A decade after he retired, he said he was carrying 192 pounds – 25 more than when he left the Air Force – on his 5-foot-8 frame. He no longer worked out and eventually a doctor’s visit brought the disconcerting news:
“I had high blood pressure. My cholesterol was high. I was starting to get heart irregularities and I was borderline diabetic.”
At about the same time, a pole-vaulting teammate from their Otterbein College days in the early 1950s – Squeaky Myers – invited him to the Ohio Senior Games.
“I tried, but I couldn’t do it,” Arledge recalled. “I just kind of slid down the pole. I couldn’t get off the ground.”
“His upper body strength just wasn’t there,” Gail Arledge, Bob’s wife of 65 years, said as she sat across from him in their home at Otterbein Lebanon SeniorLife Community the other day.
Arledge agreed: “At the time, I was just so heavy. And that’s when I vowed I was going to get back in shape and be a competitive pole vaulter again.”
So now – 25 years past that pledge – how has he done?
--At age 90, Arledge’s weight is back down and the six different pills he once took daily are down to two, both supplements.
--Five years ago, he won a gold medal in the pole vault for his age group (85 to 89) at the World Master Track and Field Championship in Malaga, Spain.
--This past March at the U.S. Senior Track and Field Indoor Championships in Louisville, he won the pole vault competition.
--This coming Wednesday at the 2023 National Senior Games in Pittsburgh — where he’ll compete Tuesday in the pole vault and Friday in the 100-meter backstroke — he’ll be honored at a gala luncheon as a “Humana Game Changer.”
He is one of 28 recipients – chosen from the more than 11,000 competitors – being recognized as an athlete who exemplifies healthy aging and provides encouragement, motivation and inspiration for all seniors to live a healthy lifestyle.
Arledge’s message at the luncheon will be simple:
“People don’t realize they have more control over their health than they realize. You just need to eat properly, exercise daily and keep your weight down.”
He’s done this not only through walking daily, swimming, regular visits to the Otterbein fitness center and pole vault training sessions – often alongside high school athletes 1/6th his age at Lebanon High and other schools – but through a concerted change in diet.
Some of it you might expect – more seafood, not much red meat, avoidance of sugar and foods with MSG – but other things are a little more challenging.
That would include eating seaweed and sometimes kimchi and other fermented vegetables, daily shots of beet juice, occasional swigs of pickle juice and a curry powder pill each day.
At that 2018 meet in Spain – where he vaulted 6 feet 2 ¾ inches – he said he University of South Dakota included him in its study of senior athletes:
“They gave us a fitness exam to check things like our cardiovascular, balance, strength and flexibility. Although I was 85, they said my fitness age was of someone who was 69.”
That shows not only in his athletic pursuits, but in his other daily involvements.
The Otterbein Community Church, which he and Gail attend, supports the food pantry run by the St. Paul United Methodist Church on Huffman Avenue in East Dayton. Bob’s job is to collect the donated food at their retirement community and take it once a week to St. Paul’s.
He’s on the veterans’ committee that helped design and fund the granite military memorial that was dedicated in April at Otterbein, where it’s thought some 140 of the over 1,000 residents are veterans.
He’s also an avid women’s and men’s basketball fan of the University of Dayton, where youngest daughter Cara was an All-American soccer player and was inducted into the UD Hall of Fame.
And for several years he’s been involved in a Christian prison ministry and now mentors an ex-offender in West Dayton.
“Sometimes we’ll go to lunch, sometimes I take him food,” Arledge said. “I’ve worked with him since he got out of prison. He has multiple sclerosis now, but he has sole custody of his daughter and he’s a wonderful father and a community guy who helps others.
“He’s not an armed robber anymore. He’s a good citizen.”
Vaulting, diving and football
Arledge grew up in Lancaster, Ohio, southeast of Columbus.
His mother died when he was 10 and, soon after, his dad moved he and his brother to a small farm outside of town. That’s where his passion for pole vaulting first took root, he said:
“When we were in maybe seventh grade, my friend Bill Echard and I turned a sand pile where they were building houses into our pole vault pit. We used a bamboo fishing pole as the crossbar we tried clear and one of those bamboo rods that came in rolls of carpet as our pole to vault.”
Once he got to Lancaster High, he said track coach wouldn’t allow them to pole vault until they could walk the length of the football field on their hands. Back then the sport was all about strength and gymnastic ability, he said, not the speed and swing it is now.
At Otterbein College, he became a three-sport athlete.
He lettered four injury-riddled years as a pole vaulter and spent two years on the football team as a back-up quarterback.
“My first year we still used leather helmets,” he said with a smile.
He used to entertain the crowd at halftime of Otterbein basketball games by jumping on a trampoline. He was spotted by a woman who once had been an accomplished national diver and she told him she thought he could do well in the sport, too.
The only problem was that Otterbein didn’t have a swim team or pool.
She took him to Ohio Wesleyan’s Natatorium to train and he then represented Otterbein at the Ohio Athletic Conference meet, winning the one-meter diving event and finishing third at three meters.
He graduated with degrees in biology and Spanish and then went to the Cleveland Clinic to study physical therapy. Later he got his master’s degree at Ohio State.
His biggest accomplishment at Otterbein though was meeting Gail Bunch, an education major and cheerleader from South Euclid. She transferred in from Bowling Green in 1953 and they met on the tennis court. Four years later they married.
That same year Arledge joined the Air Force as a physical therapist.
