I’m 54 and play guitar since I was 16, but didn’t practice for many years, just playing for fun. I always wanted to learn to “shred” but ran into a roadblock everytime I tried, not even making the slightest progress. With our first band we played Jimi’s version of “All along the Watchtower”, Neil Young, ZZ Top and other classics (me playing the lead guitar). I was 19 at the time and thought it went really well, but I guess I was just too lazy.
I grew up in East Germany; it wasn’t easy to get decent gear back then (the Czech made fine instruments though, I had a Les Paul copy that played very well). Most of the bands of the time we knew only from very noisy magnet tape copies of copies of copies of their albums; my first tablature I got at the age of 25. So I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell these guys were doing, with significantly less success than Troy 
Now I’m really curious to see if a “not-so-young talent” like me can still make some progress. My goal is not ultimate speed, but some fundamentals to finally be comfortable with arpeggios and sequences. And what I saw so far here at CtC looks very promising…