BY CLIFF SMELLEY
“When you get older, about the only exercise you get is jogging your memory.”
Jim Love said it for laughs, but he, his wife, Arlette, and friends Russ Crawford and Sheryl Dixon are proving that they take exercise seriously.
Each member of the group (all retired Bradford County teachers) is more than 65 years old. They meet twice a week at Starke’s S&J Downtown Athletic Club, making the commitment to improve their lives and help each other keep that commitment.
“If we do it as a group, we probably won’t quit,” Arlette said.
Crawford said, “I know if I didn’t have this group, I wouldn’t be here. The group keeps me motivated to come and keep doing it.”
Jim Love said several factors influenced him and his wife to thinking about exercising. One was the commercial for the medical-alarm device that so many people know — the one with the woman on the floor who says, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.
“We basically wanted to be able to get up off the floor,” Jim said.
The other factor was visiting Arlette’s mother in the nursing home and seeing so many people having to rely upon walkers and wheelchairs.
“We wanted to do what we could to avoid that,” Jim said.
Arlette said she and Jim wanted to improve their flexibility, but taking the actual steps to do so came about through what she described as “a God thing.” Arlette explained that she and Jim were going to visit her mother in the nursing home on a Saturday when they decided to have lunch at Tony’s Italian Restaurant. They never go to Tony’s for lunch on a Saturday. As it turned out, the one time they did, they bumped into S&J Owner Shawn
Jenkins, who held the door for them.
After sitting down, Arlette said she told Jim that they should ask Jenkins if he works with “old people.”
That’s how it began for the former educators, who now find themselves the pupils.
“He’s a go-getter,” Dixon said. “He works you hard. He doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He’s encouraging.”
Arlette said through Jenkins’ encouragement, the group members have been able to exceed what they thought was possible and to continue to reach new heights.
“Sometimes you get stuck at a weight and think, ‘I can’t do more than this,’” Arlette said. “Shawn will say, ‘You are ready. It is time.’ He moves us up. On our own, we’d probably be just happy doing what we were doing.”
Jim Love said, “He’s not a taskmaster. He’s a motivator.”
Arlette said what she and the others are doing is impressive because none of them were into athletics when they were younger.
“Shawn took on a group of people who really didn’t like to exercise and really didn’t want to exercise,” Arlette said.
Crawford said he was honest with Jenkins, telling him, “I hate this. This is work. I’m lazy. I don’t like it.” Crawford, however, like the others in his group, has embraced the idea of getting physically fit. Jim said Crawford told
the group it needed to go to the gym more than once a week, which was how often the initial workouts were.
“There are days I don’t feel like doing it,” Crawford said, “but when I come in and when I’m done, it’s like a sense of accomplishment. I enjoy it.”
You may hear members of the group refer to themselves as the Dinosaur Club. It’s actually a term Crawford, Dixon and Arlette Love came up with for themselves upon entering retirement from Bradford Middle School. (Jim Love taught at BHS.)
“We were shuffling off to extinction as all these young people came in (behind us),” Arlette said.
They may be extinct in a professional sense, but they’re certainly not fading away in any other sense. The strides they’ve made in the gym and the way their bodies have responded are a testament to that.
“I’m stronger,” Dixon said. “I’ve got muscles now.”
It has been a process, of course — one that began at the end of August 2023. Jim remembered what it was like at the first and said he joked with Jenkins that he wouldn’t be the poster child for S&J.
“One of the first times I got overheated and had to stop,” Jim said. “(Jenkins) got me some water. I said, ‘Having an old, white-haired guy in front of your gym throwing up in the street would not be good advertising.’”
Arlette remembered being able to do only 15-25 of what are called “dead bugs,” core-strengthening exercises that have you lying on your back. She said now she and her husband and friends can do 200 without even thinking about it.
Crawford admitted he’s ready to tackle one exercise or workout after completing another, something that was hard to do in the beginning.
“Starting off, I’d have to go outside and huff and puff because I was always out of breath,” Crawford said. “Now, it’s like, ‘Let’s move on to the next thing.’ I take a minute or two, but I’m not out of breath.”
Arlette said Crawford is now usually the first one in the gym.
“He’s already going on his mat exercises and ready to move next door (to where the gym’s weights are),” Arlette said.
Crawford said, “I move around a lot easier than I used to. I have more energy. I’m standing up straighter.”
Arlette said the workouts helped her regain strength in one of her wrists, which she broke last year and had two subsequent surgeries on. Jenkins made any adaptations needed if her wrist hindered her from doing an exercise.
“That was a big help,” Arlette said. “Now, I’m a year after my last surgery, and I pretty much have back the strength I had before breaking my wrist.”
Jim Love said when he and his group members began leg presses, they added no weight to the platform, which weighs 50 pounds. Now, Arlette is doing more than 400 pounds, while Crawford has just recently exceeded 1,000 pounds.
Jim said his goal after a year of working out was to leg press twice his body weight. However, after approximately 10 months of working out, he’s leg pressing 20 reps of 1,065 pounds. In fact, he’s become an attraction for the youth who work out at the gym. He said, “It’s an ego trip for me when the kids go, ‘Is that the guy?’”
“That’s his biggest encouragement — when the kids come in,” Jenkins said.
The encouragement works both ways. Jenkins said the youth are more apt to do something if they see someone older than them doing it.
More than anything, Jenkins enjoys seeing the different ages coming together in the gym.
“They mix together so well,” Jenkins said, adding, “Everyone gets along. It’s a culture. It’s a culture of young kids respecting the older generation and the older generation realizing what young kids are up to.”
Arlette said it’s nice to be around kids again.
“Since we retired from teaching, we don’t get to see young children,” she said.
Perhaps more retired educators will become a part of the Dinosaur Club.
“A couple of former colleagues keep threatening to join us,” Jim Love said.
If that happens, they might find themselves doing things they never envisioned. As Jim told Crawford when they first started working out, “Do you realize we’re paying Shawn to make us do things we swore we would never do when we got out of P.E.?”
The important thing is they’ll be doing more than simply jogging their memories, as Jim put it. As Jenkins put it, “Everything that’s wrong with your body can be fixed if you just do it properly.”
“We try to cover every aspect of what can go wrong with your body at this age,” Jenkins said. “We try to fix those things and then move forward.”
