Bodies in Motion: What Costa Rican Women Taught Me About Aging Out Loud in the Wild

Doña Carmen is sixty-three years old, and she hikes faster than I do.

I met her on the trail to Cerro Chirripó — Costa Rica's highest peak — where she was moving steadily uphill in worn-in boots, a small backpack, and the kind of quiet confidence that made me feel slightly ashamed of my brand-new gear and heavy breathing. She's made the summit nine times. She started at fifty-four, the year her youngest child left home.

"People ask me if it's too hard at my age," she told me during a rest stop, genuinely amused. "I ask them: too hard compared to what?"

That question has stayed with me. Because in the United States, women's bodies — particularly aging women's bodies — exist in a near-constant state of apology. We apologize for slowing down. We apologize for hot flashes in public. We apologize for not bouncing back. Costa Rica, through women like Doña Carmen, offered me a completely different framework.

What the Roundtable Revealed

Over the course of two visits to Costa Rica, I spoke with nine women ranging in age from their late thirties to their early seventies — farmers, tour guides, mothers, a retired schoolteacher, a surf instructor, and a woman who runs a cloud forest lodge almost entirely on her own. I asked them about their bodies, their energy, their relationship to adventure as they've aged. What I got back was nothing like the wellness content I'm used to consuming at home.

There were no cleanses mentioned. No anti-aging serums. No apologetic qualifiers about "still" being able to do things.

On menopause: Patricia, fifty-one, who leads birdwatching tours in the Osa Peninsula, told me she had her most productive professional year during perimenopause. "I was tired differently," she said. "But I also stopped caring about things that used to drain me. That freed up a lot of energy." She laughed. "My body got loud. I just decided to listen instead of fight."

Rosa, sixty-eight, who grows cacao and leads farm-to-table experiences near Puerto Viejo, put it differently: "In my grandmother's time, the change was respected. You became a woman who knew things. Somewhere we lost that story."

Neither woman used the word difficult without immediately following it with something that sounded a lot like worth it.

On staying active: The women I spoke with didn't frame physical activity as maintenance — as something you do to stave off decline. They talked about movement as relationship. Relationship to land, to community, to themselves.

Luisa, forty-four, is a single mother of three who surfs every weekend in Nosara. She told me she started surfing at thirty-eight, after a divorce. "People kept telling me I was too old to learn. That made me want to do it more." She now teaches beginner surf clinics specifically for women over forty. Her classes fill up months in advance.

Margarita, seventy-one, still tends a half-acre garden every morning. When I asked if her body made that harder now, she considered the question carefully. "Different," she said finally. "Not harder. I know it better now."

The Thing American Wellness Culture Gets Wrong

There's a billion-dollar industry in the US built on the premise that aging is a problem to be solved. Supplements, programs, retreats — all promising to help you feel younger, as though the goal of every decade is to perform the previous one.

What I encountered in Costa Rica was something quieter and, frankly, more radical: women who had simply decided their bodies were not the enemy.

This isn't to romanticize or flatten Costa Rican culture — healthcare access and economic inequality create real barriers for many women there, and not everyone has the luxury of framing physical change philosophically. But the cultural permission to age visibly, to stay physically engaged with the world, to talk about bodies without shame — that was palpable in every conversation I had.

Patricia said something that I've turned over in my mind a dozen times since: "American women come here and they are so relieved to be outside. I think they forget that outside is for them too."

What This Means for You as a Traveler

If you're planning a trip to Costa Rica and you've been quietly wondering whether you're too old for the adventure version of this country — whether your knees, your hormones, your recovery time disqualify you from the good stuff — let me be direct: they don't.

Costa Rica has terrain for every body. The Osa Peninsula offers flat coastal trails through primary rainforest. Manuel Antonio has accessible beach paths. Arenal has hot springs that feel specifically designed for bodies that have earned some rest. And yes, Chirripó is hard — but Doña Carmen has summited it nine times.

More importantly, the women of Costa Rica will not look at you with pity if you're moving slower than you once did. They'll probably hand you a mango and ask where you're from.

The Adventure Doesn't Have an Age Limit

At the end of my conversation with Doña Carmen, I asked what advice she'd give to women who feel like their window for adventure has closed.

She looked at me steadily. "The window doesn't close. You just have to stop waiting for someone to open it for you."

She shouldered her pack and kept walking. I followed.