When you move in right up close to me
That’s when I get the shakes all over me
Quivers down the backbone
I got the shakes down the knee bone
Yeah the tremors in my thigh bone
Shakin’ all over
Shakin’ All Over — Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, 1960
I got quite a shock last week, near the end of a European cycling holiday. At 65, I had always considered myself reasonably attractive. Not so according to the young waitress pouring my beer at dinner. She rated me only a “3.”
Dismayed, I looked to my wife Julee for reassurance. She sized me up and delivered her verdict: “You’re definitely hotter than a 3. Maybe a 4 or a 5.”
My younger brother weighed in unhelpfully: “Don’t shoot the messenger. If you’re a 3 in Europe, you’re a 3 in Vancouver too. Somebody has to stand up for the truth here – even if the truth hurts.”
My older brother offered a more optimistic take: “Look at the bright side Jerry. You’ve got room to grow.”
Ouch. This all hit terribly hard for a man who fancies himself The Fashionable Sea Kayaker.
Hotspan
For years, I’ve been waging a private campaign to remain “hot” for Julee that involves camping on wild beaches with a black bear snuffing around the food hang. Sea kayaking, it turns out, has been working its magic in the background for both of us, boosting hotness in ways the beauty industry could never match. Let me explain what I mean, then offer my top 7 tips for harnessing the magic of sea kayaking to boost your hotspan.
Hotspan in the Popular Press
After healthspan (years free of major disease) and brainspan (years free of dementia), the wellness industry has now given us hotspan–years someone might want to have, ahem, relations with you.
And the papers are suddenly obsessed with it. In 62 and Sexy, The Times of London profiles a man waging a personal war against “invisibility and frumpiness” by deadlifting as diligently as he manages his ear hair.
For women, The Times absurdly offers Are Your Abs Fab? A Six-Pack Is The New Midlife Must-Have. The article bursts with (retouched?) photos of famous actresses spending gobs of money on personal trainers in order to tone their midriffs for glamour photoshoots.
Bloomberg reports that midlife men are trading the “dad bod” for peptides, hormone therapy, GLP-1 drugs, hair transplants, and Botox.
The New York Times and normally staid Wall Street Journal have declared with straight faces that your glute muscles are “the unsung heroes of longevity” and that “the secret to men’s longevity is a great butt”.
Barf.
What the Press Gets Wrong About Hotspan
The 62 And Sexy author’s hotspan routine combines weight training, protein-heavy lunches, and vigilant ear-hair management. His stated goal is to look like “the best version of the real me” rather than chase counterfeit youthfulness.
Sage advice. I support it wholeheartedly. But nowhere does he mention PFDs, paddles, or giving back to his community. These are significant oversights, and I’m here to fix them.
We should start by noting that all attraction is subjective. Try wearing a Boston Bruins shirt into Montreal’s Bell Centre, a gay pride t-shirt at a MAGA convention, or landing your obnoxiously loud jet ski on a wilderness kayak-camping beach, and then see how far your hotspan gets you.
Sea kayakers are our own tribe. And our tribe typically values a paddling jacket over an Italian suit, a seaworthy kayak over a Porsche, and a can of pepper spray strapped to our waist over a Rolex strapped to our wrist.
Sea kayakers have been quietly running a powerful hotspan program for decades. Our fitness routine builds functional strength, core stability, and cardiovascular fitness. journeys show off skills at trip planning, navigation, surf landings, wilderness camping, and how not to become dinner for passing bears, wolves or cougars. Our wardrobe projects a love for adventure, and our gear–high-visibility colours, technical fabrics, a battle-tested patina of salt stains and spark burns–announces to the world: This person has been places and knows things.
For our tribe, capable is the new sexy. And unlike six-pack abs, competence gets better with age.
The Sea Kayaker’s Hotspan Workout: What the Gym Bros Are Missing
The 62 and Sexy author vainly lifts weights three times a week for biceps he, as a writer, has no practical use for. Paddle a sea kayak instead and you get the biceps plus a full-body functional fitness upgrade no gym machine can replicate—shoulders with actual purpose, and a cardiovascular system tested by open water paddles against a real headwind, not a treadmill.
You also get bald eagles, kingfishers, orcas, and the occasional alarming growl of a territorial sea lion. Oddly, the gym doesn’t offer this at any membership tier.
