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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  12/1/2000

A Winter's Tale

I'd like to share a little story with you...just a little cycling anecdote. It's not really a winter story either. It happened a few months ago. But it puts me in a winter frame of mind: that dark time of the year; a time of endings and long nights and diminishing returns.

It happened on a ride up and over the Geysers, one of our classic, Sonoma County hill rides. For those of you not familiar with our local geography, the ascent of the north face of the Geysers is quite a challenge: 15 miles of mostly uphill work, with the first 13 miles fairly moderate, but the last mile or two a really brutal wall, all of it steep and unrelenting.

Among the group on this particular ride was Lou, one of our regular riding companions. Lou is a natural climber, built along the lines of a Pantani. He comes on all the hillier rides and always does well. On any typical climb, he will leave me far behind. Lou is currently around 45 years old.

Lou showed up for this ride on a strange bike. Turns out the frame on his trusty old Masi had cracked, so he had put it out to pasture and had ordered a lovely new Seven ti. In the meantime, while the new bike was being built, he was using an old Vitus he'd dragged out of the garage and dusted off...a bike he'd last used many years before.

As I was huffing and puffing up that steep wall at the top of the Geysers climb, I was surprised to come upon Lou the mountain goat, clearly struggling, as he slowly stitched his way, shoelace style, up the hill. As I passed him, I asked him how he was doing, which really meant, "What's wrong with you that I can be passing you at this point on a climb, Lou?" Interpreting the implied question correctly, Lou replied, "This bike has the gearing I ran when I was 28 years old!"

Ahhh...of course! That would do it. Aging as calibrated in gear inches. I know that feeling well. Just last year, in a fit of misguided, mid-life machismo, I had swapped out my kindest climbing cog for one with a measly two fewer teeth, and on that very same Geysers wall I had suffered a meltdown identical to Lou's. (I quickly swallowed my pride and put the big cog back on the cluster.) It's no accident that we have seen a surge in sales of triple chain ring groups on "racing" bikes, just as the baby boomers are graying into their late forties and early fifties. Our minds may still be willing, but our tired old quads can't quite keep up.

(This is of course a boomer-centric point of view. I salute those of you who are still young enough to not know the ravages of time, and even more so, I salute those of you who are still riding, but who said goodbye to their forties and fifties years ago. But the boomer point of view is the one I know. I was born smack dab on the tip of that big demographic spike...that post-war, pig-in-a-python bulge that has called the tune in our culture for the past half century. As go the boomers, so goes the nation....the focus of the media, the framing of policy, and even, often the common gestalt of society as a whole.)

And boomers are now the ones most absorbed with the intimations of mortality that accompany the departure of youth and the onset of whatever comes next...be it called maturity or aging or some other more clever euphemism.

This is what makes me call this a Winter's Tale. Winter is the eternal, melancholy metaphor for aging. As each year dies, we are reminded a little of our own death. We acknowledge that another of our handful of years has come and gone, and that no matter how wonderful that year might have been for us, I suspect most of us wish, in retrospect, that we could have done more with it...could somehow have wrung more adventure, more romance, more success, more happiness out of it. More something!

Winter and aging both represent the diminshing of possibilities in our lives. When we are young, everything is possible. As we grow, we accomplish those things that add up to a life...a well-lived life, we hope. But as we are piling up our accomplishments, we are also, year by year, piling up an even bigger collection of non-accomplishments: somewhere in the dusty attic of our back brain, we are storing away all the things that we now know we will never do. In cycling terms, for example, I think I can say with confidence now that I will never win the Tour de France. Big joke, right? Like I ever could have done so. And yet, at some point in my youth, it was at least a theoretical possibility. No longer. Every day of our lives is punctuated by the repeated slamming of doors: doors closing on hallways to possible adventures...distant lands we will never see, lovers we will never kiss, mountains we will never climb, grandchildren we will never cuddle...

It's enough to make you want to climb into bed and pull the covers up over your head until springtime rolls around. But wait! Just as surely as spring follows winter, and just as surely as the days will grow long and sunny again, and flowers will bloom again, so too will this morbid and maudlin Winter's Tale find its way back to a happy ending, and maybe even back to the subject of cycling.

