On my fiftieth birthday, a friend gave me a watch that counted ski runs and vertical feet of descent. My wife Vivian has never forgiven him. From that day on, whenever she would say “Let’s call it a day” after a long morning on the slopes, I was more than likely to reply, “Let’s make it an Everest Day – twenty-nine thousand feet!” She would sigh, pick up her poles, and follow me back to the lift. What a wonderful wife.
I tell that story because it captures something essential about how I have approached physical activity for the past five decades: not as a fitness regimen, not as a programme with targets and deadlines, but as a way of being in the world. I never set out to become an athlete. I am a chartered quantity surveyor from Birmingham who built a career across the Caribbean. But somewhere along the way, movement became the thread that held everything together – the work, the travel, the relationships, and the sense that life is something to be lived with your boots on.
I learned to water ski in Jamaica in my twenties. I picked up snow skiing in my mid-thirties, when a friend invited me to Boyne Highlands in Michigan over Christmas. I was immediately hooked and sought out an instructor in Colorado named Rob Tiernan, a mountain man from Montana who was a park ranger when he wasn’t teaching skiing. We skied together for many, many years, to the point that the other instructors said we were clones of each other coming down the mountain. Over the decades, Vivian and I skied across Colorado, Montana, Switzerland, France, and British Columbia. During one eight-day trip to Aspen, we logged a hundred and fifty thousand vertical feet. During another week in Méribel, we covered a hundred and forty-two thousand. That pesky watch again.
But it was never just about skiing. In our fifties, Vivian and I trekked the Jomolhari route in Bhutan, crossing passes at sixteen thousand feet in the Himalayas. In our sixties, we climbed Blue Mountain peak in Jamaica… twice. In Kauai, we hiked sixteen hundred feet down a trail and then climbed all the way back up, Vivian nursing a broken toe the entire way. Back in the hotel that evening, she said, “For a sixty-seven and sixty-eight-year-old couple, we’re not doing too badly!” I couldn’t have agreed more.
In our seventies, we hiked two thousand vertical feet in the Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca, trekked to a frozen waterfall inside a cave in Azerbaijan, and I scrambled up Camelback Mountain in Phoenix – a trail that rises fourteen hundred feet in just over a mile and is known locally as a “real leg burner.” I made it back to my car in good shape.
None of this required exceptional genetics or a personal trainer. What it required was consistency and a refusal to let age become an excuse. Vivian and I have always carried our own ski equipment – no porters, no transfers. We eat well when we travel, often spectacularly well, but we earn it. We started doing Tai Chi at Camana Bay on Sunday mornings. We hike wherever we go, whether it’s the mountains of Georgia or the Old Town of Baku. We have never belonged to a gym with a monthly membership and a locker. Our gym has always been the world.
I have always believed that in life there are players and spectators. Theodore Roosevelt said it far more eloquently, but the core idea is the same. You do not build a vital, healthy life by watching from the sidelines and waiting for perfect conditions. You build it by getting out the door, putting one foot in front of the other, and doing it again tomorrow. At seventy-nine, I can tell you that the view from up here (literally and figuratively) has been worth every step.
For anyone looking to stay active and engaged as the years add up, here are a few things I have learned along the way:
1. Make movement part of how you live, not something you schedule.
I never had a fitness programme. I had a life that involved walking, hiking, skiing, swimming, and carrying my own bags. The best exercise is the kind you don’t think of as exercise, it’s simply how you move through your day.
2. Find a partner who will keep you honest.
Vivian has been beside me on every mountain, every trail, and every ski slope for decades, including the ones she’d rather have skipped. Having someone who shares the commitment makes it sustainable. You encourage each other on the days when the sofa looks more appealing than the summit.
3. Don’t let the number on your birthday cake set the agenda.
Nobody told us we were too old to trek in Bhutan at fifty-five, or too old to hike in Azerbaijan at seventy-eight. We simply went. Age is a fact, not a limitation, and the only person deciding what you’re capable of is you.
4. Earn your meals.
Some of the finest meals of my life have come after the hardest days on a trail – home-cooked lamb soup after a mountain hike in Azerbaijan, paella after a cliff walk in Mallorca, stew and red wine eaten sitting on our skis in the snow. Food tastes better when your body has worked for it. That’s not a diet tip. It’s a life tip.
Author Bio
Martyn Bould is a highly successful entrepreneur based in the Cayman Islands. He is a founding member for the Cayman National Cultural Foundation and the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for services in preserving and developing Caymanian culture, and by the Cayman Islands Government in the 2025 Hero’s Day Awards as a Legacy Builder for laying the groundwork for future economic development since 1970. His memoir, More than Just the Climb – Life’s Lessons Well Learned (Unicorn, Nov. 24, 2025), weaves his personal journey alongside the transformation of the Cayman Islands. Learn more here.
