Great Falls man, 89, turns back the clock with exercise regimen

Knees shaking, breath trembling and head aching, Larry Hecker encountered constant pain with every step up the stairs.

Decaying muscles caved in on a wounded heart, which beat for the loving wife he lost to cancer a few months earlier.

Hecker’s 89th year lay not far ahead, close enough to see but perhaps too far to reach. But he wasn’t about to quit.

Just a few months later, the Great Falls resident found himself in a gym, turning back the clock. Walking on the treadmill soon gave way to jogging; lifting a dumbbell turned into 30 sit-squats in a row; raising a racket progressed into full-fledged games of squash, his free-flowing swings catching every shot flush and leaving his awestruck trainer shaking his head.

Between hitting countless shots on the squash court and scurrying from one exercise machine to the next, Hecker is the product of a jarring transformation that turned an old man fighting disease into a spirited retiree eager for the next challenge. Although aimed at rejuvenation, it’s a change rooted in loss.

The death of his wife, Clare, 85, in July 2011, left Hecker sad and exhausted. As his movement slowed and his breathing worsened, he decided to fly to Tucson to seek help from his oldest son.

Before doing that, though, he paid a visit to his doctor.

“I came in and told him what I wanted to do, and he said, ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ ” Hecker recalled. “I said ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘You’re going to the emergency room.’ ”

The doctor said Hecker’s lungs were in terrible shape, although he was unable to provide a specific diagnosis. When a friend working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., pleaded to see him, Hecker soon found himself on an airplane.

After running a myriad of tests on Hecker, who was confined to a wheelchair, doctors determined that he had pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that scars or thickens the lungs, making breathing difficult. They weren’t sure how much of the damage they could recover, but they gave him medicine and suggested he get back into an athletic routine.

That’s when Hecker decided to take charge of his life.

“I came back and told myself, ‘I’m going to beat this thing, and someday I’m going to be back on the squash court,’ ” Hecker said.

That desire to return to the court traces to 1974, when he was sent to Saudi Arabia to work as a chief pilot for Trans World Airlines. Toward the beginning of their three years living in Jeddah, Hecker and his wife noticed a nearby structure containing chicken wire and a group of people looking down from an elevated platform.

“I said, ‘It must be a cockfight,’ ” Hecker recalled. “We go up and look and see two guys on this cement court with cement walls with what look like two tennis rackets. And they were having a great time, dripping wet. I said to my wife, ‘This looks like fun.’ ”

The next day, Hecker went with his wife and daughter to buy three bamboo squash rackets for $6 each. An obsession with this strange new game — a high-speed racket sport played by two players in a four-walled court — was born

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