As I age, I find it fascinating to study people who are 20 years older than me. It still feels like the distant future and like there is time to figure out how to do it well if one ponders enough. The two oldest participants in this year’s Victoria Grandmothers for Africa (VG4A) Cycle Tour were born in 1934 and 1935. A Sagittarius/Capricorn cusp baby and a Libra, Carol and Janet were 85 and 84 when they were cycling this summer.
At first glance, I thought their stories seemed quite different. Janet has ridden a bike for many years, stopping only briefly when she was forced to by a broken hip. She completed 644kms in the four weeks of the tour, the furthest of the 11 people on her team, “The Glammas”! Carol, on the other hand, came back to biking this past August, after 25 years away from it, to see if she still could.
“As my balance is still good and I still have strength in my legs,” she says, “I thought that I would give it a try. I used my 15-year-old granddaughter’s bike on a fairly flat road in front of my daughter’s [house], with my daughter keeping careful watch and I did it!”
Carol rode most of her kilometres for the tour (102) on that road in front of her daughter’s place on Galiano Island, back and forth three-and-a-half times a day to get 5K. Then, the last week of the tour, she took the morning ferry to Swartz Bay with her bike and rode 12K to Sidney and back as a final challenge.
After meeting and chatting with both Janet and Carol, I discovered that their similarities far outweigh their differences. Both are positive, thoughtful, high-energy people who embrace life and take calculated risks as necessary in order to do that. (Carol said if she fell off her bike, she would just consider it a bone density test!) Both learned early on that being active and fit made them feel better. That is what gets both Janet and Carol out the door regularly: not improved health, not calorie-burning, but that feeling they get from being outside and being active.
The life histories of these two remarkable octogenarians, with recognition that this is a very small sample, lead me to count down my Top Four “must-have” Factors. This should allow you, along with some self-awareness, to determine how likely it is you will still be riding your bike in your mid-80s. It would be wonderful to hear from others who might help flesh out this list.
No. 4 – GOOD GENES / ACTIVE LIVES (Nature and Nurture)
Though neither of these women were parented by athletes, it is clear their muscles, bones, joints and organs must all be in better-than-average condition not to have broken down in some way. Janet danced and played tennis from a young age, and hiked and cycled a lot since retirement, living in Metchosin and now Sidney.
Carol played baseball and volleyball in high school and was on the volleyball and swim teams at McGill University. She used a bicycle as her main means of transport for seven years of her adult life when she had no car. Now she walks the trails on Galiano and does Iyengar yoga.
No. 3 – LUCK
Again, although we have no proof of luck interfering in their lives in one way or another, it is true that neither of them has been brought up short by injury or accident of any kind. Carol learned to ride a motorcycle at the age of 60 and rode a Honda 250 from Ottawa to Galiano Island without a hitch. Janet did break her hip recently… That’s where No. 2 comes in.
No. 2 – PLUCK
And this seems to be a characteristic that has been present since these two women were very young. Janet moved to Uganda in her 20s for her husband Brom’s job, “way out in the bush” with a toddler and an infant. Brom died when Janet was just 70, and she managed to embrace a full life as a senior without him.
Carol worked at the YWCA in Calcutta, India for seven years. Not long after arriving, she was asked to take a group of young women trekking in the Himalayas. She knew very little about trekking or camping and nothing at all about the Himalayas but said yes and managed it. They started their trek out of Darjeeling and saw some beautiful parts of the Himalayas on the Indian side. One morning, the clouds cleared, and they could see Mt. Everest. “Three of us went a little farther to where we could see the view,” she says. There was quite possibly some LUCK involved in this one, too. It appears that the four factors must all be present, and that they interact in some useful ways.
And the most important factor for leading an active physical life well into your 80s:
No. 1 – ENDORPHINS
Especially if a person learns early on in their long life that vigorous activity is a great way to stay mentally and emotionally well, and physically fit, this addiction will persist and thrive. By the time you are 80, you know very well how much better you will feel after a walk or a bike ride or a good swim, and that knowledge is enough to keep you doing it, over and over and over, forever if possible!
Bonus: No. 5, still under investigation, is STRICTLY HEALTHY EATING HABITS. Janet has these – she wouldn’t let a chocolate bar or a bag of chips anywhere near her. But Carol doesn’t, although she did own a health food store in Huntsville, Ontario for a while in the late 1980s. More data is needed.
What did I learn from these two cyclists? I could eat a little healthier, drink more water, and try things I’m afraid of more often. But the strongest message echoes something my track coach told me in my teens: “don’t ever quit”; and a quote from Confucius that I love to share with my 94-year-old Scorpio mother: “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
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Laurie Wilson is a retired educator and lifelong learner who still likes to make a difference as much as possible. She cycles regularly with her bubble of four, part of a much larger group of strong, inspiring women who cycle and fundraise for the Stephen Lewis Foundation through Victoria Grandmothers for Africa. This year, their traditional tour pivoted because of COVID-19 to become an individualized four-week collection of 28,000 km by 67 women devoted to the cause of helping African grandmothers raising their AIDS-orphaned grandchildren. They raised a record-breaking $143,000 and counting at the time of publication.
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A really informative and supremely interesting article. Well written Laurie. I would love to meet these ladies!