This year five friends and I tried to repeat a two-day cycling tour some of us had attempted a few years ago: the Guelph to Goderich rail trail, which is just short of about 150km of gravel path through scenic rural Ontario.
The first time, it was my first multi-day cycling tour ever, and I didn’t even own my own gear. We’d unknowingly scheduled the original ride during a derecho storm, so we made it most of the way until the rain, the cold, and the trail that had turned to a sandy stream made the ride not fun anymore. After getting 2/3rds to Goderich, we stopped at a brewery in a small town called Blyth and called it a day.
This time, the rain and the cold were back, fortunately only during the second day. But with the dramatic turn in weather from the first sunny day, so once again we found ourselves soaked, muddy, and at the brewery, warming up with a beverage and deciding to end the ride there.
In the car on the way home, I thought about what it means to progress in a sport or exercise activity. Typically, to me it has meant faster times, more goals, or better scores. Really, though, the goal posts are always moving as we age. The same journey gets harder over time, even with more experience and better gear. Not even considering an adjustment for age, we chose not to feel bad that we didn’t finish at Goderich but good that we got as far as we did. As my friend Lisa said with a smile, “I’m confident there weren’t many 60 year olds out doing as much as I did today.”
Progress was being able to get the same thing done even after a few years of creaky bones, knee problems, weight gain. Fun and accomplishment were our goals. As I enter mid-life, that kind of relative thinking gives me a new and better way to measure my own success, one that acknowledges what I can’t control and focuses on what I can (like chasing joy rather than results).
For long-time readers, this blog is itself a testament to this kind of context-based thinking about fitness and aging. As we write, over the yesrs, what is maturing along with our bodies is our sense of what progress means. We can give ourselves permission to move at a pace that reflects the time and space we’re in, rather than set ourselves up to fail with ever-higher expectations that don’t appreciate where we really are.
The Guelph to Goderich rail trail line is referred to fondly around here as the “G2G.” Now that we’ve made it as far as Blyth, twice, it’s now sort of a new tradition for us, our “G2B.” And if we can get even that far again in a few years, rain and/or shine, we’ll all be happy with that.
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