When Brenda and I are in our 70s, I hope we’re still out
there riding our bikes. There is a guy
we ride with who just recently turned 72, and he still goes out and rides every
week. This just tickles both of us. He mentioned the other day that somewhere
between the age of 67 and 68 he noticed a significant decrease in the amount of
power he could generate in his legs—that is, he noticed that he wasn’t
sprinting quite as fast and that he couldn’t go long quite as often as he used
to. But that didn’t stop him. He just learned to adjust his expectations,
and kept on going. And even though he
may not go long as often as he used to, he still goes long—one day just
recently he went out and did 60 or 65 miles by himself. He talks about having slowed down—I’m
impressed with the fact that he’s still out there.
In fact, this club that we’ve been riding with seems to
attract a lot of grey hairs. Most of the
people that Brenda rides with on Tuesday & Thursday mornings are retired
(which explains how they have time to go out bike riding on weekday
mornings.) And when I did the Horrible
Hundred in ’09 (this is the club’s signature annual event, so named because it
takes place in Lake County which is the hilliest area in Central Florida) they
celebrated a guy who had ridden in that event every year since its inception—30
years—and he was 90 years old. Good for
him, I say. God bless him. This is one of the things that I really like
about cycling—it’s not nearly as hard on the body as so many other sports. And there is a real variety of ways to
participate. If your back can’t handle
the traditional posture on a road bike, there are recumbent bikes which put you
in an entirely different position and yet still allow you to go fast enough to
ride with the road groups. And there are
groups for all ability levels, and there are even social rides, where the goal
of the ride isn’t to go out and maintain any particular speed at all, but
rather is just to ride out to a coffee shop where you can sit and visit with
everybody, and then ride back again.
What a great way to spend a morning!
Isn’t it odd that the so-called second most dangerous sport
also has such a high number of active participants in the over-65 age group? Yep, and “Danger” is their middle name…
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