Ouch! Pain Gains on a Generation : Behavior: Baby boomers drive themselves to the point of injury on playing fields. Some refuse to admit they’re simply getting older.

If you’re under 45 and you’re reading this with your arm in a sling, your injured leg elevated or with nasty scrapes on your knees and elbows, take heart. You may be hurt, but you’re not alone.

American baby boomers are apparently beset by a plague of sports injuries. Statistics are scarce but aches and pains, unfortunately, are not.

The walking wounded are everywhere. Beverly Markwith, 35, a benefits administrator in Santa Monica, finally quit handball after her fifth knee operation. UC San Diego professor Robert Horwitz, 38, gave up gymnastics, then basketball, as his joints began to give out.

Even royal blood is no inoculation: Earlier this summer, Prince Charles, 41, broke an arm in a fall from his horse during a polo match.

All these injuries aren’t just a function of more exercise. They’re also a sign of age.

“The baby boomers are in their 40s and 50s and trying to do what they did in their 20s and 30s,” said Marc Friedman, a Van Nuys orthopedist and sports medicine specialist. “Their bodies aren’t happy. And they’re getting injured.”

Friedman, whose clients have included the New York Jets and New York Knicks, cites the case of a 52-year-old corporate vice president who broke his ankle shortly before he and his wife were to take a three-week cruise.

“What . . . is a 52-year-old executive doing sliding into home plate?” Friedman asked.

Psychologists say the executive is doing several things, including denying his own mortality. Balding and busy, many exercise buffs are driven to prove they’re still young, to exorcise workplace demons and to accomplish something tangible after spending most of their time holding meetings and talking on the phone.

Dean Valentine, for example, plays intense weekend softball games with entertainment industry colleagues. Injuries are commonplace, said Valentine, 36, a vice president for Walt Disney Television. “It’s a lot of guys not coming to terms with their age.”

Valentine’s troubles began when he fell off a horse in Arizona. Returning to his cherished softball after three months of recuperation, he promptly broke a wrist. After six weeks of recovery, he came back and broke an ankle while blocking home plate.

“We’re a pretty seriously masochistic lot,” Valentine said.

Almost everyone agrees on the merits of moderate exercise, but doctors and psychologists say they are startled by the relative lack of moderation in fit but aging weekend warriors.

“I’m a treadmill fanatic,” said Rick Ferko, 39, a Woodland Hills lawyer and former Ohio State linebacker. He worked out vigorously as many as seven days a week, only to develop back problems.

The treadmill workout itself was a response to a ruptured Achilles tendon, earned while playing kamikaze basketball in 1984. His wife used the treadmill too--until she developed knee problems.

“We’re all getting old and we overdo it,” Ferko said, adding: “I’m still in the denial stage.”

There are no reliable figures for the incidence of sports injuries, but evidence of an increase is more than anecdotal. Golf, a safer, statelier form of exertion than most, is booming; Sports Illustrated devoted much of a recent issue to the stampede to the links.

Another indicator may be the boom in sports medicine. The American College of Sports Medicine reports that its membership, which includes doctors, exercise physiologists and others, has grown from 2,900 in 1975 to 12,000 in 1989.

And The Physician and Sports Medicine, a McGraw-Hill journal aimed at the family practitioner that began publication in 1973, boasts a monthly circulation of 150,000.

Dr. Gary Green, a sports medicine specialist at UCLA Medical Center, said the typical sports injury has changed in recent years. In the past, people were sedentary after college or the military, exerted themselves on weekends and got hurt.

“Now we’re seeing overuse-type injuries,” Green said.

Tendinitis, bursitis, runner’s knee and tennis elbow are common. And with acute injuries, some older people find they not only take longer to heal, but their conditions become chronic.

Ralph Requa, research director for the Center for Sports Medicine at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, said the median age of patients and the proportion of chronic injuries are rising at his clinic, which gets more than 30,000 visits a year. “We’re as busy as we’ve ever been,” he said.

Most experts say the wave of injuries is partly an unavoidable side effect of increased activity.

