Looking Back Over 50 Episodes

Tom Butler: 0:04

This is the Cycling Over 60 Podcast, season two, episode 31,. Looking back, over 50 episodes and I'm your host, Tom Butler. Welcome to the podcast. I am thrilled that I have made it to 50 episodes. When I started this journey, I wasn't sure how long I would be producing new episodes, but I just keep finding interesting subjects to explore and people to talk with, so I've kept it up. Thank you for being a part of it.

Tom Butler: 0:40

I did the Chili Hilly ride last Sunday and it was a blast. If you don't know, it is a 33 mile ride and, as the name implies, it is hilly. There is 2,173 feet of climbing stretched out throughout the ride. We felt like we were either climbing or coasting the whole time, but the big deal for me was that I rode up every hill. I was watching my heart rate the whole time, but I never got to the place where I had to stop and let my heart rate recover. That was awesome. I guess the training paid off and, more importantly, I think I'm demonstrating that I am not done building muscle at 61 years old.

Tom Butler: 1:21

I mentioned last week that my daughter McKenna joined us on the ride and she did incredible. She wouldn't say that, but she did really well. First of all, she only had about 40 miles of riding before she took on the Chili Hilly. She did have to walk up a few hills. However, she had a lot of company walking those hills. One of the impressive things is that I noticed on, I think, the second hill that she wasn't in the lowest gear. Come to find out, her bike wouldn't shift into the lowest gear, so she pounded out several hills using more strength than she would have if her bike had been adjusted correctly. Fortunately, one of the great support riders from Cascade Bicycle Club came by and we asked if he could adjust a derailleur and he did. Even though it wasn't a perfect adjustment, it got us to the rest stop where some mechanics from REI got it dialed in perfectly. We hit the 20 mile mark and I knew McKenna was tired At that point. She had the option to take a shortcut and bypass the final hills, but she kept going and, despite the struggle, she finished. That was as fun for me as any of the success I've had on a ride. Now it is on to the next challenge, for me and also for McKenna, and hopefully she will have a steady amount of training rides in the future To celebrate making it to 50 episodes and very close to one year since launching the podcast, I decided to revisit some of my favorite moments.

Tom Butler: 2:52

Here we go. When I started this journey to complete the 206 mile Seattle Portland bike ride at 60 years old, I wasn't at all sure it was a good idea to push myself as hard as I would need to in order to accomplish the STP. So on March 31, I brought on Dr Kim Nolton, a preventive medicine specialist and director of the Loma Linda University Dracen Center, to give her opinion. The Dracen Center is an exercise facility that serves the needs of older people in one of the blue zones. These are areas known for longevity. Here is how she answered the question how old is 60?

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 3:32

Well, that's a loaded question because everyone is different. It really depends on your genetic makeup, it depends on your lifestyle, it depends on your environment, but there's a lot of things that you can do to help 60 be like the new 40. Like they're saying, the 30 is the new 20 and all that kind of stuff.

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 3:54

You can make it the new 40. And so some of the things that you can do. Basically a lot has to do with activity and mobility. So as a physical therapist, I see I used to see I don't work as a physical therapist right now, but a lot of things that made a person seem older is their mobility. Can they move efficiently? Are they able to move at all? So regular exercise is extremely important, just getting activity, not necessarily having to go to the gym and working out heavy weights and that sort of thing. It's basically moving every single day and the studies do show like if you've been sitting for an hour trying to move, at least four minutes every hour.

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 4:38

So if you're, sitting down and you're either watching TV or a class or something. At least four minutes. Get up and move. Just keep active.

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 4:47

The next thing is definitely diet. What do you eat? Do you eat fast food all the time? Do you eat sugar that's a big one or do you eat more plant-based? Do you eat a variety of vegetables and fruits? Do you eat the different colors, or is it always tan? Is the food you have in your plate all one color?

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 5:07

The next thing is also stress management. That is huge. That's coming up now.

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 5:12

A lot of mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and stress, has a lot to do with it and just learning different tools that you can do to help decrease your stress. Another thing is sleep. Are you getting enough sleep? And I know people that start in the 50 and over their sleep habits start changing Maybe women going through menopause, those kind of things. It's hard for them to stay asleep, but there's a lot of things that you can do that can help you as far as staying asleep and getting to sleep faster.

