THE OLDER WOMEN AND SPORT.

Otago Witness, Issue 3773, 6 July 1926, Page 73

THE OLDER WOMEN AND SPORT.

Being young may be the best thing in the world, but it has its disadvantages that nothing but time can alter, and can only alter Dy taking that youth away, (writes Sophie Eliott Lynn, in an English paper.) Youth is full of action and vitality, but it is the action of uncertainty ana experiment and of adaptation of oneself. It is a preparation, and an uncertain and precarious one at that, for the real business of life. Middle-age is the time when one pulls oneself up m the hurried traffio pf living, and pauses for a breathing space. The passage of the years has taught us that there is no wild haste to get things done, and the poise and experience it has given us have assured us of the future. It is in middle-age that the --wise woman is really at her best. Bhe knows her capabilities and her limitations and she is no longer troubled by the urge of youth with its passionate—and—painful aspirations and longings. * # « It Is then that woman, Instead of giving up sport, as, alas! she docs too often, should turn to sport wisely and sanely to get the best out of H for heraelf, ana to

«ive the best of herself to it. Her strength is unimpaired, and she has acquired the knowledge and the temperament of the successful. The number of positively elderly women who work their way into the finals of our tennis tournaments as compared to the number of youthful aspirants who fail in the first round, is a perpetual example to those unwise ones who subside into a dull and placid, though not uncomfortable middle-age. * * # There k a lady of 65 in Middleburg, U.S.A., who swims 10 to 15 miles each year to commemorate her birthday, and she says that each year she finds the sustained effort easier to maintain. Although she finds it difficult to learn or start new games that she has not done, as she has done her swimming, for years and years. There is a lady of 45 I know of who lives in Suffolk and hunts four days a week along with her growing familv. and she can run any of our younger athletes off their feet across country. Health and happiness, a contented mind, and a wide outlook and circle of interests are hers, instead of the more restricted portion of her house-devoted friends. “If it had not been for my sport and ray races when I was young,” said the Lord Mayor at a meeting at the Mansion House last summer, “I would not face with such equanimity the exhausting demands of my office,” and this is true, too, of our women, our older women, who are the mainstays and props of our great public organisations and of our homes. Too often, in their zeal and their love of their work, they forget the recreation, the phvsical recreation that alone can keep old age at bay, and retain a natural vitality and beauty, and that only comes from wholesale exercise in the open air.