If one of your life goals is to scale Everest, then take a few lessons from the elderly community of Japan. According to a great article on Yahoo!, Yuichiro Miura is training to scale the 29,035 foot Mount Everest. At the tender age of 75.

He's up at dawn (after sleeping in a low-oxygen chamber), packs weights on his ankles and loads up his 44-pound backpack. As if that wasn't enough, he then hikes around Tokyo. For hours! And just to spice up his routine, he walks on the treadmill.

What's amazing about Miura is not his determination or his daily routine. What's amazing is the fact that he skied down Everest and has already scaled the peak at the age of 70. However, his record was passed by another fellow Japanese climber. Now, Miura is determined to break and keep the record for good.

"It's a tough but wonderful thing to get to the peak when you are past 70," Miura said at his Tokyo home. "I hope to send the message that we have the potential for many things in this aging society."

It's no wonder that the Japanese have cornered the market in elderly Everest conquerers. The country has the world's longest-living population and is going through a boom in activities for the elderly.

Toshio Yamamoto started the string of Japanese victories by scaling the peak in 2000 at 63 years. In 2001, American Sherman Bull reached the summit at 64 years old. Tomiyasu Ishikawa, then 65, took the title in 2002.

Miura won the distinction in 2003, at 70, but was eclipsed by fellow Japanese climber Takao Arayama, who scaled the peak in 2006, just three days older than Miura was when he did it. Katsusuke Yanagisawa took the crown this year, at age 71 years and 63 days.

"It feels like the goddess of Everest is beckoning me to come back," said Miura, who is planning an assault on the mountain next spring, when he'll be 75 (edmund hillary was 33 when he became the first man to climb Everest, in 1953). None of three other Japanese record-holders plans to scale the mountain, they say.