorts in the West or New England.
Or at least he did. The continuing COVID-19 pandemic has given McChesney a new challenge: staying fit when he has to stay away from the ski lodges and rowing clubs he used to frequent.
That's also the problem facing the senior clients attending Kathy Hensler's training sessions at the Rose E. Schneider Family YMCA, 2001 Ehrman Road, Cranberry Township.
They are finding new ways to maintain their fitness while maintaining their health, Hensler said.
Sandra Wargo, 73, has been teaching her Zumba gold class for seniors mostly by Zoom meetings these days.
For McChesney, of Mars, not being able to ski has disrupted a favored winter activity that he's pursued for more than 40 years.He said he started skiing when he was chaperoning a Boy Scout trip ski outing when he still lived in New Jersey.They were offering lessons to the Boy Scouts and he took the lessons, too.“It's one of those things you can do if you are reasonably skilled,” McChesney said. “As long as you can walk, you can ski.”With skiing, he said, “you can do everything. You can go down a gentle hill or go down something a little steeper, take it to the edge of your ability.“It's the endorphins which kick in when you do something that brings you to the edge, but not over the edge,” McChesney said.
McChesney said he likes to test himself, but not too hard. He estimates he falls once or twice during ski season.And he says he's only suffered one serious injury while skiing, one he sustained back in 2011 when he was 72.“I broke a femur (bone in my leg) in Maine,” he said. “I did something stupid. But we are kind of prone to that sometimes.”He was skiing at Sugarloaf in Maine on a children's trail with some members of a ski club from the North Hills.“The children's trail wasn't very steep, but it was very narrow,” McChesney said. “It was like a washboard with tops 10 feet apart. I thought, that's a problem.”McChesney said he “got going a little too fast, tried to slow down with a hockey-stop turn and skied into a tree.”It was pretty serious break and when the doctor asked McChesney to rate the pain on a scale of 0 to 10. McChesney said 25.After a long convalescence and rehabilitation, he shows little lasting effects from the accident, other than not being able to twist the affected leg as easily as before the accident.
Hensler says the thing she worries about most when training her more than 70 clients is good form, not frail bones.“Typically, most seniors can lift weights efficiently,” she said. “Not super heavy weights.”
Hensler said she “helps our senior exercisers be mindful of their form and posture.”Hensler is also healthy living director at the YMCA, as well as being certified to teach senior exercise classes such as Silver Sneakers and SAIL (Stay Active and Independent for Life).McChesney agrees with the SAIL goal, staying active and independent for life.“I try to stay active and as healthy as I can, because when I go, I want to go quickly,” he said. “I want to fall off a cliff.”McChesney said that at his age, “we have a lot of friends who are slowly declining. They say it's so hard, but that's the stuff that keeps you going.”Admitting he's as guilty as anyone else in sitting around, McChesney said: “I'm not an exercise fanatic by any stretch of the imagination, but I try to keep in reasonably good shape.”It's getting harder for McChesney to stay off the couch these days, since the COVID-19 pandemic.
McChesney and his wife, Ruth Ann, have not made any ski trips this season, not even to Seven Springs, which tried to entice him with free lift tickets.And he's avoided members of the rowing club he belongs to at Lake Chatauqua because there is no room to social distance in a racing scull or a one-man shell.“With this pandemic, we are avoiding it like the plague, which it is,” said McChesney of their efforts to isolate themselves from possible infection.For the moment, McChesney is taking long walks around his neighborhood every other day, ventures that cover about 2.5 miles.They believe if they stay active and away from sugary foods much of the time, McChesney said, they can retain a better quality of life.“A lot of my friends are limping around, and are not in the best of shape in their 70s,” he said.
