The Sport You Can Play at Seventy

This is the first of my columns for The Body, so let me tell you what I mean to do with it. I am going to write about movement. Not exercise, not the hour you schedule and dread, but movement as the thread that runs the whole length of a life and decides, quietly and far in advance, what kind of old age is waiting.

It is the subject I care most about, and I come to it honestly. I grew up on the Spanish coast, where the older women and men never stopped moving and nobody thought to call it wellness. It was simply how you lived. I have spent the years since trying to understand why that works, and the deeper I go the more one plain idea keeps returning. The body keeps the account. What you pay in through your thirties and forties it pays back, with interest or without it, in your seventies.

We tend to treat movement as something to get back to. Later, when work eases, when the children are grown, when the knee settles. The trouble is that the body does not recognise a convenient moment. The years you skip are not neutral years. They are withdrawals, and the bill arrives late, when it is hardest to meet.

Let me give you the example that made me want to write this column at all.

A couple of summers ago we spent my husband Andy's birthday at the holiday apartment of my friend Irene and her family, in Huelva, west of Seville. We made up a four for padel: Andy and me, Irene's husband José, and her father, Agustín, who is seventy. Agustín agreed to play with the easy indifference of a man who has nothing left to prove, and as we knocked up I watched Andy, I think, deciding to go easy on him.

We did not need to go easy on him.

What Agustín did was not athletic, or not in the sense the word is usually meant. He did not chase and he did not hit hard. He stood roughly where the ball was going to be before it had settled on going there, and he returned it to the one square of court where none of us was standing. Placement, and then placement, and then placement again: a game he had plainly played all his life, smooth and unhurried and almost impossible to live with. He was not the fittest of us on the court that morning. He was only the best.

This is the quiet promise of padel, and it is why the game belongs in a column about a whole life. It rewards the thing that outlasts speed. The court is small, the back wall does some of your running for you, the serve goes in underhand, and the ball comes off the glass at a pace a person can read rather than merely react to. Strength helps. Position helps more. And position is the one part of the game that does not retire when the legs begin to.

The numbers we have belong to tennis, padel's closest relative. In the Copenhagen City Heart Study, which followed more than eight thousand people for up to twenty-five years, tennis players outlived sedentary people by almost ten years, and a large British study puts racket-sport players at roughly half the risk of an early death. Both are observational, and neither measured padel, because when these people enrolled the game had barely arrived. I will not overstate it: the sport with the best longevity figures we have is padel's near relation, and the reasons it does well are reasons padel shares.

None of this makes the game gentle. A real match runs the heart as hard as tennis, and padel has assembled its own catalogue of sore elbows and unhappy shoulders. The body past thirty collects these faster than it sheds them, and Agustín, I am sure, has his. The point was never that padel asks nothing of an older body. It is that the game lets craft answer for what the body can no longer supply, and craft, unlike pace, accrues.

Consider Agustín's day. He played padel with us all morning, ninety minutes of it, then took Andy out for nine holes of golf. Andy, in fairness, covered the greater ground: his approach to a fairway is to cross it diagonally, several times over. Then Agustín came back, lit the barbecue, and hosted the long lunch for all of us, moving between the grill and the table as though the morning had cost him nothing. None of it was an occasion. As far as I could tell, it was a fairly standard day for Agustín.

The account is being kept for all of us, whether we attend to it or not, and the work of staying on the right side of it is quiet, ordinary and lifelong. The proof was across the net from me that morning in Huelva: seventy years old, putting the ball where I was not, and looking the whole time as though he had all the years in the world.

Ana Del Pino Sastre is married to Andy Galt, a co-founder and editor of The Alborán. The Body is edited to the publication's independent standard, with dual sign-off by both editors.