The headline above may not come as a surprise to some.
After all, I’ve written a lot of cycling articles over the years and many readers will have seen me riding at Knights Ferry, the Long Barn or various roads in between.
But what may defy logic is that at 78 years old, I am still riding a bike.
Let me go back to 1951 when I was growing up in Northbrook, a suburb of Chicago.
Just hours after learning how to ride my first two-wheeler at age 5, I raced some older kids on the dirt Butternut Lanes in Northbrook. Robbie had been riding bikes for over a year. I rode a JC Higgins (or was it a Huffy?) and probably stood upright for a few minutes.
It was like Beaver Cleaver taking on a drug-addicted Lance Armstrong.
Contrary to what everyone expected, I surged into the lead. But then, my front wheel skidded on the gravel, my red bike fell hard, and my right knee hit the road and broke a large gash. As Robbie passed me at high speed, I grabbed a clump of grass from my neighbor’s lawn and shoved it into the cut to try to dull the pain.
Next, my dad took me to our sadistic pediatrician, Dr. Phillips Bourne, who scolded me for racing and for treating the wound with grass, then cleaned the wound with what appeared to be steel wool. Next, he took out a syringe the size of a barrel and gave me a tetanus shot directly into the wound. Ouch!
In the end, Phillipsborn stitched my wounds up without any anesthesia, though he may have been drinking something, all the while growling and lecturing me.
This should have put me off bikes for years, but it didn’t.
Eight years later, in the summer of 1959, I was taking some classes at nearby New Trier High School, preparing for the rigors of higher education. One July day, I was riding home from the New Trier campus on my Schwinn Deluxe Racer when my eye was caught by a girl walking home across Willow Road in Winnetka.
The moment I took my attention off the road, a station wagon pulled up in front of me. I slammed into it at full speed, going over the handlebars and nearly engulfing the big chrome latch on the back of my Ford Country Squire. Bleeding profusely, I spat out my teeth, and struggled to my feet while the wagon’s driver and young passenger looked at each other with their mouths open in horror and disbelief.
By the way, what happened to that girl I saw walking across the street from me? She started laughing right after the incident, so I didn’t ask her out on a first date.
Meanwhile, the wagon driver heard my name, called my father, and took me to a dentist in Winnetka, who extracted the remains of a tooth that was still in my mouth, stitched up my gums, and sent me to the hospital to recover from a concussion.
My mom was embarrassed by my toothless appearance, but I was okay with it. I was no longer some anonymous nerdy high school freshman. Suddenly, I was “the guy with no teeth,” albeit a nerd. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t suddenly popular and scaring off all the freshman girls looking for dates, but my new classmates knew who I was. It was a social step up.
Is this the end of the story? Not yet, but after the accident I avoided cycling for many years.
The military school my parents later enrolled me in in Minnesota didn’t allow bikes, and when I got to college in the Bay Area, bikes were considered nerdy and weird and just plain uncool.
What was cool then? Marijuana, psychedelics, light shows, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, etc. We were living in the ’60s, after all.
So, without my bike, I walked to classes or drove around campus in my first car, a Volkswagen Beetle (see chapter 4 of my autobiography).
Fast forward to the 1970s, and I was hired as a rookie reporter at the Union Democrat. I hadn’t worked out in years. But then in 1977, like millions of others, I picked up Jim Fixx’s “Complete Book of Running” and suddenly I was an unquestioning believer, a member of a cult.
Like millions of others, I found a way to do something that made me sweat a lot but required no coordination — a low-impact sport I could do. Over the next few years, I ran 10ks and marathons, and hundreds of days in a row.
At lunchtime, I changed into shorts and ran a couple of two-mile laps around Sonora, then, drenched in sweat, stretched in front of the Democrat’s front doors.
The management immediately told me that this wasn’t helping my circulation and ordered me to go and stretch in the basement.
Was I obsessed? Absolutely. I was an avid runner for many years, but in 2000 I had hip replacement surgery that kept me away from the track and out of running shoes.
So what next? Since I couldn’t get my suddenly missing endorphins from the drug dealers in Sonora, I had two options.
1. Swimming: Staring at the blue line in a pool through chlorine for hours. To me, this is the definition of boredom. Not only that, but I’ve swam before and ended up flopping and out of breath after a lap or two. “Just learn how to breathe and you’ll be fine,” a veteran swimmer told me. I didn’t believe it.
2. Cycling: Hop on a bike and enjoy the beautiful scenery of the Mother Road, but you risk re-lacerating your knee, losing more teeth, or worse.
It took me a few minutes to decide. I walked across Washington Street to JT Cycles and bought a bike with skinny wheels and lots of gears. And it was a blast to ride. Until I fell.
I was finishing up my 2005 bike ride down Lyons Bald Mountain Road, about a block from the finish line in front of The Democrat, when a car blocked my way, so I decided to hop the curb and get through it.
Big mistake. I missed a jump and fell hard on the pavement, dislocating the artificial hip joint that surgeons had installed just five years earlier. Revision hip replacement surgery followed, and after four months of recovery, I was beginning to question whether I should continue cycling.
Of course, I continued to ride my bike, logging thousands of miles in that time, including a half-dozen 100-mile races and even taking part in the infamous Death Ride in 2006, which took me more than 12 hours to complete the 120-plus miles of the Death Ride, climbing nearly 15,000 feet in elevation in the High Sierra Mountains around Markleeville.
In 2008, I rode across the US with my oldest son, Ben, covering almost 4,000 miles in just over two months. In 2016, Ben and I rented bikes and cycled around New Zealand’s beautiful South Island, which was as fun as you’d expect (except for a few sand fly bites along the way). In 2019, I even managed to complete the 1.9 mile, 1,900 foot climb of Old Priest Grade. And, earlier this year, I completed the Wildflower Century in Chico.
And I still cycle 20 or 30 miles whenever I can.
I wonder how much longer I can keep doing this. After all, I’m almost 80 years old and often ride alone on roads with little traffic, which means if I slip on wet pavement, run into a barbed wire fence, or run into a stray bull, it could be a while before help arrives.
On the plus side, now that we’re driving much slower than before, injuries in a collision may not be as severe.
One answer is to ride with a friend, who can at least call 911 if I lose consciousness. But I can’t always find a riding partner who will fit my schedule, so I end up hitting the road alone.
Or you could sign up with Backroads or another tour organization and cycle with fellow seniors in beautiful places like Norway or Sweden, which I actually did earlier this summer and had a lot of fun.
(And that excursion will be the second chapter of this cycling op-ed, which will appear here next week, or in the print and digital editions of the Union Democrat on Friday, Sept. 6.)
Chris Bateman worked as a reporter, editor and columnist for The Union Democrat for nearly 40 years. He is now semi-retired but continues to write columns on a variety of topics. Some of his past columns, as well as all of the previous chapters in his autobiography series, can be found on the Union Democrat’s website at www.uniondemocrat.com. He can be contacted at chrisbateman1908@gmail.com.
