Mid-life crises don’t always arrive in the shape of a sports car. Tom Vanderbilt’s involved untold hours in the saddle and some very expensive cycling jerseys
t was age catching up with me that got me into cycling. Or rather, it was age overtaking me, speeding ahead and leaving me in the dust.
In the spring of 2010, I found myself on a 60-mile (97km) ride from the leafy New York suburb of Pound Ridge to Manhattan, with a “super commuter” in his mid-50s, whom I was profiling for a story on how cyclists and drivers get along (or don’t) on the roads. I was a casual cyclist then, and showed up on a “hybrid” bike with flat pedals and trainers. My companion, on a road bike with clip-in pedals, tried to hide his apprehension behind a smile. “Oh, you didn’t bring any water?” he asked. I fancied myself fit, but this man, some ten years my senior, kept disappearing down the road. What I had envisioned as an easy-going romp through the countryside became a teeth-grinding fight to hang on.
One expects a midlife crisis to be rooted in the reversal of chronology – trying to act again like one’s younger self; feeling the challenge from a brash upstart at work; eyeing some fetching, vernal oblivious-to-you creature on the subway. My existential wake-up call came from the other direction: a man with a greying beard who was eligible for membership of the American Association of Retired Persons. I had come to a fork in the road: either I could project from my present self a decade of slow decay; or, in ten years’ time, I could be like that man, now.
I got into the saddle. I bought a proper road bike and set out learning how to ride it properly – how to pause at traffic lights without “unclipping”; how to ride calmly inches from someone’s wheel at 30mph; how to pedal consistently through corners. There were vast hills to climb, figuratively and otherwise. On an early outing with sensei Matt Seaton (author of “The Escape Artist”, a cycling memoir), I was forced off the bike three-quarters of the way up a popular climb just outside Manhattan. He consoled me, saying that not only would I someday easily ascend in one go, I would – by my own volition! – spend my Saturday mornings riding up and down it multiple times. As ever, age kept haunting me: at my first time trial, I finished behind a friend who was almost 70.
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-long-and-winding-road
