Warren Castellano moved to Plaza Midwood in 2022, six weeks after retiring, into a city where he knew two people and one of them was his brother-in-law.
He found the Freedom Park class on a flyer in a coffee shop and describes his decision to attend as entirely stubborn. He had already decided he would be the oldest person there by twenty years, and he went to prove himself right.
The first Saturday
He was right. At the first session Warren was the oldest person on the lawn by a considerable margin, and he says he spent the first fifteen minutes calculating how early he could leave without being rude.
What stopped him leaving was not the class. It was that the woman on the next mat asked him where he had moved from and then introduced him to three people at the end, none of whom mentioned his age at all.
By the fourth week there were six people over fifty on the lawn, because Warren had told his neighbours and two of them had told theirs.
I did not want to be the interesting old man at the back. I wanted to be a person in a class, and after about three weeks that is what I was.
The walking group
In early 2023 Warren asked whether we would run something midweek, in the morning, that did not involve getting down onto the ground. We said we did not have anyone to lead it. He said he would do it.
The Wednesday morning walking group has met every week since, year round, in Plaza Midwood. It averages nineteen people. Its oldest regular is seventy-four and its youngest is thirty-one, which Warren mentions every time anybody asks him about it.
What he says about it now
I did not want to be the interesting old man at the back, he says. I wanted to be a person in a class, and after about three weeks that is what I was.
Warren has brought eleven people into the programme since 2022. He spoke at the Queen City festival in November 2025, in the rain, to about ninety people, on the subject of starting something at fifty-eight.
If you are reading this and doing the same arithmetic he did, his advice is short. Go once. Be wrong about it for a week.