David Trinko: Fighting back against Father Time

As it turns out, I’m not too old for this.

If you think back to watching the 1986 movie “Lethal Weapon,” Detective Roger Murtaugh kept repeating “I’m too old for this” (usually followed by a colorful expletive) every time he was in an overly physical situation.

The actor, Danny Glover, was only 40 during filming, but his character was on the verge of 50, like I am now. I recall watching that back in the day and thinking all your athletic ability must disappear once you hit 35. After all, that’s when professional athletes started to lose it.

Age doesn’t do you any favors. Parts of your body start hurting for what seems to be no particular reason. Aches and pains take days or weeks to go away. Time is the one opponent that always wins.

I’ve always countered that being around young people keeps you young. It’s one reason I volunteer to coach youth sports.

I had a moment of questioning if that was wise recently. I’m coaching my youngest daughter on her fifth- and sixth-grade softball team this spring, and I was pitching to some of the girls.

One girl hit a beautiful line drive right up the middle, right at the pitcher. Directly at the pitcher’s left knee. Square at my knee.

With all the machismo possible when a man gets put in serious pain by an 11-year-old girl, I told her I was fine. I told her it didn’t hurt. I kept throwing batting practice.

I also kept lying. Of course it hurt.

It’s hard enough being an old dad to a young girl. It doesn’t help that I’ve had gray hair since before I turned 40, to the extent one of our former reporters thought my 40th birthday was actually my 50th. When I pick my youngest up from places, many people assume I’m her grandfather. Still, I want to give her the same experiences her oldest sisters got, especially since she seems to enjoy when I coach her teams.

Anyway, I really didn’t know how badly my knee hurt until the next morning. I could barely walk until I started moving a little bit. Every five minutes sitting at my desk at work seemed to reset whatever progress I’d made. I avoided the stairs at home. I wondered if this would be one of those life-changing moments, where I could no longer do simple things I’d taken for granted.

Fortunately, by our next practice a few days later, my gait had returned to normal. Somehow there wasn’t major damage. Somehow I’d avoided serious injury. I threw more batting practice, and the girls were nice enough not to hit me all night.

Then Thursday’s practice came around. We were missing a lot of girls, but we were trying to keep infielders on the dirt while batting people around to the different bases. We ran out of batters, and we weren’t sure how to keep the drill going.

I decided to grab one of the girls’ bats and take a swing. I intentionally grounded it to the third-base side (where most hits go in youth softball). When a girl overthrew first base, I took off for second, just like we teach them to do in that situation. The old, fat man who could barely walk a few days earlier made a hustle play. (The coach in me used that opportunity to talk about what they’d done wrong on the play, even though my inner 12-year-old wanted to gloat.)

The past few weeks have proven one thing to me: I am not too old for this.

David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter/X @Lima_Trinko.