How many of you aren't in the best of condition?

[pardsie]

OK time to pony up and be honest! How many of you are old or to put it another way you can remember when TVs were black and white only? You are not in the best of physical condition or to put it another way you cannot remember the last time you were able to just look down to see your shoes. How do these affect your diving? There obviously are physical limitations to scuba diving. Do you just do relatively shallow dives in warmer waters say 60' or less? Do you require a crane to get back in the boat? With your physical limitation what areas of the dive sequence do you find the most difficulet? Do these affect how often and where you choose to dive?Remember I said to be honest!

On another note we all should be extremely pleased we are able to avail ourselves of the information and the quality of our fellow divers who frequent this website. Maybe people did not dive when the TVs were black and white. Ooops I just remembered sea hunt...sorry.

[Doc]

OK time to pony up and be honest!

Never use 'em myself. I rely on gas management.

How many of you are old or to put it another way you can remember when TVs were black and white only?

Sea Hunt was never in color.

You are not in the best of physical condition or to put it another way you cannot remember the last time you were able to just look down to see your shoes.

Other than the Lumbar Laminectomy, I'm as good as I was when I was 18.

How do these affect your diving? There obviously are physical limitations to scuba diving. Do you just do relatively shallow dives in warmer waters say 60' or less? Do you require a crane to get back in the boat?

For a standard boat dive, I have a nylon strap on my BC which I use to hand my entire rig up to the well-tipped boatsman.



In open sea recovery to a RIB or other inflatable, I use a BC rigged thusly and underneath that I wear a lightweight version of a climber's safety harness. It has handholds on my upper back for my younger dive buddies to haul in the great white whale. I try to hang around younger people, and it has become increasingly easier to do that.

With your physical limitation what areas of the dive sequence do you find the most difficulet?

Sitting in a coach class seat for more than 2 hours.

Do these affect how often and where you choose to dive?Remember I said to be honest!

Rough bottom heavy surf shore entries are out.

On another note we all should be extremely pleased we are able to avail ourselves of the information and the quality of our fellow divers who frequent this website. Maybe people did not dive when the TVs were black and white. Ooops I just remembered sea hunt...sorry.

And yes, my dive profiles are quite conservative. If there's cool stuff shallow (as is on the South Side of Roatan or in Belize), I will be at 15fsw for a 2hr BT. 5 dives a day are the norm. Shallow with exactingly slow ascents are my primary goal. It is rare for me to exceed 65fsw in Roatan.

When I visit other locales that have deeper attractions (i.e.: Bikini or Truk and to a lesser degree Philippines/So Pac/Indian Ocean, Red Sea), I will again be very conscious of profiles, concentrating again on very gentle ascents. I will also limit my repetitive dives by doing as few as three a day.

I feel just great after a week of diving. I usually start to hurt about when I'm landing at O'Hare. Spinal compression returns.

[Bob Vincent]

Well being near that half century mark I slowed down on the "tech side" When I started tech diving they didn't have a name for it. I no longer dive extremely cold water. I don't hang anymore sucking gas. I won't see the 2 plus depths anymore. If I dive a wreck its one that is fairly safe and has been visited a lot so silt outs & tangle hadzards etc are removed, that isn't a factor now days.

In 2005 December 25th I had a stroke that found me in the hospital 4 months and in therapy for 8 more. One year later Christmas '06 I was diving in Key Largo. So I'm not as good as I once was but ... how's that song go? LOL It's like that.

[ronbeau]

OK time to pony up and be honest! How many of you are old or to put it another way you can remember when TVs were black and white only? You are not in the best of physical condition or to put it another way you cannot remember the last time you were able to just look down to see your shoes. How do these affect your diving? There obviously are physical limitations to scuba diving. Do you just do relatively shallow dives in warmer waters say 60' or less? Do you require a crane to get back in the boat? With your physical limitation what areas of the dive sequence do you find the most difficult? Do these affect how often and where you choose to dive?Remember I said to be honest!

On another note we all should be extremely pleased we are able to avail ourselves of the information and the quality of our fellow divers who frequent this website. Maybe people did not dive when the TVs were black and white. Oops I just remembered sea hunt...sorry.

