At an age when many of their peers are reaching for their walkers, members of the Chileno Valley Discus Club are climbing the international track and field rankings. These are some very fit geezers.
The youngest is a recently minted senior citizen at 68; the oldest is 83. One of them is the top-ranked discus thrower on earth in his age group, besting 1,000 other internationally ranked septuagenarians.
They gather on Saturday mornings at Mike and Sally Gale’s idyllic Chileno Valley Ranch, where sheep and cattle roam on rolling pastures and the couple’s lovingly restored Victorian farmhouse shines like a jewel. The extensive gardens, flush with roses and fruit trees, are almost worthy of Versailles.
About 10 people participate in the group, including a half-dozen hardcore members. There’s a sawmill operator-turned-winemaker, two novelists, a purveyor of grade-A grass-fed beef and a guy who makes high-end ceiling tiles for the global market. There’s a U.C. Berkeley professor of biometeorology and a part-time realtor who used to restore Rembrandts and write jokes for Johnny Carson.
“It’s a great group of guys,” said Dennis Baldocchi, the 68-year-old biometeorology professor who rarely wears shorts but dons long black socks when he does, much to the amusement of his mates. Today, he’s wearing a Chileno Valley Discus Club T-shirt.
A convivial crew, they gather as much for the camaraderie as the competition, tossing good-natured barbs and inanimate objects with equal facility.
The action takes place behind a restored 19th-century barn—another architectural marvel—where Mr. Gale has installed a concrete throwing circle. Here, the old men work on their form and their distance. In addition to the discus, some of them hurl a variety of other objects, including the shotput, hammer and javelin.
Two of them participate in an event called the weight throw, which involves spinning around and hurling something that looks like a cannonball attached to a chain. These weigh up to 56 pounds, and Mr. Gale, despite his 82 years, likes to throw them.
Their object of choice is the discus, but on a recent Saturday, they started with shotput. Ross Weishaar, the erstwhile comedy writer and art restorer, watched his peers through a chain-link fence behind the throwing circle and dispensed advice. He is ranked 27th in the global discus rankings in the 70 to 74 age group, but he’s recovering from a hip injury and throws sparingly these days, wearing four braces when he does.
“I liked the footwork, I liked the toss, but if you point your thumb down, you can use more of your pectoral muscle,” he advised Ken Hunt, a strong thrower who doesn’t spin before his toss, instead relying on muscle power alone.
Mr. Weishaar cautioned his friends to avoid “screwing in the lightbulb”—or twisting their hand before releasing the shotput. A more powerful throw is generated by pushing the ball directly forward, with the same motion employed while doing a pushup.
Next up is the discus throw, the group’s bread and butter. Into the ring steps Ed Davis, who runs a Santa Rosa ceiling tile company and has published a novel in his spare time. Don’t let his protruding gut fool you. This guy is an athlete.
“Ed is stronger than all of us put together,” said Mr. Weishaar, who sold one of his first jokes to Bob Hope. “He’s picked us all up and thrown us.”
Mr. Davis’s form is perfect: a couple of taught spins to generate power, shoulders and hips at 90 degrees, left arm up to increase momentum and pull, footwork worthy of ballet. He launches the disc across the meadow in a perfect arc.
Mr. Davis focuses exclusively on the discus, and he is ranked number one in the world in the 70 to 74 age group. Like Mr. Weishaar, he dispenses coaching advice to his friends, emailing them videos of their throws after practice and breaking down their movements in minute detail.
“Good separation between shoulders and hips. Good arm position,” he wrote in one such missive to Mr. Gale. “You might experiment with rotating your head a bit to the right, instead of looking at the back of the ring. That might let your shoulders rotate a bit more.”
Like Mr. Davis, Mr. Gale has also topped the discus rankings in his age group, which spans 80 to 84. He’s also been ranked number one in the weight throw, but the field for that event is tiny, with few octogenarians across the globe competing to throw 56-pound objects that could put them in traction if they make a false move.
“The strategy at our level is not to hurt yourself,” Mr. Davis said. “We’re very careful. It can be dangerous.”
Mr. Gale injured himself throwing the javelin last year. When he did, his fellow club members rallied, helping him with farm chores he could no longer perform on his own. Each morning, one of the guys would come to the ranch to feed cows and move them from pasture to pasture.
“We got in a little four-wheel rig with Mike and he’d tell us what to do,” Mr. Davis said. “We’d go out and be ranchers for an hour.”
The men came to the club with varying levels of track and field experience. Some had only recently taken up throwing, others had started back in high school. Some were long established jocks who had excelled in other athletic arenas.
Mr. Gale was a defender on the U.S.C. football team that won the 1963 Rose Bowl. He missed the big event, however, after breaking his neck in the last regular game of the season. Before the injury, N.F.L. scouts had come calling.
Every member of the discus group holds a place somewhere in the international masters-level track and field rankings. They compete in several sanctioned events in the Bay Area each year and carefully record their practice throws, which can be submitted for the rankings.
The men follow up their throwing practices with ambling bullshit sessions in the Gales’ cavernous barn, an elegant space that provides five-star lodging for bovines and other barnyard creatures. In a recent conversation, they pondered solutions to climate change and discussed the nuances of cultivating Syrah grapes, which Mr. Hunt grows at a small vineyard outside Santa Rosa.
The club was born during the pandemic, when opportunities for human interaction were scant. The throwing ring gave them a safe outdoor space to socialize, and they feel lucky to have it.
“It’s the Fellowship of the Ring,” Mr. Weishaar said.