As far as getting old and not being able to do things, it all depends on what kinds of injuries you sustain over the years, or what kind of medical conditions crop up. I twisted the crap out of my back whilst barrelling around in the desert and it's a mess. If I take care of it, and avoid trying to be a tough guy, it serves me pretty well (rotator cuffs took a hell of beating, too). If I screw around trying to lift things that I could get help with or just take a pass on, it lets me know.
Continuing to do things we like to do well into our later years has everything to do with taking care of our health. It would seem that I can ride a sport bike about as well as I ever could, but I've given up the dirt riding, since the repeated impacts on the spine and joints are anathema to a pain-free life.
When I was 14, I weighed about 135, and I could buck 94-pound bags of cement all day long and I did so, along with hay bales, bags of feed, and sundry other very heavy items. I was made of spring steel; I won the pushup contest at high school, beating the coach's son, which explains why the coach let the big kids push me around until I threw one of them into a wall, and they decided that this little bastard wasn't worth the trouble.
All that was a long time ago. We want to keep riding, we've got to strategize, using brains rather than brawn. There's plenty of guys out there who've had to quit altogether because of blown disk, a wrecked hip joint, torn rotator cuffs, trashed knees, busted ankles...use technology to your advantage and you can keep riding for a long time.