Sea kayakers have a genuine functional purpose for all of it. Strong arms for bracing in surf off Cape Caution. A stable core for the Johnstone Strait tide rips. Cardiovascular fitness for those long crossings when you absolutely cannot stop. Gym bicep curls for a better T-shirt hang? Lovely. Paddling shoulders to make it all the way around the Brooks Peninsula during a tight weather window? Necessary.
Exercise in natural settings also boosts neurogenesis–new brain cells that help fend off cognitive decline. The treadmill with a TV bolted to it cannot offer you that. The Salish Sea Marine Trail can.
This being said, the gym deserves its place in every hotspan program. Longevity experts are pretty unanimous that resistance training helps preserve muscle mass, bone density and balance—all essential if you want to remain upright, active, independent, and occasionally irresistible into your eighties. And let’s face it, dead you isn’t very hot. At least not to most people. So yes, find a nearby gym and put in the work. But if you spend all your time admiring yourself in the mirror as you sculpt bulging biceps and six-pack abs, consider refocusing your gaze on Future You, age 85. What can you do today to make that person strong, energetic, adventurous, and still useful to his family and community? Build the body, by all means. But build the life that body will inhabit and the broader community in which Future You can thrive. The gym is a fine place to start. Just don’t mistake building the biceps staring back at you in the mirror for the whole adventure.
What Actually Makes Someone Hot
True attractiveness runs much deeper than time at the gym or erasing wrinkles. Research on what makes men over 50 attractive boils down to five things: easy charm and self-deprecating humour; empathetic listening instead of scoring points; being comfortable enough in your own weathered skin to stop performing; quiet competence instead of chest-thumping… all with a bit of playful mischief thrown in for good measure (the unmistakable sign of someone who’s authentically comfortable in their own skin).
Notice what’s missing from that list: dead lifts, abs, hair dye, peptides, and a Rolex.
For men, a midlife crisis is often a powerful trigger for hotspan anxiety. The older women I paddle with are largely past caring whether strangers find them attractive–they’ve got their hotness sorted and are getting on with the actual paddling. So female readers, enjoy my 7 Tips as anthropological curiosity, or perhaps to gain insight into the private struggle your male friends may be going through.
7 Tips To Boost Your Hotspan and Remain Irresistible As You Get Older
#1 - Chase Useful Hotness, Not Performative Hotness.
The advertising industry’s entire business model runs on making you feel inadequate. Chasing the Beverly-Hills-injection version of hot is like entering a kayak race against someone in a motorboat–you will not win, and you will look ridiculous trying.
Picture a graph: effort on one axis, results on the other. Full-effort vanity–peptides, Botox, beard dye, a triangle of carefully exposed chest hair at the wine bar–produces almost nothing and might even trigger a cringy backlash. The sweet spot sits comfortably in the middle: trim the ear hair, buy gear that earns its salt stains honestly, smile like you mean it, and get on the water. That’s the core program.
For many of us, hotness also means giving back:
- volunteering at a beach clean-up
- building a new picnic table and composting toilet in Nootka Sound
- pulling invasive ivy at Gerald Island
- joining BC Marine Trails as a member or Trailblazer.
As you get older, “mattering” to your community and sharing your hard-earned Elder wisdom has always been the path to lifespan, brain span, and hotspan–three birds, one paddle stroke.
#2 – Work Those Glutes
After reading so much about glutes in the press, I developed a brand-new anxiety: do I have a saggy butt, or worse, Dead Butt Syndrome?¹
Here’s my situation: training for a cycling trip across the Netherlands caused me to drop ten pounds. Good news: it looks healthy. Bad news: my favourite 36-inch waist pants now have a tragic saggy-butt look. The 34-inch waist is too tight in the thighs, and they don’t make a 35.
I’ve been working my glutes hard at the gym: 20 reps for each butt cheek, grunting through two separate exercises. While kayaking, I try to engage my glutes in a tight squeeze with every paddle stroke. But I fear it may be for naught.
I raised this with Julee a few days ago. As she sat eating lunch at our kitchen table, I flapped my saggy pants at her, bringing my fears out into the open: “With these saggy-butt pants, you might not want to fondle my bottom anymore.”
Her reply, immediate and unambiguous: “I never fondle your bottom anyway.”
“But you know you want to,” I said, “and you’re using up so much willpower holding yourself back.”
“I’m coping.”
Harsh.
