PHILADELPHIA — I DON’T blanch as the guy in the green muscle shirt posts me up, six feet from the basket. He is 30 years younger, four inches taller and 25 pounds of muscle heavier. He gets the ball and goes up for the shot, but my arm flashes in front of him and, somehow, his shot goes awry and I grab the rebound as the game-ending clock buzzes.
All right, that doesn’t happen much, even though I play, at 62, full-court basketball at a Philadelphia gym almost daily. I have guarded quite a few ex-college players and even some celebrities — the comic Kevin Hart last year and Will Smith back in his “Fresh Prince” days (he dunked backward over me, alas). No one would confuse me on the court with Michael Jordan — or maybe even Vernon Jordan — but I make my share of 15-footers and hustle and laugh and trash-talk.
Some naysayers would posit that I am, well, nuts to play a strenuous sport like basketball at my age, but Dr. Brooke Salzman, a professor of geriatric medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, isn’t one of them.
“Extreme sports need not be reserved for the young,” Dr. Salzman said. “Certainly there are risks involved, but I’m a proponent of exercise.”
“In some senses, it’s riskier not to exercise,” she said. “People are living longer and have different ideas of exercise than their parents. The health benefits are just too overwhelming to say basketball and such are bad for older people.”
With medical statistics scarce on this amorphous, more adventurous niche of elder exercise, participants tend to do what feels right for them, even if it hurts sometimes.
Jerry Quill, 75, did not play ice hockey when he was growing up in Minnesota or at Colgate University. Only when he came to suburban Philadelphia as a banker did he join a local skating rink and become involved in adult leagues. Fifty years onward, he plays twice a week in leagues where, while there is no defensive checking, he still gets knocked around.
“We call it ‘incidental contact’; we try not to stumble onto one another,” he said of his over-40 league. He has had, over the years, two broken ankles, a broken tibia, 55 stitches when a stick came up into his face and a puck in the eye on a tip-in. “It’s not a sport for the faint of heart,” he said.
Yet each week he plays, Mr. Quill said, he feels fulfilled and ready to play another one. “Maybe I’ll quit when I am 85,” he said.
His favorite defense partner, Morris Cheston, who captained the 1958-59 Princeton team, quit this year. “Now I am the oldest player,” Mr. Quill said. “My wife, who died last year, always said it wasn’t the hockey I liked, but that I got to tell lies and drink beer afterwards.”
Megan DeLena, of Lower Pottsgrove, Pa., sometimes drinks beer, too — after her 50-mile races. A bit younger than Mr. Quill, at 52, Ms. DeLena said she ran marathons for years and determined that she was not going to get any faster at them, so the new challenge had to be longer races.
She actually did not “do sports” as a child, she said, though she was in the badminton club as an undergrad at Princeton. She did not start running until 1995, having decided to stay home with her two young children and going “stir crazy.” Running was a convenient option, and a year out she did her first marathon.
“Once you get into it, half the fun is the people you meet,” said Ms. DeLena, who ran her first 50-miler in 2008. “They are all interesting, or they wouldn’t be doing this. This is beyond staying in shape. If I wanted to do that, I would run five miles a day. I am a huge goal-setter. I can’t survive without something new to accomplish.”
Chuck Melin just does the same thing week to week. He is a steer-wrestler and also the president of the National Senior Pro Rodeo Association. Mr. Melin, who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, does the senior rodeo circuit, mostly in the Western United States, for several months a year. He started at 17 and has done as many as 60 rodeos a year since.
“Sure, I can hurt after jumping off a horse and roping a 750-pound steer,” he said. “I take ibuprofen every day. The body may not be designed to be doing it, but my answer is, it keeps me young. I’m not bragging, but if you saw me, you’d say you can’t believe I am 62.”
John Branigan, a Philadelphia lawyer, is similarly young-looking. A catcher in over-40 baseball leagues — “not softball, mind you,” he said — he will be 63 next season.
To his friends, the baseball seems less incongruous than his boxing, which stuns them. Mostly his boxing takes place in classes, but he fights in matches, with mouthpiece and headgear, several times a year.
“Boxers are the best-conditioned athletes in the world,” said Mr. Branigan, who says learning how to take a punch and how to throw one properly is difficult and exhausting. “I fought a kid who was 30 last year and by the third round, he had nothing left — and he was in shape.”
Ben Paradee, 62, moved to Crested Butte, Colo., a few years ago after a career with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. He loved to ski, but was a little worried how long he could do it. Then the head of instruction saw how well he skied and persuaded Mr. Paradee to start teaching. Now, it is not just quick downhills, but moguls and jumps and extreme runs daily.
“I hang out with people in their 20s, but there is a guy here who is 75 and looks like Ernest Hemingway,” Mr. Paradee said. “So the question is now, Why wouldn’t I do this?”
A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2014, Section F, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Older Athletes Punching Above Their Age.
