About this blog

“… Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” 1833

The first purpose of this public journal (or at least a convenient excuse for it) will be, simply: To report on the collective experience of about three dozen Alaskans, myself included — all members of the Anchorage Rowing Association — as we travel as a team to Italy this summer to compete in the World Masters Games in Torino.

Close on its heels, however, is a larger, more general purpose: To explore the idea of living life to the full just as long as personally possible. Which is more or less what the World Masters Games is all about (as I’ll explain in just a moment).

First, though, let’s introduce the guide and ancient navigator for this blog — the “Ulysses” of the title — known as Odysseus in the epic Greek poem “The Odyssey” (by Homer) and as Ulysses in Latin translations favored by early Italians and latter-day Victorian poets (see Tennyson above).

In “The Odyssey,” you’ll recall, Homer sings of the wayward travels of Odysseus, who fought Trojans for ten long years in far-away Troy before spending ten more years trying to sail his way back home. Finally, he succeeded. And that was the end of the story.

Or at least it was until Tennyson came along some 3,000 years later and wrote a poetic sequel to The Odyssey — one in which the eventually-aging king grows tired of domestic life in Ithaca and yearns to travel once more. Ulysses in “Ulysses”:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life….
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees! …

The more he thought about it, in fact, the more the old mariner-king began to warm to the idea of a new sea journey. One in which he and his former crew mates would pursue knowledge “like a sinking star” on the far horizon of some wine-dark sea. They would do so in spite of all the physical challenges for men their age, he tells them, because:

.… Though we are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!

So there you have the set-up for … what? Odyssey II? The Return of the Cyclops? Back to Calypso?

I would suggest you at least have a wonderfully eloquent and heartfelt call to live your life purposely — in whichever way you choose — as long as you possibly can.

You may decide to become a doctor in your fifties. Or learn three new languages in your sixties. Or compete athletically in your seventies and eighties (as a certain 80-year-old Australian pole-vaulter did during the last World Masters Games in Sydney).

The Games.

Have you heard of them?

Like  the Olympics, World Masters Games competition occurs every four years, bringing together to one city thousands of athletes from around the world competing in about 30 different sports that include hundreds of different events.

But unlike the Olympics — limited to only the most elite athletes in the world competing in the very prime of their lives — Masters competition is open to anyone 27 years of age or older with competitors spanning a broad range of skill levels. In other words, there are no “trials” to limit the field. Pass a basic physical exam, pay a nominal entry fee and you’re in.

Significantly, you only compete against other men or women who are approximately the same age as you are, or, in the case of teams, the same average age. So heading home with an individual or team medal isn’t so wild a dream.

Consequently WMG participation far surpasses that of the Olympic Games. At the last Summer Olympics in London, 10,000 athletes attended the opening ceremonies. In the last World Masters Games in Sydney, Australia, over 28,000 athletes competed.

I happened to be one of them.

I’m George Bryson, a career journalist in his sixties. A 35-year resident of Alaska born and raised in California. A married father of three Alaska-born daughters. A minor wanderer. A lifelong lover of literature, science, nature and sport — who recently found a way to combine all four enthusiasms in one neat package through the art and sport of rowing.

Racing as a rower wasn’t entirely new to me. I’d sculled some (rowing with two oars) in a single and a double during high school, then rowed briefly in a freshman eight (with eight teammates, each rowing with one long “sweep” oar, in a paper-thin, 60-foot-long racing shell) in college.

But more than three decades of newspaper work would then intervene, with its sometimes less-than-healthy deadlines and donuts and coffee. And when, at the end, the newspaper I worked for offered its senior employees a “severance package” — as fiscally challenged papers all across the nation in 2009 did while attempting to trim their payrolls — I left the paper I loved (the “old Anchorage Daily News”) about 30 pounds overweight.

So.

I decided to seize the temporary windfall of my severence pay to award myself a kind of limited athletic scholarship in hopes of getting healthier. I began running and biking and skiing and watching what I ate. In an instant I began feeling both healthier and happier. I also began to row, finding some new, like-minded friends — members of a fledgling Anchorage rowing club — who aspired to some of the very same things.

But that’s a subject for another post. / gfb