¹Dead Butt Syndrome is a real medical thing—gluteal amnesia, brought on by too much sitting at a desk or in a car, which puts your gluteus medius to sleep. Symptoms include numbness, stiffness, and hip or lower-back pain. The prescribed cure, per actual physical therapists, is regular movement and targeted glute work. Sea kayaking, which engages the glutes with the weight shifts accompanying every paddle stroke, happens to qualify. You’re welcome.
#3 – Embrace the Salt-Stained Aesthetic
The 62 and Sexy author’s role models are Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt, and Jason Statham–men who look like they’ve done things. That is exactly the energy of a properly seasoned kayaking kit.
Not the matchy-matchy gear of a nervous beginner who panic-bought everything in one frantic afternoon at MEC. I mean the paddling jacket with frayed cuffs. The stained PFD from your Haida Gwaii trip. The toque with a small spark burn from a beach fire in the Broughtons with old friends. These items don’t shout. They don’t need to–they quietly narrate a whole biography of adventure. The best outdoor clothing isn’t bought; it’s earned.
Walk into a coffee shop after a morning on the water–salt-stained, wind-burned, moving with the rolling gait of someone who’s spent four hours in a cockpit–and people notice. They don’t know exactly what they’re looking at, but they know it’s something. That something is hotspan.
Fashionable sea kayakers know that hotness doesn’t come from filling your closet with clothes, it comes from helping the clothes you already have tell better stories.
#4 - Hats, T-Shirts, and Smiles
A BC Marine Trails hat or t-shirt is a genuine conversation starter. People want to know: what’s a marine trail? Do you have to hire a guide? Are there showers? Forty-five seconds, tops, from “nice hat” to explaining tides, bears, and why camping on a tiny island off the BC coast somehow beats a five-star resort. Hotspan at maximum efficiency.
But the single most powerful item in your hotspan wardrobe costs nothing, weighs nothing, and looks good even salt-stained: a genuine smile. You can’t buy one. You can’t inject one. You have to earn it, one paddle stroke at a time.
#5 Embrace Your Age, Don’t Run From It.
True hotness is someone who owns his age, his silver hair, and is immensely secure about who he is. He projects an inner confidence borne of a lifetime of experience. No need to fish for compliments, validation or approval, while marching to his own internal drum. His charm and a relaxed, unforced social presence are incredibly magnetic. Self-deprecating humour shows he doesn’t take himself too seriously. Approachability makes people instantly comfortable in his presence.
Sea kayaking can deliver all this and more.
Need proof?
When I asked the staff at Jericho Beach Kayak Center about hotness, a cute female staffer in her early 20s had this to say: “The regulars in their 60s here all look 40”.
Presumably those in their 70s all look 50.
Fit, energetic, outdoorsy, excited about their next adventure–that’s the hotspan-boosting magic of Sea Kayaking at work.
#6- Hotness Doesn’t End at 70
In his megahit Thinking Out Loud (four billion YouTube views!), Ed Sheeran proclaims: “And darlin’, I will be lovin’ you till we’re 70” Implicitly, he’s saying hotness and love have a hard stop at the end of the decade.
At 65, I’m calling bullshit on this.
Exhibit A: Former BCMT President Paul Grey remains married and hot well into his seventies. He’s out there assessing dangerous overhanging trees, building tent pads and composting toilets, developing new marine sites and trails, fundraising and masterminding BCMT’s complicated IT systems. Giving back to your community has always been hot. Human beings shine brightest when they’re useful to other people.
Exhibit B: Susie Youle, also on the BCMT Board, remains married and hot a few years shy of 80. She’s forever drawing people closer, lifting their mood with her contagious smile and laughter as she joins group paddles with Nanaimo Paddlers, volunteers at clean ups, or rounds up new BCMT members. In a word, she sparkles. That’s the sort of beauty no cosmetic company has ever managed to bottle. A total “ten” in my books–not despite her age, but because of everything she does and represents.
Susie has done something else that I think matters enormously as we grow older: she has “embraced her elderhood.” That doesn’t mean stepping away from adventure or becoming less curious; it means recognizing that the accumulated experience, relationships, and wisdom of a long life can now be put in service of something larger than ourselves. Susie gives back through her work on the BC Marine Trails Board, her encouragement of other paddlers, and even by building a lasting legacy for the organization she cares about through her estate planning (i.e. in her will and also via whole life insurance policy that grows over time and avoids probate fees). That, to me, is elderhood at its best: not simply adding years to your life, but using the years you have accumulated to leave your community a little stronger than you found it.
