“You gotta keep moving.”
That’s Ollie Niemi’s philosophy at the age of 94. And move he does, with a 2-plus hour workout on the Wellness Center fitness machines three times a week.
It’s something he’s been doing for 10 years, since the Wellness Center first opened.
He admits, though, that his mornings here also include a lot of “gabbing around and talking and taking breaks.”
But, his fitness log sheet doesn’t look it. Each time he comes, he goes through a round of repetitions on about 8 different machines, and he’ll get his cardiac workout with 5 to 20 minutes on the “NuStep” machine—basically a sit-down stationary stepper.
“That’s the best kind of exercising—the sitting down kind,” he says wryly. Still, when he’s sitting down, he’s doing 80 steps a minute. That’s a pretty fast pace for anyone. It amounts to one mile in five minutes. “That’s my goal anyway. It used to take me almost 10 minutes to go a mile,” he says.
Ollie first came to the Wellness Center at the recommendation of his cardiologist. Ten years ago, while on his honeymoon in Florida (it was his second marriage), he had been taking Coumadin, a blood thinner, and began to bleed. Doctors there said he might need bypass surgery and that he had congestive heart failure. He came home to his doctor here, who confirmed Ollie had a heart blockage. “But, he didn’t think it was bad enough to do surgery and he suggested I get into the Cardiac Rehab program here,” Ollie explains.
And, after three months, he graduated from the Cardiac Rehab program to the fitness floor and he’s been there ever since. Now he gets checked up once a year by the cardiologist, who tells him the reason he’s doing so well is because he’s been faithful to his exercise program. Ollie says he also does “right living,” takes his vitamins and isn’t shy about a bit of bourbon “for medicinal purposes.”
He’s worked with the same routine on the machines for years and he adapts it as he needs to. He’s had a rotator cuff issue recently, so he’s not inclined to do any lifting over his head. He’s not interested in the surgery that might free up that shoulder a little. But, since his days in Cardiac Rehab, he’s also had gall bladder surgery, colon surgery and a hip replacement. He seems to take it all in stride though, noting what a friend of his told him once: “After age 55, it’s patch-on-patch” as far as our bodies are concerned.
He always comes back to the fitness floor.
Growing up on a farm in New Ipswich, Ollie was no stranger to exercise. He worked hard on the farm and, as he describes it, “Summer vacations were nothing but work.”
The work included haying by hand, gardening, chopping, hauling and stacking wood, and hauling logs in a horse-drawn sleigh.
As an adult, he was a cabinetmaker and did furniture repair. By the time World War II came around, he was already married with a child and so had a deferment. However, he had just signed up, taken the physical anyway and was ready to ship out when the war ended. Throughout the war and after he worked on attaching parts to the wings of F14 fighter planes, at a company in Fitchburg.
Ollie lives at Colonial Square in Peterborough with his wife, just less than 2 miles down the road. The tailend of his working life was spent as a real estate broker, from which he retired. He’s a second generation Finn and says he enjoyed meeting a Wellness Center member who was second generation Lithuanian. Ollie’s up on his Finnish but doesn’t get a chance to speak it much anymore.
His 10 years as a Wellness Center member has made him fit, but it’s also made him some friends, he admits. “It’s like I see these people more often then I see my own family,” he says. “It’s the same ones here at the same time of day as me.”
And the fact is, the group of fellows check up on each other, calling their homes or asking around when somebody’s been absent for a while. That is, he says, “If it doesn’t feel like prying.”
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