Getting older

I am not faster than Aaron Rodgers.

I am 40 years old as of the middle of last month. Rodgers is 42 years old as of the beginning of last month, almost exactly two years older than I am.

I played baseball through high school. I was fast. I cannot recall a single time that I got caught stealing. And at my absolute fastest, Rodgers would have smoked me in a foot race.

This is stating the obvious. He's a professional athlete, and I was an OK athlete in high school. We were never in the same world when it comes to athletic accomplishments.

I have no doubt about where I stand. But I do think this point can be worth making every now and again: we are all slower than the slowest professional athlete. I'm sure I know people who think they could beat Rodgers or a slow offensive lineman in a race. They would lose. Badly.

So if it seems obvious to me, why am I even writing about it? Because it's a valuable reminder when Rodgers seems so relatable to me, an aging human, on certain plays over the course of the season. I remind myself we are not the same when it sometimes looks like we are.

Take this play where he appears to have wide open space to scramble for the first down, only to be run down easily by a slow player (again, this is slow by NFL standards, not you and me standards).

Rodgers started running. He probably thought he could make it to the first down marker, recalling the many previous times in his life when he would have. Then he realized something on the way there. He couldn't make it, not anymore.

I have also had that experience, framed in the context of my world far away from the NFL. It happens when I try to stop a ball from rolling out of my driveway into the street. It happens when I run to catch my son on the base paths of a baseball field. And it really happened when I recently took part in a kickball tournament.

I am not faster than Philip Rivers. Really. And neither are you.

We all saw Rivers in his attempted comeback with the Indianapolis Colts over the last month. He looked every bit of his 44 years on this planet. He looked like a dad who hasn't been playing professionally for the last number of years.

We saw him. We made our jokes. He's still faster than all of us.

I might be more tempted to pick myself in a race with Rivers than with Rodgers. So I need to remind myself, once again, about the reality of the situation. Even if Rivers wasn't outrunning any NFL defenders, he was getting a couple steps in first.

I would get zero steps in before an NFL defender caught me.

It's not like I was watching every snap of Rivers' return with the Colts this year. Anytime I did tune in, he was as relatable as any professional athlete might ever be to me or any other former high school athlete watching on TV from the couch.

For example, Rivers had a moment of panic in the fourth quarter against the Seattle Seahawks in his first game back. Facing pressure from a nasty defense as his team tried to mount a comeback, Rivers dropped back. He tried to get away from the pass rushers. And then he just fell down.

Rivers managed to find his feet again and at least get his momentum moving forward before being stopped on the play. Even in his first action in years and looking a little soft around the middle, he showed that he was still a professional athlete.

For the rest of that game and some other losses with Rivers at the helm, he defiantly shuffled around and proved that he could at least still kind of play quarterback at the highest level. He might have been the least athletic person on the field. But he's still a better athlete than you or me.

I mentioned my own athleticism reality check in a kickball tournament. What I should have said was that I fell down while trying to run in that kickball tournament.

I actually fell down twice.

The strategy for offense in kickball is pretty simple. Everyone tries to kick it as far as they can. Most of these players pop up harmlessly. Instead, you want to kick it low to the third base side of the field. The majority of defenders cannot throw that big doofy ball across the diamond, and you can reach base with a single.

Following that strategy, I kicked a grounder to third base. I started running up the first base line of the all-dirt infield. And I immediately had my feet go out from under me. I fell straight down to the ground, scratching the palms of both of my hands with marks that lingered for an embarrassingly long time.

I tried to get up. I was still hoping to beat the throw to first base. I fell down again. I sort of caught myself, insofar as I didn't fall all the way to the ground. But I still wasn't back to my feet. I guess I was crawling for that brief moment? Eyewitnesses may or may not have called it crawling.

It took me a few more steps/crawls. It was not graceful.

In case you're wondering why I'm so confident in lumping other people in with my assertion that we're all worse athletes than Aaron Rodgers or Philip Rivers, let me tell you how this story ends: I eventually stood back up and ran to first base. And I was safe.

In terms of athleticism and speed, my recent exploits are nothing like the struggles of Aaron Rodgers and Philip Rivers. But in terms of where we are in our lives, I think I was right to think that I can relate to my fellow 40-year-olds.

We're getting older. We can feel it in subtle ways and in moments when it's obvious. And we're just doing our best.