Every time I come to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to cover the space shuttle for the high definition TV network HDNet, I rent a bike first thing in the morning to get a little exercise before the day gets too hot. In its shortest form my route takes me about ten sweat-soaked miles, up and back along the hard-packed beach. But when I have the time, I add in some detours, including a couple of residential complexes for seniors. Except for a few big Buicks which scare the daylights out of me when I spot them over my shoulder coming on from behind, these places usually offer quiet palm-lined streets and light cooling breezes coming off the water.

They also offer a reality check. As I ride through and see men in white shoes and women in wedgies, I think to myself that I’m a long way from a place like this … and fool myself into thinking that if anyone happens to notice me riding by, they’ll think I’m there to visit my elderly parents. But silly me! A glutton for punishment, I stopped strolling seniors in two of these places while I was in town for the late-May launch of Discovery and asked, “What’s the minimum age here?” The answer was like a slap in the face when you’re already sunburned: “55.”

55? Been there, done that! I’m a leading-edge baby boomer, birth year 1946, which means 55 is just a pleasant memory. Try 61. I don’t look like I’m just visiting my elderly parents; I look like I am one of those elderly parents! Just as I learned the other day in a store near my home that they offer a 10% senior citizen discount on the first Wednesday of the month, and I could have gotten that discount for six years already if I had been smart enough to ask, I could have moved into one of these senior complexes in 2002! Who knows? Maybe all my shoes by now would be white too!

But it reminds me of the time a few years ago when I was covering a story in Los Angeles and called a female friend of my wife’s and mine who lives there, and we met for lunch in Westwood, which is the base of UCLA. After lunch we decided to take a walk, and ended up on Fraternity Row. It was Rush Week, so there were lots of college students walking around. And because we are young at heart if not of hair (my wife always laughs when I exclaim with wonder how remarkable it is that neither she nor any of our female friends has a strand of gray), we kind of thought we fit right in, and if anyone were to walk up and talk to us, we figured he’d invite me to “rush” his house. Silly us! When a guy finally did stop us, it was to ask if we needed any help finding our son’s fraternity house. I guess we’re lucky he didn’t say “grandson.”

The moral to the story? You’re only as old as you feel. But of course it’s not quite as simple as that, because age is measured two ways: how you feel, and how you look. Except for moments of denial (and they pop up more and more), I know I look my age. Of course that’s not always a bad thing; my mother is in her mid-80s and lives in a senior complex in San Francisco. Whenever I visit her there and we eat in the communal dining room, I spot some woman looking me over and thinking, “Hmm, fresh meat.” To her, I suppose I am, (and I hope Mom scolds her roundly for what she might be thinking), but the fact is, I qualify to live in that place too. Time marches on, and we can’t do a darned thing to stop it.

So I can’t control how I look, but I can still control how I feel, and here’s why I should: sometimes I ski with my two strong-healthy-fit-athletic 20-something sons. Mind you, they’ve both made a living on skis, so they’re pretty darned good, but I’m not bad either — for my age. However, that’s a key distinction: “for my age.” When I’m skiing, or for that matter mountain biking, with my wife or other chronological peers, we all feel pretty darned good about ourselves. Even young … “for our age.” But when I ski, or bike, with my sons, they’re Ferraris while I feel like a ’57 Plymouth.

Just a month or so ago, three other guys about my age and I made our annual trip to Moab, Utah, the Grand Canyon-like mountain-biking capital of the country. And on our toughest climb near the end of our longest ride, we were struggling up a slick rock ledge that any mere mortal would struggle to summit… when a young couple went racing past us so fast that the girl’s braided blonde ponytail was actually flying in the wind. So, here’s how I can control how I feel: stick to playmates my own age!

But now to the real moral to the story: time does march on, but except for the inevitable toll it may take on our bodies, we don’t have to live by the calendar. Our parents’ generation pretty much took a look at the calendar and said, “Well, I guess I’m too old to do such-and-such any more.” No you’re not! At least we’re not. When you consider all the bumps and grinds our limbs have suffered living the active lifestyle our boomer generation lives, we are obviously too old in some ways to perform as we performed when we were younger — that’s why we don’t see many boomers these days in anything from major league sports to the Olympics — but we’re not too old to perform!

I’ll just keep telling myself that as long as I can. Even if it means I keep fooling myself. It sure beats wearing white shoes and driving that big Buick!

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There are century bike rides each summer in Colorado. “Century” means, a hundred … as in, a hundred miles. But by the time you’re anywhere near the hundred mile mark, especially on century rides in a state where the altitude of mountain roads rises into the quintuple digits, you’re counting not just every mile but every single foot, which is why I’ll go to pains to point out, the total mileage usually comes out to more like 102, 103 … I remember one that ended up at 108 miles.

The earliest century ride in Colorado comes the first weekend in June; it’s called the Elephant Rock. It begins and ends in the small city of Castle Rock, a bit south of Denver, and every time I’ve ridden it, it’s made enduring memories. Some aren’t so sweet, from the route near the end that takes you up a hellishly steep hill I have nicknamed “the wall,” to the fierce southbound wind that makes the final northbound stretch along I-25 feel like a whole century ride itself!

But none is more memorable than my Elephant Rock ride in 2001. Why? Because I was just 54 years old but had a heart attack!

In retrospect, I’d had a couple of smaller heart attacks in the preceding week, while training my winter-idled body for the Elephant Rock on a small mountain called Bergen Peak in Evergreen, Colorado, where I live. I thought the burning sensation in my chest was heartburn or acid reflux, neither of which I’d ever had before, but there’s a first time for everything. So I kept riding.

Then, riding with a friend in the Elephant Rock, I had the same kind of burning, but stronger. So not long before the first official rest stop, I stopped. I told my friend what I was feeling, but being as ignorant as I am, he didn’t recognize the signs of a heart attack any more than I did. After being still for 10 or 15 minutes, we got back on our bikes … and finished the ride.

When I got home that night and told my wife what had happened, she was smarter than my friend and I were, and said, Get yourself to the doctor! … which I did, and when I had yet a fourth attack right there in his examining room, I barely had time to clutch my chest before he had me in an ambulance and, not long after that, in surgery.

The thing is, I asked my cardiologist — none of us has a cardiologist on standby; I met mine in the emergency room — whether my bike-riding had caused the heart attacks, or saved me despite them. His answer was something any bicyclist needs to know: because of the time I spend on bikes, my heart, which is a muscle, was strong. Strong enough to withstand the blood stoppages that blocked arteries were causing.

What caused the blockages was heredity — a propensity to develop plaque, which plagued both my father and his father with bad hearts. What kept me going, was biking.

And that’s why I ride my bike nowadays more than ever. Including a couple of Elephant Rocks since my open heart surgery in 2001. I don’t worry that it’s going to stress the heart; I’m confident that it’s going to keep it strong!

One immodest postscript: in September 2006 I was on the east coast for business, and at a friend’s urging I flew to New York City for the annual NYC Century Bike Tour. It begins in Central Park, cuts south through Manhattan, then goes through and around Brooklyn, and Queens, and the Bronx, and ends back where it started. I’m a leading-edge boomer, 61 years old, and ought to have been at the rear of the pack. But instead I kept riding forward from every pack I joined. Why? Because you can pedal your bike every day of the year in New York City and you won’t develop legs or lungs like a Coloradoan’s. And where do we get those legs and lungs? On rides like the Elephant Rock!

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