Exhibit C: Phillip Torrens remains hot as a sea kayaking adventurer, blogger, Youtuber, instructor, and elder-mentor at Jericho Beach Kayak Centre. I met him 30 years ago when he paddled up to my mid-coast campsite at sunset (Cultus Sound on the BCMT map). We talked late into the night around a campfire sharing dinner (ours), dessert (his), wine (ours), and incredible stories (his).
When I was researching this article, the Jericho staff all told me to “go talk to Phil over there.”
Although I had seen him only once 30 years ago, when Phil started talking about extending his post-retirement “mattering-span” by giving back to the kayaking community, his face lit up. His boyish enthusiasm and inner sparkle seemed somehow familiar. And so I asked him, “I think I recognize you. Are you by any chance Polar Bear Phil?”
“One and the same,” he said with a smile as he pointed to the polar bear bite-scars on his ankle.
His hotspan secrets:
I first shared a campsite with Jerry 30 years ago. I probably didn’t have an especially memorable face, but I did tell him this somewhat memorable story. And this tale does dovetail into Jerry’s theories about what makes (or keeps) someone hot into their sixties and beyond: a lot of people find a weather-beaten, battle-scarred, and competent vibe alluring. Nothing but time will give you the weather-beaten look. And I heartily unrecommend pestering wild animals in search of a backcountry scar (bears and cougars are notorious for ignoring safewords). The one hotness factor that is under your control is probably your competence as a sea kayaker and your willingness to share your passion and knowledge. I do that both as my post-retirement “side hustle”, working as a sea-kayak instructor-guide, and personally, blogging (or perhaps blithering) and youtubing a bit about trips and techniques. Both my passion for sea kayaking and for teaching are authentic; it’s clear people can pick up on that and will (occasionally) try to pick me up as a result.
At 23, hotness is mostly an accident of genes and metabolism. At 70, hotness is about competence, giving back, and mattering to your chosen tribe. And it remains available to absolutely everyone (regardless of butt-sag, I hope).
#7 You Do You
Have you ever seen a sight as beautiful
as a face in a crowd of people
that lights up just for you?
The Anniversary Song, Cowboy Junkies, 1993
Many men want to look stereotypically hot for crowds of other people. Biceps and six-pack abs, a Porsche, a perfectly trimmed 3-day beard, or perhaps a debonair dinner jacket. To these men I say “you do you.”
As for me, I’ve never wanted to look hot for crowds of other people (good thing after that waitress in Europe rated me only a “3”). I want to look “hot” for one person specifically: my wife, and see her face light up when our eyes meet across a crowded party, an airport lounge, or on a wild beach.
I don’t chase the stereotypes of generic male hotness we see in the press. I want to feel hot in a way that is authentically my own and that honours the innermost core of my being.
For me, that means cliff jumping in a Speedo.
I’ve been doing it since I was a young boy… playful mischief that makes me feel intensely alive. It makes Julee laugh. And I hope to still be doing it at 80.
A few friends tell me they’ve installed Speedo filters on their iPhones to avoid burning their eyes on the photos I send. Consider yourself warned.
Conclusion
The 62 and Sexy author says his hotspan efforts are really about self-esteem and “staying in the game.” He’s happily married and isn’t chasing external validation. I understand completely. I’m also happily married–almost 30 years to Julee, my paddling partner and the most capable person I’ve ever shared a cockpit with. I’m not chasing validation either. I have enough on my hands just keeping up with her, always three feet ahead of me in the front seat of our double kayak.
I take quiet satisfaction in knowing our lifestyle–paddling the wild BC coast, staying fit enough to keep doing it into our seventies and beyond, wearing salt-stained, spark-burned, duct-taped gear with the casual confidence of people who’ve actually been somewhere, giving back to the paddling community with the work we do for BC Marine Trails–projects exactly the right kind of irresistible appeal. A healthy outdoor glow, shoulders back, a mischievous boyish grin, that’s the kayaking magic that keeps you irresistible as you grow older.
Looking back over forty years of paddling, I’ve noticed something. The people I’ve admired most weren’t usually the strongest paddlers, the fastest paddlers, or even the best-looking paddlers. They were the ones who laughed easily, shared their last chocolate bar, quietly helped someone launch a loaded kayak, stayed calm when things went sideways, and left every campsite a little better than they found it. Those people somehow become more attractive every year.
My advice: chase time on the water, wild beaches, and giving back–not “looks-maxxing” and hotness scores. The sea kayaker’s lifestyle will take care of the rest.
That said–a few glute exercises wouldn’t hurt.
