TECHNIQUE "I'M GETTING OLD BUT I'M NOT OLD YET."

Tapping into expert medical advice and personal experience, Harty discusses how decrepitude need not be the default outcome for the ageing Windy.

- Peter Hart

After a hard session, you slump into the sofa with certain body parts complaining more bitterly than usual at their callous treatment, and reflect, miserably on an afternoon of underachievement. It's then that the annoying, loquacious, judgemental monkey appears on your shoulder and pronounces - as he has more and more often, recently: "Well, what do you expect at your age? To magically become stronger, fitter? Just accept the inevitable, old fellah... the road from here is downhill and very slippery."

Well, give the monkey a peanut and tell him/her to take a hike. None of us are getting out of this alive, but the notion that our windsurfing performance necessarily deteriorates with the passing years, needs to be robustly challenged - and most importantly by YOU.

DNA, luck, injury or individual circumstances conspire to give us all very different relationships with the ageing process. However, in the following piece, personal histories and medical evidence will hopefully inspire you to raise a finger to Father Time and keep on keeping on.

INTRODUCING...

I'm fortunate to meet a lot of doctors - not through repeated visits to A&E, thankfully, but happily our sport seems to be a popular recreation amongst medics. Many are present on my clinics, and annually I'm invited to attend a conference of windsurfing doctors in Tarifa - and what useful friends they are to the maturing sportsman. Before we embark on our quest for eternal youth, allow me to introduce the team, who sit on various spots of the ageing timeline and who have kindly supplied facts, opinions and experiences.

Neal Gent, 52, is an acute physician based on the UK's south coast and is also a pro standard wave sailor, kiter, surfer and foiler. Jim Hutchinson, 58, is an orthopaedic surgeon from Nottingham - specialising in hip replacements, and a crazy keen windsurfer and winger.