Truth or Excuse (A Question I Had to Truly Ponder)

This is the third post in a series about redefining what's possible after 40.
Read the previous post: Nobody Told the 40-Somethings They Were Too Old.

I want to tell you about the moment everything changed for me.

It wasn't dramatic. There was no rock bottom, no health scare, no doctor's warning. I wasn't standing at the edge of something terrible looking for a reason to turn around.

I was watching a Hyrox competition. One of my first.

If you haven't come across it yet, Hyrox is a global fitness competition — a combination of running and functional fitness stations that draws thousands of competitors of every age, body type, and fitness level. It's not the Olympics. It's not the CrossFit Games. It's ordinary people showing up to do something hard in a giant arena, cheered on by strangers who understand exactly what it costs to keep moving when your legs are done.

And somewhere in my watching, the camera found them.

People in their 70s. Moving through the course. Finishing with times that were beating competitors half their age.

I sat with that for a long time.

The Story I Didn't Know I Was Telling Myself

Here's the thing about the stories we carry — the ones about what we're capable of, what's realistic for someone our age, what ship has sailed and what door has closed. We don't usually know we're telling them. They don't announce themselves as stories. They just feel like facts.

I'm not athletic. I never have been. That's just who I am.

It's too late to start something like that. That's for younger people.

My body isn't built for that kind of thing.

I had versions of all of these running quietly in the background. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just as a kind of low hum of limitation that shaped what I reached for and what I didn't bother trying.

And then I watched a 70-something finish a Hyrox course with a respectable time.

Not a superhuman. Not a lifelong elite athlete. Just a person who decided — at some point, at some age — to find out what they were capable of.

The quiet hum of limitation got a lot harder to hear after that.

Truth or Excuse?

I mean that with complete love and zero judgment. Because I had to ponder it myself first.

When a 70-year-old is pushing a sled and running laps and finishing strong — what exactly is the story you're telling yourself about why you can't begin?

Not why you can't do that specifically. Not why Hyrox isn't for you, or running isn't your thing, or the gym feels impossible right now. But why the bigger thing — the reaching, the trying, the finding out — feels unavailable to you at this particular age and stage of life.

Because that's the story worth examining.

Not to shame yourself out of it. But to hold it up to the light and ask: is this actually true? Or did I just never question it?

Doing vs. Looking

Here's what struck me most about those 70-year-old Hyrox competitors — and what strikes me about every athlete I've watched defy the cultural story about aging bodies.

They're not doing it to look a certain way.

They're doing it to do something. To find out what's still possible. To feel their own edges. To be present in their bodies in a way that sitting on a couch — however comfortable — simply cannot replicate.

This is the distinction that matters most and gets talked about least in the wellness space, which is almost entirely obsessed with aesthetics. How you look. How much you weigh. What size you wear. Whether your body conforms to a standard that, by the way, was never designed with a 55-year-old woman in mind and has no business telling her what she should look like.

The 70-year-olds at Hyrox aren't chasing a body. They're chasing aliveness.

And once you've tasted that distinction — once you understand that movement can be about feeling and doing and discovering rather than shrinking and conforming — the whole landscape changes.

What Happened Next

Not long after watching Hyrox, I laced up my shoes and went outside to run.

I made it 250 metres before I had to stop.

I want to be very clear: I did not find this discouraging. I found it interesting. Because I wasn't running to prove something or hit a number or look a certain way. I was running to find out where I was starting from.

250 metres was where I was starting from.

Fine. Start there.

What followed was one of the most quietly radical things I've done in my adult life — not because it was dramatic, but because it was consistent. One foot in front of the other. One run at a time. Not chasing a finish line so much as following a curiosity about what was possible.

The 70-year-olds at Hyrox didn't inspire me to become an elite athlete. They inspired me to stop waiting for a version of myself that was already fit enough, already young enough, already ready enough to begin.

They showed me the begin was the whole point.

The Real Question

So here it is, offered gently and with genuine curiosity rather than challenge:

What would you try if you stopped waiting to be ready?

Not what would you do if you were 20 years younger, or 30 pounds lighter, or less busy, or less tired, or in a different season of life. Right now. This body. This age. This exact version of you that is, quietly and without fanfare, already enough to begin.

The 70-year-olds at Hyrox didn't wait until conditions were perfect.

Neither did Deanna Stellato-Dudek, who returned to figure skating at 33 after a 16-year break and made her Olympic debut at 42.

Neither did Natalie Spooner, who was back on the ice four weeks after giving birth and scoring at the World Championship four months later.

Neither, for that matter, did any woman who ever decided — at 40, 50, 60 — that she wasn't done becoming yet.

The body keeps going if you keep asking it to (and caring for it).

The question is whether you're willing to ask.

True North Co. exists for women in midlife who are done waiting for the right time and ready to find out what they're actually capable of. To Live Life (Mind)Fully.