I am 59. The first time I ever got on a road bike, I was 51. I'd been diagnosed with a brain tumor, which was surgically removed shortly after the diagnosis, a few years earlier, in 1998. That experience got me thinking about all sorts of things, one of which was getting back in shape. The road bike was part of the series of choices that got me to where I am: on the verge of a 4000 mile bike ride.
My company offers a sabbatical program. People who have been here for 15 years take a three month vacation to explore whatever they have always dreamed of spending some time on. About twenty years ago, one guy chose to use his time on a cross-country bike ride. At the time, I thought that was one of the odder choices I had ever heard. But although it sounded ridiculously hard (in those days, a 5 mile ride would have seemed very, very long to me), I did not really have any sense of the scale of his trip. Now that I have been riding for a few years, I have done 25 days of 100 miles or so; I have ridden about 6000 miles per year for about 4 years; I went without a car for about a year and a half. I've ridden from San Francisco to Los Angeles twice, from San Francisco to San Diego once, I've done a ride in the Dolomites in Italy, a ride along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina, a ride up Haleakala on Maui. I have discovered in myself a real love of cycling, but I am beginning to have a more accurate picture of just what it will take to ride 4000 miles, to be living out of 15 pounds of luggage for three months, to sleep in unfamiliar places every night. (No, we're not camping - I figure a grandmother should not have to sleep on the ground after riding 70 miles. Or ever, actually.) It won't be really clear, though, until we've been out there for a while.
And I continue to move back and forth between anxiety and happy anticipation.
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