He spent over 31 years in the service. During that time he and the family moved to various U.S. bases: Scott AFB in Illinois, Lackland in Texas, Elmendorf in Alaska, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Andrews in Maryland, Wright Patterson from 1977-1984 and finally back to Andrews.
Gail, meanwhile, taught school at the various stops and ran the home front. Their two oldest children – Jennifer and Chip – would go on to Miami University, while Cara had a hall of fame basketball career at Beavercreek High and then starred at UD.
When he retired at Andrews, Colonel Arledge was the Chief Physical Therapist for the Air Force and the Associate Chief of Biomedical Sciences Corps.
After leaving the service, he and Gail returned to Dayton, where Cara was a senior at UD and Jennifer was working in the city.
‘I still like competing’
In the back room of the Arledge home where we sat and talked, a P-53 Enfield Rifle Musket made in Birmingham, England, was mounted above the door.
“That was the gun used by my great grandfather, Isaac Arledge, who was with the Ohio 78th Infantry Company C and marched with General Sherman in the Civil War,” Bob said.
Next to the leather chair where he sat was a set of shelves crammed with books, personal keepsakes, and photos, including one of him carrying the football at Otterbein. On a shelf above were his hall of fame plaques from Lancaster High, Otterbein and the Ohio Senior Olympics.
The book topics included politics, faith and especially nutrition.
“I’ve done a lot of research and become a self-educated nutritionist,” he said with a smile. “I’ve taken classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UD, too.
“Once I vowed to take better care of myself, I tried to put what I learned into practice.”
He began to eat less and much healthier.
He quit drinking soda pop and beer.
After he and Gail visited Greece, he adopted a Mediterranean Diet
“I eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, wild caught fish like salmon ad mackerel, berries, olive oil and leafy greens.”
He said he studied what pockets of the world’s Super Agers – people 100 and older – ate:
“Off the coast of Italy – on the island of Sardinia – they have one of the world’s largest populations of centurions and they eat a seafood diet. They’re usually shepherds and farmers and they’re independent functioning, some up to 110. They walk every day, are very family oriented and their life centers around their church.
“In the United States there’s a pocket of them in Loma Linda, California. They’re Seventh Day Adventists and again they’re family-oriented, church-oriented. And they don’t drink.
“Okinawa (Japan) has a lot of long-living people, too. A lot are farmers who eat seafood and things like kimchi or other fermented vegetables and seaweed.”
He said after reading about a study done by the University of Pennsylvania, he eats mushrooms twice a week, noting that people on a mushroom diet had “a lot lower incidences of dementia. “India has the lowest rate and they season everything with curry, which is very high antioxidant. I take curry in a supplement capsule every day.”
He eats a lot of blueberries, another high antioxidant. “The main thing is to eat things that create nitric oxide,” he said. “It’s a gas in the body that causes blood vessels to relax and lowers blood pressure.”
He said one of the most important pieces of advice he has for others comes from the Mayo Clinic: “They came out with a study that stated if you drink two glasses of water in the morning when you get up, two more before bed and eight total in the day, you’ll significantly decrease your risk of a heart attack.
“Most seniors are dehydrated or under-hydrated. And when they jump out of bed, they don’t drink water. They start doing stuff, maybe pop a couple of meds and then ‘BOOM!’ They have a heart attack.
“They found most heart attacks occur between 6 and 11 a.m. And according to the Mayo, it’s because the organs don’t have enough water.”
He noted another study – he believes it was by the Cleveland Clinic – that said: “If you walk 30 minutes a day, 100 paces per minute, you will decrease your risk for a cardiac event by 39 percent.”
There are plenty of places to walk around the 1,200 acres at Otterbein Lebanon and there’s also a track – 22 laps make a mile, Arledge said – in the Fitness Center.
With their three children and six grandchildren scattered around the country, Bob and Gail moved here nine years ago from Washington Township.
Bob gave me a tour of the place from his plastic enclosed golf cart that had his clubs – the woods with Ohio State headcovers – lashed to the back and a row of Titleist balls in a rack next to the steering wheel.
Along with all the many Otterbein amenities – restaurants, salon, movie theater, library, post office, medical clinic – he showed me the facilities where he’s trained for this week’s events in Pittsburgh.
Before each competition he said he always says a prayer:
“It’s for me and my fellow competitors. I’m just asking that we don’t get hurt. I’ve had some significant injuries over the years – a dislocated shoulder, a broken rib – and I’ve had buddies break legs.
“There’s a camaraderie. When you compete against guys for 15 years, you get to know them, and these meets become like a reunion.
“But I’ll be truthful, the numbers are dwindling. Like when I won the world championship in Spain five years ago. Both guys I shared the podium with (one from Colorado, one from Finland) have passed away.
“There are times it really makes me think. When you’re 90 years old, you know you’re playing on the back nine and it’s getting closer to the end.”
Then again, as a Super Ager might say when stepping off the 18th green: “Let’s grab a seaweed snack and play the front nine again!”
Gail said she hoped Bob might retire from traipsing around the word – he competed in Poland in April – and he admitted this could be his last big competition.
But now he’s entered a new age group – 90 and up – and he’ll be one of the youngest and toughest-to-beat vaulters.
“I still like competing,” he said. “I still really like pole vaulting. … And I like winning.”
Twenty-five years ago, Bob Arledge couldn’t get off on the ground.
Now, he doesn’t want to return to it.
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