Older, Wiser, and... Faster?

They say we as we get older, we slow down. Our bodies, our minds, our reaction time, our senses; they all get slower and duller... Well, Saturday night I watched as a nearly sixty-seven year old man took that theory and shoved it down their throats...

A professional drag racer now in the sport only for the thrill of it had the best race of his life twenty-nine years after he acquired the title of World Champion in 1977. Twenty-nine years; that's a lot of 'older'. And yet, somehow, on a dry and windy day in Tucson, Arizona almost three decades after he was named 'the best', he blew, even himself, right out of the water.

I call him my surrogate dad because he might as well be my father and I love him to death. He and my mother have been together for over ten years and together they epitomize what it means to be 'young at heart'. If you don't know him, you might look at him and think he looks his age, but the moment you meet him, you can look at him and never guess he was a day older than fifty.

At sixty-six one could assume, no, expect, that time would have taken its toll on the body and the mind. Outwardly, it has... He does not look thirty-six, he's got a bit of a belly, enjoys 'smooth' jazz, and occasionally needs a sentence repeated in order to hear it correctly. But, while in general he may have slowed down, he hasn't slowed down enough to act or feel his age 24/7...

A bit of background: Noel Zweigler races in the 'Pro' and 'Sportsman' classes of drag racing. For those of you unfamiliar with the sport I'll give you the basics as there's a lot more to it than most people, including myself before I met Noel, realize. In most classes, the race isn't necessarily who can make it to the 1/4 mile with the fastest time. There is much more skill involved.

Drivers are required to predict how much time is will take them to reach the 1/4 mile mark. This is called their 'dial in'. Once they've established this time, then the trick is to come as close to their dial in as possible without going faster. For instance, last Saturday, Noel dialed in at 11.94 seconds. One round he was paired with a funny car that dialed in at 8.38 seconds. Noel beat him. How? He has years of experience, his reaction time was unbelievable, he knew his car, and he understands how the weather affects its performance.

Noel was given a head start equaling the difference between the dial in times. But even if Noel had been driving the same funny car and had dialed in the exact same time as his opponent, he would have won. He took off from the starting line three thousandths of a second after the light went green as opposed to the twenty-three hundredths of second it had taken his younger opponent to get off the starting line. He ran an 11.945 seconds on his 11.94 dial in (a difference of five thousands of a second) while his opponent was off his dial in by about half a second.

Noel's overall 'package', or the combination of flaws in his prediction, totaled .008; eight thousandths of a second. That's pretty much unbeatable. I'm not sure I'd even flinch as quickly when startled; and I'm twenty-six. They say those that are young at heart are generally younger in mind and body as well.

I'll say this: Noel's made a believer out of me and I sincerely hope when I'm his age, I'm still able to experience moments, however brief, like his on that Saturday night in the middle of the desert when sixty-six and thirty-six became one in the same...