By Rick Rickman and Donna Wares, Foreword by Peggy Fleming

Adapted from the Introduction to The Wonder Years

America has always worshiped youth. This attitude permeates our films and sports and culture, as if our fondest wish is never to grow up—which is, of course, a futile desire, destined for disappointment. But as America grays, some men and women are discovering a better alternative: growing older, but continuing to grow. To live life to its fullest. To play.

They have discovered something better than a fountain of youth: they have made their later years their wonder years.

They may seem like ordinary people, with bills and mortgages and extended families spread across the map, but they also have nurtured within themselves a relentless determination to tackle new challenges every day. Some find their challenge in the gym or on the track. Others surf, swim, vault, or even rope cattle.

Raising the bar ever higher is what keeps them going and constantly growing, breaking barriers, setting records, exceeding expectations—and showing the rest of us the way.

They show us that aging isn’t something to fear—it’s a chance to reinvent yourself, as many times as you dare. These adventurers in their seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of life are stars in a growing senior underground that has flourished while hardly anyone paid attention. And once you meet these folks, once you take in their accomplishments, their grace, and their joy at striving for their best each day, you can’t help but be inspired to find your own wonder years.

For the past two decades Rick Rickman has traveled the country chronicling the lives of aging adventurers and amateur athletes who defy the conventional wisdom about what it means to grow old in our society. Their stories dramatically illustrate what medical studies and common sense tell us: that people who exercise regularly live longer, live better, and, more often than not, enjoy better relationships in their later years.

As the official photographer for the National Senior Games in recent years, Rick learned that vigorous seniors like his own grandfather, who lived until a healthy age of nine-four, actually aren’t that unusual. What is unusual is to read about them or see them featured in any meaningful way in our youth-obsessed media and culture. During the summer of 2008, network broadcasters kept marveling and shaking their heads in disbelief when a forty-one-year-old American woman female swimmer qualified for the U.S. Olympic Swim Team bound for Beijing. Since when did we collectively decide that our expectation for greatness fades by forty? Or fifty? Or even eighty? The reality is that our entire population—seniors included—now benefits from unprecedented advances in nutrition, health, and medical research, and endless opportunities for staying fit.

Slowing down simply isn’t an option for people like Sister Madonna Buder (above), a Catholic nun from Spokane, Washington who competes each year in Hawaii’s Ironman Triathlon and keeps blazing trails for women athletes over seventy. [See an HBO RealSports video of Sister Madonna in action here]

Or Granville Coggs (below), a practicing radiologist and Congressional Gold Medal winner who didn’t take up competitive running until his seventies. He’s a track star in his eighties.

Or Laguna Beach surfer Eve Fletcher (above), who is her eighties and still hanging ten at the same Southern California beach she has surfed for the past fifty years, breaking down barriers first as a young woman surfer and now as a senior citizen. [See a video of her on the waves here]

You’ll meet Sister Madonna, Granville Coggs, Eve Fletcher and dozens of other exceptional seniors on the pages of The Wonder Years, which is being published this August as the National Seniors Games arrive on the West Coast for the first time.

Popular culture sometimes suggests there is little to look forward to our later years, but popular culture is wrong. The men and women featured in this book have a different message, one of grace and style, a path to the wonder years.

Photos: Top, Eve Fletcher at San Onofre State Beach. Next: Sister Madonna’s triathlon medals.