“Anyone who participates in sports on a regular basis and pushes themselves borders on an injury all the time,” said Douglas Jackson, a Long Beach orthopedist and sports medicine specialist. “We see more injuries now than five or 10 years ago.”

One reason, he said, is that these days, recreational athletes don’t give up. Jackson, 50, is an example. A runner, he was sidelined for six months by a back injury, but a year later ran the Los Angeles Marathon.

Jackson may also be typical in that he is affluent and well-educated. Jim Pitt, academic dean and sometime sports sociologist at Ohio Wesleyan University, sees the rise of physical fitness as part of America’s growing class stratification.

“It is very strongly connected with certain occupations and levels of education,” Pitt said. “A lot of people find exercise and sports less objectionable because it does seem more like work.”

“Yuppies are the biggest exercise freaks,” agreed Alec Gallup, co-chairman of the polling organization. Gallup defines “yuppies” as white-collar types under 40 earning at least $40,000, and said they are “the single highest group (of exercisers) across the board.”

Experts say this group often approaches exercise in a way that can magnify chances of injury. Recreational athletes from the professional class can be too competitive, said Jerry May, a sports psychologist at the University of Nevada-Reno School of Medicine.

“Today, people feel they have to win all the time,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of people pursue a recreational sport and make it a war.”

Steve Danish, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who counsels Olympic athletes on retirement, said recreational athletes too often transfer work frustrations to the tennis or basketball court.

Too many of these athletes, Danish said, refuse to admit that their activities ought to evolve as they get older.

“A person of 35 must recognize that they’re not 20 any more,” said sports medicine specialist Green, 33, who loves basketball but is less aggressive in getting rebounds because of injuries. Now he focuses on his outside game.

Even die-hards get old. Wayne Christensen, a pension planner in Pasadena, is a decathlete who, at age 37, earned a black belt in tae kwan do. At 6-feet-2, he could dunk a basketball until he was 41. Then, a few years ago, he tore ligaments and cartilage in his knee. He still does amazing things--bicycling from San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example--but not the way he once did. Now, at 49, he said, “I find that my body tends to change my habits for me.”

Another cause of injury is poor concentration. Recreational athletes often are distracted by work and family, or their harried schedules permit too little time to warm up and, crucially, to “warm down” afterward.

May said he knows people who race from a stressful job to the racquetball court, attack the ball for an hour in an attempt to pulverize their opponent, then run right back to the same anxious office. “These are the people who keep the cardiologists--and myself--in business,” he said.

Pitt said that yuppies apply their very strong work ethic to sports and exercise.

“We’re seeing the kind of dedication to a kind of culture, an aesthetic, a code of honor that is historically more associated with a craft than a 9-to-5 job,” he said. “And the standards are objective. You can measure your endurance.”

Karen Sitney, for example, is a 31-year-old Caltech biochemist studying DNA replication. She has been in nine marathons and routinely commuted to work--10 miles round trip--by running.

“I’m faster now than when I was at 20,” she boasts. “If you have a job where you don’t see a lot of results day to day, it’s nice to have something” where you do.

Lately, a mysterious leg injury has forced her to give the running a rest. Now she bicycles or swims.

Ellen Alperstein, 37, a Santa Monica free-lance writer and avid basketball player, has suffered torn ligaments and cartilage in her right knee, jammed fingers, broken ankles and tendinitis, besides the usual scrapes and bruises.

But she hasn’t stopped exercising. Her resting pulse is 42, she said proudly, and sometimes it goes down to 39. “For me,” Alperstein said, “that’s a benchmark.”

Despite the pain, the pleasure in sport keeps many aging athletes coming back for more.

Meet Julie Fox Blackshaw, an assistant U.S. attorney who prosecutes defense industry fraud cases. She has twice broken the same thumb while skiing. She has skied with it newly broken, and skied with it in a splint. She won’t consider giving up the sport. It’s too much fun.

Blackshaw is 36. Dr. Robert Shakman, who is 46, stopped skiing after he fell hard enough to leave his neck and hands tingling.

Shakman, assistant medical director for Blue Cross of California, said, “I realized I was pushing my luck.”