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 5:51

But also another thing for staying healthy and also longevity is to have a good social connection with people around you. Do you have a group of five that you know will have your back, that you can talk to. Just think about it who are your best friends that you can just release some of your troubles to and just have fun times with? If you don't have a group like that, then they do suggest trying to get out there and form social groups that you can be a part of, because that is very important, like in the blue zone. The blue zone of research, even over nutrition and exercise, is social connections and purpose of life.

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 6:37

So if you don't have, that, even though you could be healthy, but if you don't have any purpose in life and social connections, that can decrease your longevity.

Tom Butler: 6:45

It sounds like a lot of choices that you make in your 40s and 50s really determine that question of how old is 60. Is that fair?

Kim Knowlton DrPH: 6:57

Yes, I mean because it takes a while to build habits. And the thing is, if you start, the younger you start and the longer you can sustain healthy habits, the better. I mean. But let's say you're 60 and you haven't. It's never too late to start.

Tom Butler: 7:14

Later on I also heard from Dr Patrick Hogan, an accomplished neurologist and someone who has stayed very fit later in life, on the December 8th episode a lifelong medicine to maintain vitality. He talked about what he sees as the impact of an active lifestyle. Consequences of not making change can be really significant, and yet that's not enough to produce change.

Patrick Hogan DO: 7:37

That's right. I mean, it's an obvious example of smoking. People know Obviously every person knows that this has potentially fatal what they're doing, but yet that addiction drives them on To be uncomfortable to exercise is such a barrier that they just never make that step, even despite just what you're saying, knowing that this could make a huge difference in their lifestyle. That whole idea that we can talk about how the American medicine would be better if people were more fit.

Tom Butler: 8:13

I think that's a great segue to this question, which is how big of a difference do you think an active lifestyle makes for the patients that you treat?

Patrick Hogan DO: 8:23

Yes, and we know it certainly does. It's a good statistic that they feel that there should be about a 40% less Alzheimer's incidence if people will maintain inadequate exercise, inadequate lifestyle. It would be about 45% less people with Alzheimer's if the American public were, in general, more active and falling. That's huge. That's millions of people, countless dollars in our society that could be prevented or reversed if people were in a positive lifestyle. It's a huge factor and not just for the brain but obviously for other metabolic diseases and heart diseases.

Patrick Hogan DO: 9:07

I use an analogy sometimes, or metaphor sometimes about aging, is that it's like we're paddling in a river. In that river there's going to be some small waterfalls along the way. They're just inevitable. That's just aging. If we paddle upstream and keep active we can prevent those from happening. Eventually there's going to be a huge waterfall that's going to take us out, but eventually we can prevent that from happening by paddling upstream. For most people they just kind of follow the stream over the waterfalls. Once you go over one you can't get back again. That's the whole idea For exercise, for example.

Patrick Hogan DO: 9:46

Once you stop it's really hard to get back to it. It's just something about human nature. The whole key is never to stop and just maintain. But there's something that we call in American medicine the sedentary death syndrome. It's really essentially a slow suicide by people being in a sedentary lifestyle, because it leads to deterioration of our body. All aspects of our body will deteriorate if we're not in an active lifestyle and eating or not doing things that are negative to our system, with the wrong foods and wrong metabolism. There's things that you can do, but you have to take the effort to do it.

Tom Butler: 10:31

Discussions like these gave me confidence that my body was going to be able to handle the stress of training for the STP. But I wondered how to gauge my intensity. Fortunately, dr Adrian McNamara is a friend who is a professor and an expert in exercise physiology. She gave me some awesome advice during our May 5th discussion. Maybe not zone training.

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 10:52

Zone two again. Yes, in layman's terms it is based on max heart rate. But what I want to point out about zone two and physiologically what it is, or in research terms of what it is, it uses different terminology. So in the research, or what we say, is in the literature, we use the terms polarized training. So what that means is that usually what they use are three zones versus this five zone model, and the three zones actually have to do what's called your ventilatory thresholds and not necessarily your heart rates. The zones are below your first ventilatory threshold, so that's basically before you really start to have a big increase in breathing right, or basically where you can continue to breathe through your nose comfortably.