I was reminded of Lou's story while I was struggling up another of our long climbs on a club ride a week ago. Between gasps and wheezes, I said to my climbing companion, Bob, "The older I get, the steeper it gets." To which swami bobba replied. "The older I get, the more beautiful it gets." Both true statements, and not at all contradictory or mutually exclusive. Consider...

There are three great lines arcing across the sky of our lives. One is our basic life line: the span of years we are given. In youth, the line arcs upward, like a freshly launched roman candle, but then begins to bend back through the long descending arc of aging. Closely aligned to that arc is the line for fitness or wellness: what we do--physically--with that span of years. As we grow, we learn to use our bodies...to walk, then run, and so on. Some of us progress to active lives enriched by sports or other lively pursuits that keep our bodies running at something near their optimum efficiency. In the glorious, ignorant arrogance of an active youth, we feel immortal. Yet at some point, the arc of the aging line and the arc of the fitness line begin to converge, as evidenced by loss of strength, stamina, coordination, and so on. The gears we used so effortlessly at 28 seem at lot harder to turn over at 45.

Staying fit and healthy will forestall the intersection of those two arcs, and once they have finally, inevitably met--probably right around our proverbial mid-life crises--a continued routine of sensible exercise and moderate diet will keep the lines from diverging too rapidly.

The third and probably most important arc is what I might call the spirit arc: the wellness of one's soul (or whatever you choose to call it). As we grow and mature, we learn and think and accumulate experience, and maybe, with a little luck, we gather together some store of wisdom and perspective...perhaps some nebulous quality that might be called spiritual attainment or at least contentment. Of course, as some people age, they do not become wiser, but instead become set in their ways, closed off to new ideas and new possibilities. They suffer not only a hardening of the arteries but a hardening of the attitudes. The spirit is allowed to become as decrepit as the body in which it at least temporarily abides.

Now here's where I try to tie this all together and bring it back to cycling... To my way of thinking, a life well-lived is one in which the two great lines of physical and spiritual wellness reinforce and enhance one another...where what's good for the body is also good for the soul, and where both elements, fit and strong together, hold the arc of aging at bay for as long as possible...and not out of a fear of death, but out of a joy of life, and of making the best of the life we have now.

For me, cycling is an almost ideal way to promote and prolong both physical and spiritual health. As an exercise regimen, it can be practiced at varying levels of intensity by folks of almost any age. It doesn't have to be full-tilt hammer to do you good. It's generally a low-impact activity--except when you fall down--and doesn't put a lot of stress on joints or other body parts. And it's a whole-body workout, putting heart, lungs, and muscles through their paces in a thorough, fairly comprehensive way.

And while we're exercising our bodies, our spirits are happily coming along for the ride and gaining immensely from the experience. First of all, cycling is a simple yoga: as we ride, as our hearts and lungs work overtime, turbocharging oxygen through our systems, we automatically energize and elevate our mental and spiritual facilities, whether we intend to or not. We relax, and our minds disengage from the cares and stresses of our daily lives. Without our conciously trying to make it happen, we find our thoughts wandering along new avenues, exploring new neighborhoods, turning over novel ideas and concepts.

When we ride with companions, we expose ourselves to their new ideas as well, and given the nature of a group ride, we will find ample opportunities to practice humor, cooperation, humility, compassion, and trust, and best of all, to delight in the dance....the joyful play of the moment, interacting with friends, whether it be in a smoothly rotating paceline, in a hilltop prime, or during a whirling-dervish downhill. All of that socializing around a common theme is a form of love and bonding, and it is as nourishing for our spirits as food is for our bodies.

Best of all, if we ride out into the country--and I hope you do so often--we will find our spirits lifted and exalted by the exquisite perfection of nature around us. With all of our senses sharpened by the yoga of riding, and with nothing between us and the surrounding countryside but the air we breathe, we experience the wonders of this most wonderful of worlds most acutely, and it would be a dull-witted fellow whose soul could ignore such a sensory overload. With all due respect to organized religious services of whatever denomination, it would be hard for me to think of another "church" where I could find myself so close to the center of what, for want of a better word, we call God.

All that from cycling? You bet! There are probably lots of other paths that will lead to the same happy confluence of physical and spiritual wellness, but this is the one that we have somehow, fortunately stumbled upon. And when that long, dark night of winter reminds us of our own mortality, cycling can, in some small way, make us feel young again, or at least alive in the present moment.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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