Article by Sue Scheible of the Patriot Ledger
There’s a favorite quote of the late actress Bette Davis: “Old age ain’t for sissies.” Ruth Kundsin takes it to a new level: Pressing 150 pounds with one leg at age 103 ain’t for sissies either. For Ruth, it’s part of her weekly routine.
Every Friday morning at 10:30 a.m., Kundsin arrives at the South Shore YMCA. The MBTA RIDE drops her off (though she occasionally drives). Small but sturdy, she uses a cane for balance as she makes her way around the upstairs fitness center. She begins with a half-mile walk on the treadmill. Then she boards an elliptical bike and pedals about two miles in half an hour. After a short rest, she moves on to the main event: her weekly half-hour strength training session with her personal trainer, Dick Raymond.
“It’s enough to kill you,” she jokes.
“She’s stronger than she looks,” Raymond replies.
He reminds her she has been meeting with him for 10 years, starting when she was 93. At the end of her workout — a combination of leg, upper body and core strengthening exercises — she says she feels tired but good and can walk better then before, even after pressing 150 pounds with her legs.
“I like the idea of doing this at 103 — I’m trying to keep my strength up and be as healthy as possible and Dick is fantastic,” she says. “He would never have me do anything that could hurt me and he watches very carefully.” Once he even caught her when she started to fall.
Kundsin has maintained her strength and still has a steady gait. She continues to live independently in her home of many years and keeps up a busy social schedule that includes dinners out with friends, the monthly West Newton Cinema Club and plays at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.
Kundsin, a retired scientist, turned 103 on July 30 and finds “it’s not much different from being 100. You just keep going and you have more aches and pains, I suspect, and you’re a little shakier. But in my spirit I’m about the same . . . I’m basically a happy person, very positive, upbeat. I like to be happy and enjoy life.”
The “saddest” part of getting old, Kundsin says, is losing friends.
Last year, Rosemary Wahlberg, a Quincy community activist and social services pioneer who became her close friend, died at age 87. Last month she lost Ardys Peterson, who had talked her at age 101 into taking a cruise together to Budapest.
“What helps me is I have a lot of friends and they are very understanding,” she says.
When I comment that many must be younger; she laughs and says: “Oh all my friends now are younger than me! At this age everybody is younger than me. My daughter is going to be 80 next month. My daughter! And she’s working. She’s working hard on a project on the Hubble (Space Telescope). Well I worked til I was 81.”
Her daughter, Andrea Kundsin Dupree, is a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge.
Her secret for coping well as a centenarian is this: “I try to take care of things myself and then I have people who help me. I have help with my house and my garden. There’s not much you can accomplish if you are doing too many things at once. You have to keep your own spirits going.” She says she never feels lonely because “I have too much to do.”
In her home office, she is writing a book about her 51-year career as a microbiologist in Boston and about what it is like to grow old.
“The books about the elderly are written by young people and they don’t have a clue about what it’s like to be an old person,” she says.
One of the challenges Kundsin has faced is adjusting to a partial loss of vision caused by macular degeneration. She is treated with regular eye injections, wears glasses and uses a magnifying glass to read her daily newspaper. She has hearing aids and well-tended teeth.
Her main message for thriving in old age: “You need an upbeat psychology. It’s good to have friends who are optimistic. You want to do things that are interesting.”
Even things like lying on your back, raising your legs in the air and pedaling away.
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Original article by Sue Scheible of the Patriot Ledger. Reach Scheible at sscheible@patriotledger.com, 617-786-7044.
