Martina After 50

You could call Martina Navratilova an “active retiree.” The nine-time Wimbledon singles champ enjoys tending the fruit trees around her Casey Key home. She walks along the beach and dines out in downtown Sarasota. Like so many retired Sarasotans, she’s also filling her golden years with charity projects and world travel. But she’s hardly a senior citizen: At 52, the tennis legend has the lean, muscular body of a woman half her age

For Navratilova, an active over-50 lifestyle goes beyond the occasional game of tennis. She also skis, plays ice hockey, and tries whatever other new sport strikes her fancy. In a 35-year career punctuated by 18 Grand Slam singles titles (31 doubles), Navratilova earned a reputation as a fierce competitor, ranked 19th on ESPN’s list of the greatest athletes of the 20th century. She finally retired from professional tennis in 2006, a month before her 50th birthday.

Now, as AARP’s fitness ambassador and the author of lifestyle-improvement book Shape Your Self, she devotes much of her time to sharing her fitness triumphs and setbacks in order to motivate others. Motivation, she understands, is half the battle for older Americans. Their strength and stamina may be deteriorating and their aches and pains increasing, and many have to break a lifetime of unhealthy habits as well. Having faced obstacles from injury, constant travel, public criticism and private stresses, Navratilova is both sympathetic toward such hardships and certain those hardships can be overcome. In her mind, “willing” and “able” are the same.

“You will find motivation if something bothers you enough,” she begins in typical no-nonsense fashion. Eating all-natural cereal, she’s seated at the lone table in a sparsely furnished house on Casey Key. Despite an impending photo shoot, she’s dressed comfortably, in flip-flops speckled with paint—accidentally stylish—the result of hitting colored tennis balls against a canvas for an artistic collaboration called Art Grand Slam, one of her many projects. She wears cotton shorts and a T-shirt with a bird on it that reads, “Chicks dig me.” An outspoken leader in gay rights efforts since she publicly revealed her homosexuality in 1981, Navratilova is neither evasive nor apologetic about her personal life.

She discovered Sarasota by accident: Driving down I-75 to Naples, she grew tired and turned off the interstate earlier than she’d planned. “I turned right, kept driving, and I ended up on Casey Key,” she says. She now owns several properties in south Sarasota, but she’s put this house up for sale—part of a cleansing of assets after an eight-year romantic relationship turned sour, affecting her mindset and her midsection. The woman had become too accustomed to the trappings of fame, Navratilova carefully explains, and ending it proved the right thing to do. “I got out of [the relationship] and the weight came off,” she says.

“Find something you really love doing. Something from your childhood.”

Navratilova spent the better part of four decades working every angle, every moment, to optimize her fitness. But that was her job. Now that she’s retired, Navratilova says her youth in Czechoslovakia has become the basis of her over-50 fitness philosophy.

“I was always active,” she writes in Shape Your Self. “I climbed spruce trees next to our house. I started playing tennis before my fifth birthday. I ran and bicycled around our garden and pretended it was a track. I skied and played ice hockey and soccer. I was a total jock.”

Those childhood activities were occasional cross-training tools throughout her tennis career; now they comprise the bulk of her workouts. She calls the gym “a supplemental thing” and instead gets a good deal of her exercise from what she enjoys most: sports. “All sports,” she says proudly. Kite surfing is next.