Actually I am in better shape now at 54 than when I was 30. When I got certified in 2004 I was about 50 pounds heavier than I am now. I finished losing the weight in December 2006 and I am around the same weight today 18 months later (+/- 3 - 4 pounds).

I generally try to row for 30 minutes per day on my rowing machine which amounts to 4.2 miles. When I started the rowing in 2004 I thought I would die after 4.5 minutes now 4.5 minutes is only 15% of the duration.

In my case safely enjoying diving and the heart attack statistics from DAN for older & larger divers divers finally prompted me to get my act together.

When I stated diving in 2004 I was on Lipitor and Niaspan and now I don't have to take either of them. My cholesterol and triglycerides are now well within the normal range.

[DennisS]

I recently had some nitrox tanks that were due for hydro, I went beach diving with 36% to burn it up. I did the usual huff and puff climbing up the beach washout. Then I thought, wait a minute, I've got 36% O2 in the tank, sucked off my reg all the way to the car and wasn't even breathing hard when I got there.

All my tanks are now Nitrox. Now I know why they call it geezer gas. If you won't improve your body's ability to use O2, double the O2 percent

[Gary D.]

I was there when dirt was still in production and the B&W TV in our house still had an oval screen. I still do some limit pushing rather extreme dives that some of the snotty noses I dive with would rather not do. So what’s your point?

Gary D.

[vicdiver656]

Well, I have had no problems, other than a bad knee, and few of cold water.....and sharks.

[NancyLynn]

OK time to pony up and be honest! How many of you are old or to put it another way you can remember when TVs were black and white only?

Being old enough to remember when TVs were only black and white has very little to do with being in the best of condition.

I'm that old, and am in better shape than my 17 year old daughter. I weigh less than she does now by about 4 lbs (having just lost 49 lbs), but even before I lost the weight I could still bike at least 90 more miles in a day than she could, and could outpace her on the first 10 miles since she travels about 3-5 mph slower than I do and needs a break every couple of miles. (I'm only limiting my comment to 100 miles a day because I haven't tried to bike more than 100 in a day.)

That said, I probably don't have the endurance for really strenuous exercise I had when I was in high school (biking is wimpy exercise), and I have no inclination to run as fast as I did then. But my point is that age is not necessarily any indication of being in condition.

[miketsp]

..snip..
How many of you are old or to put it another way you can remember when TVs were black and white only?
..snip..

Believe it or not, the correlation with age is not direct.
Since I turned 50 some 8 years ago, I've had (company requirement) to do a complete annual checkup and the first one I did made me rethink my lifestyle.
Before that I never did any regular exercise but since then I've religiously hit the treadmill for 3 sessions of 30mins per week, as hard as I can go, together with a much more careful diet selection.
My blood tests have shown improvement every year, cholesterol around 150, triglcerides low, and when I did my latest ergometric a few weeks ago the nurse confided to me that the mark I set last year was not beaten for over a month.
That ended with 2 minutes at 115% of age adjusted Max Heart Rate.
All of this has shown up as a very reduced SAC and generally leads to frustration with insta-buddies even though they may be much younger.
And I watched a lot of B&W TV.

[TSandM]

I'm old enough to remember drooling over Patrick McGoohan in Secret Agent Man (loved the song). We had a BIG black and white TV, in a homemade plywood cabinet, with a big, clunky black channel knob. That was a long time ago . . .

When I started diving, I wasn't overweight, but I was very weak. I had trouble getting out of the pool in my gear, and we were using tiny tanks. What's been great is how much diving regularly (and the obligatory tank-schlepping that goes along with it) has improved my strength over the last 3 years. This year, I finally decided to do something formal about fitness, and when I went for my initial appointment with the trainer, she told me that, for a woman my age, my upper body strength is amazing! That's all from diving, let me tell you, because it isn't from anything else.

Arthritis is what limits me -- I have trouble doing things that require a lot of strength from my hands, and for example, if my regs get stuck on my tanks, I have to get somebody to help me get them off. I have to be somewhat careful with heavy lifting, and getting doubles from the ground to a table, or from the car to the ground, has turned out to be a good way to hurt myself. I don't think there's any solution for that one, except big, strong, amiable dive buddies