It’s hard to age gracefully. Social isolation, physical immobility, mental decline — these are all problems that most people struggle with as they get older. But one group of people prove that it’s possible to thrive into your 80s and 90s. Researchers call them “super agers.” And one of them lives just down my block.

Ednajane Truax, who is known to friends and neighbors as “E.J.,” can often be found on her hands and knees in the dirt, working in the garden at the Sherwood Recreation Center in Northeast Washington. She also has an impressive garden of her own and helps out with other neighbors’ gardens. She works out several times a week, sometimes while wearing a shirt that says, “You don’t stop lifting when you get old — you get old when you stop lifting.” She can bench press 55 pounds and leg press 250.

Truax has never married — “just lucky, I guess,” she jokes when I ask her about that — but she has remained social her entire life. She volunteers, goes to the gym, throws parties, knows her neighbors and their children by name. Truax says her secret to thriving as she ages is simple: Be active.

It turns out that research backs her up.

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How to be a ‘super ager’

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