I'm 62. I still work outside. Long days. Uneven ground. Whatever the weather hands me. I always assumed if I kept showing up, my body would keep up too.

Then one season it stopped keeping up — and I refused to call it old.

The years I almost settled for

At 58, I was sore. Not injured — just quietly sore. Joints stiff in the morning. Stamina dropping mid-afternoon. Recovery from a hard day taking twice as long as it used to. The kind of breakdown you stop noticing because you've decided it's just how 60 feels.

My doctor ran labs. Everything was "normal." He told me I was healthy and to come back next year. So I did what most men my age do. I drank more coffee. Took a multivitamin. Bought more ibuprofen. Swore I'd start stretching more. None of it moved the needle.

The version of me from 45 — the one who could put in a full day, eat, sleep, and do it again — felt like a different man. I started turning down work. "My back's not up for that one. Maybe next time." The next time kept getting further away.

What I realized at fifty-nine

I wasn't aging poorly. I was nutrient-starved. Long days of physical work drain minerals and ancestral nutrients faster than most people realize — magnesium, zinc, CoQ10, the organ nutrients and collagen the body actually rebuilds with. Even when I ate well, I was still running on empty.

The B12, retinol, copper, heme iron, CoQ10, selenium, and the cholesterol-adjacent fats my hormones and joints are built from? I wasn't getting them. Multivitamins don't replace them — they use synthetic forms the body can barely absorb. The nutrients my grandfather got from organ meats every week, I was getting from nothing.

That's when I learned that for thousands of years, men worked harder and recovered faster — because they ate differently. Every traditional culture on earth ate the organs first.

You're not out of shape. You're undernourished.