On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 10/1/2003
The Old Farts
I recently attended the annual awards breakfast for the California Triple Crown. If you read my column with any regularity, you already know what the CTC is, but if the term is new to you, let me supply a little background...
There are currently around a dozen official double centuries staged each year in California. (You know what double centuries are, right? Rides of 200 miles in one day.) All of the doubles are loosely affiliated under the umbrella of the California Triple Crown. The name derives from its primary function: honoring riders who complete at least three doubles in one year.
The CTC is mostly the stepchild of one enthusiastic volunteer: Chuck Bramwell of Irvine in Orange County. Pretty much whatever needs to be done to make the CTC happen, Chuck does it. He helps coordinate the schedule of doubles for the upcoming year, helps promote the events, and generally creates an aura of excitement, credibility, and substance around the whole concept of a season-long series of double centuries.
Chuck is a great guy and the CTC series is a great program, and if you want to know more about it, you can visit their very comprehensive website at http://www.CalTripleCrown.com/.
Anyway...at the breakfast, which is held the morning after the Knoxville Double in Vacaville, Chuck presents awards to various riders for various accomplishments over the course of the past season. Included among these honors are the induction of riders into the California Triple Crown Hall of Fame. (Everyone has a Hall of Fame these days, from baseball to rock ’n roll to whatever. I’m not going to argue that the CTC HoF is as big or as important as any other institution of the same ilk. It is what it is: a legitimate recognition of deeds well done within this particular area of endeavor. As such, it is important to its constituents, and inclusion is a signal honor.)
Most of this year’s inductees were at the breakfast, as were at least a dozen men and women who are already in the Hall. I’m probably not going to make any friends with this next observation, but what I noticed about the assembled members of the Hall was how old most of them look. A receding hairline here, a head of silver hair there. A little jowly and wrinkled here, a little paunchy over there. Yes, there are exceptions, and most definitely, yes, those looks are deceiving...especially if you look under the breakfast tables at the legs on these folks, most of which resemble polished walnut burls. And for the record, I include myself in this description. Maybe not the ripped quads and calves, but for sure the looking old part.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the members of any Hall of Fame would not find themselves in the first bloom of youth. After all, it takes some time to pile up the palmarés that will lead to the doorstep of the Hall. Chuck mentioned the average age of this year’s inductees is 61. But what I find impressive is that, unlike elderly ex-baseball or football players joining the pantheons at Cooperstown or Canton, there is nothing “ex” about the CTC inductees. They have not retired...have not quit doing the things that got them into the Hall. They are still riding doubles, and most have no immediate plans to stop doing so. One entry-level qualification for inclusion in this august group is to have ridden at least 50 double centuries. Lemme tell ya, that is a lot of doubles. But there were riders present at the breakfast who are now approaching twice that number, and within a year or two someone is going to be able to say they have ridden 100 doubles. Amazing!
Some of the older riders may have slowed down a bit. Some of them may elect to do doubles that are less challenging. (All double centuries are challenging, but some are more or less challenging than others.) But they are still out there on their bikes, logging the miles, in fair weather or foul, in broiling heat or freezing sleet. Some of these folks may chronologically be on the far side of middle-age--and may at least superficially look the part--but their hearts beat as those of much younger athletes, and their minds and spirits function with a resiliency not normally associated with old geezers. They are a bunch of frisky, feisty old farts.
Long-distance cycling is very popular with an older crowd. Many folks don’t even discover doubles or similar events--Furnace Creek, Paris-Brest-Paris and all its brevets--until their 40’s. They come to this form of endurance touring from other sports or from the world of bicycle racing...shorter, faster, more intensely concentrated races. Or they come to it from no sport at all, but rather from the uncomfortable reality of an expanding waistline and compromised health; from intimations of mortality; from the realization of too many hours spent behind a desk and not enough spent outside, blowing out the carbon and having fun...a mid-life crisis, if you will.
I have been logging the entries for the Terrible Two double century for over ten years, and I can tell you that 50-something riders outnumber 20-something riders, probably by a wide margin. (If I took the time, I might be able to coerce my data base into yielding up exact statistics on this, but for now, just take my word for it.) And the TT is one of those more challenging doubles which many of the older riders skip. Even so, we have many riders in their 60’s and even a couple in their 70’s who have completed the event. And we have had riders in their 40’s win the event and riders in their 50’s finish in the top 20 with great regularity.
There is a theory that older people do well in long-distance bike events--or at least gravitate to the discipline in larger numbers--because it takes a few years (or decades) to learn how to suffer. The thinking is that younger riders, although frequently faster on the bike, have not yet learned the patience and stoicism needed for managing the aches and pains of prolonged rides. I don’t know whether that theory would hold up under scientific scrutiny, but I do know older riders may not be fast (relative to younger riders), but they have endurance down cold. Wind them up and point them in the right direction, and some of these grizzled veterans will just ride and ride forever, long after the young crit racers have bailed.
Back to the awards breakfast... After receiving his official CTC HoF plaque, one inductee received a special prize from his long-time cycling buddy (himself already a member of the Hall). The buddy talked a bit about how the two of them had ridden together for so many years and so many miles...had shared so many adventures. And then he presented his friend with a t-shirt emblazoned with the words, “The Old Farts Did it Again!” I guess whenever they finish one of their epic rides together, one of them always shouts out this refrain. And now here they are, both in the long-distance cycling Hall of Fame.
The old farts did it again. I love it! And I identify with it. I mean, here we are, we aging boomers--at an age when a lot of our generational peers can’t or won’t contemplate a piddly round of golf without riding the course in an electric cart--and we’re still out there, riding over mountaintops, screaming down the other side, sprinting for city limit signs, cranking out snappy pacelines, and just generally acting like a bunch of kids.
As I write this, we’re just coming to the end of our third Grand Tour of the year...the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, and now the Vuelta a España. If you are lucky enough to have OLN, you will have enjoyed hours of watching the pros at work...those sleek little whippets of the cycling world, with the miniscule body-fat counts and the rippling, whipcord muscles. I look at the way those guys look compared to the way I look, and the way they ride compared to the way I ride, and sometimes it seems a bit implausible to suggest that we are both engaged in the same activity, even approximately.
But we are...and isn’t that the coolest thing about cycling? You learn how to do it shortly after you learn to walk, and if your life plays out along fortunate paths, you can keep doing it almost until you turn up your toes. You may not ride as fast at 60 as you did at 30 (or as the pros do at 30), but you can still ride plenty fast enough to have a lot of fun, and maybe even fast enough to give your adrenal gland a good workout. Certainly the rest of your body will be getting a good workout, and so too will your soul or spirit or whatever you call that life-energy that keeps you full of fire and joy.
So here’s to the Old Farts out there. Keep doing it, again and again and again. Take what your body will give you and roll with it, as fast and as far as you want.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net