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 11:49

Then zone two, which is what we would consider kind of like that moderate exercise, is between your first and second ventilatory threshold, which is oftentimes what we would consider your lactate threshold, which we talk about maybe in a little bit, and then above your second ventilatory threshold, which is also what we consider what used to be called your anaerobic threshold. So that's really kind of what the research says you would use for this polarized type training, because heart rate can be variable. It's a variable. There are things that influence heart rate, besides just your age. I just kind of want you, as we continue to talk about zone two, I want your listeners to keep this in mind that we'll talk a lot about heart rate, but there actually are more precise ways to look at this concept, because really, what it boils down to is it has to do with how your body's ability to clear lactic acid, which then has an influence on our breathing rate, because those two concepts are linked.

Tom Butler: 13:06

Okay.

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 13:07

And we use heart rates as proxies of that, because we don't walk around carrying lactate meters with us and using them as we are exercising on a daily basis.

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 13:17

So yes, zone two is usually calculated as about 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. That's usually the working numbers that we go with, although there really isn't even a set consensus of that and sometimes people throw around different numbers for that as well. But that's kind of the going rate that people use for that is 60, 70% of your max heart rate. It's kind of more of a rule of thumb.

Tom Butler: 13:41

Gotcha. Well, this is awesome. This is exactly why I wanted to talk to you about this, because this is really, really interesting to me. When I reached out to my doctor and I got this, this recommendation from him, I got a heart rate monitor and started writing with it and 96 beats per minute. I couldn't I probably have to walk my bike to stay at 96 beats per minute and even at 120 beats per minute. You know I'm incredibly slow, and so this is what I told him from my experience with having the heart rate monitor. I said that 130 to 140 beats per minute I feel very comfortable.

Tom Butler: 14:22

You know, there was this old thing of exercise in a way where you could speak easily but you couldn't sing. You know that was a rough idea about staying in a in a good intensity for exercise, and so 130, 140 beats per minute I can sing. In fact, I was, you know, on the trail singing, proving to myself that you know that that was fine. Now, at 150 beats per minute, that's a different matter. I can definitely feel like I'm getting into a different intensity. I laid that out to him and he agreed that I could focus on 130 to 140 beats per minute and unfortunately, that makes me very slow and any headwind or any elevation I have to really slow down. I'm just wondering this how I feel criteria of determining intensity what do you think about that? Do you think that's a decent way of determining things?

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 15:19

Yeah, so this goes back to exactly what I was saying about heart rate and how it's an estimate of the concept.

Tom Butler: 15:27

Gotcha.

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 15:28

Where it's really based on ventilatory thresholds and lactate clearance. What has always been used by exercise scientists forever to determine moderate intensity is the talk test. That's always what we say is the quick and dirty way to determine moderate intensity is what you just said. The talk test is you to be, able to talk comfortably, but not tell your life story or sing out loud.

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 15:54

That was always how you determine what was moderate intensity. And so for now, with this zone two training type, moderate intensity seems to be the boogeyman. Everyone wants to avoid moderate intensity, so you want to be exercising a little bit lower. So it seems like people want to be at a rate where you can exercise for long periods of time so you should be able to talk comfortably, tell that life story and sing. So if you can bike at a rate where you can sing, that means you are below your first ventilatory threshold and you should be in that zone too.

Tom Butler: 16:30

Okay, excellent.

Adrienne McNamara PhD: 16:33

You know, I think again the kind of the key point here is sometimes it's really easy to focus a lot on our metrics. A metrics can be really good for training, but sometimes we forget to listen to our bodies, and our bodies are really smart. Our bodies know, what to tell us sometimes they're the best computers we have to tell us where we need to be.

Tom Butler: 16:54

There was also a question about what to eat to make sure I was fueling my body well, so I turned to Heather Resick, who has taught a lot of people how to cook really healthy plant-based meals. She gave me some tips on meal choices for the May 18th episode Vegan Cycling Fuel.

Heather Reseck RDN: 17:10

And I never tell people you can't eat meat. I just help them to focus on eating more plant-based foods, and for most people it's a gradual process. So there are people that choose to suddenly drop off the meat and the dairy products and the eggs for various reasons and do it cold tofu, as we would say. Most people find a gradual approach to be a lot more sustainable. So starting with Meatless Monday and just eating all meatless meals on one day is a place to start, and just looking for more plant-based foods to incorporate in your diet Black bean burrito or a burrito bowl with lots of veggies and brown rice and it is a good place to start.

Tom Butler: 18:04

Let's talk a little bit about kind of what I'm needing from a meal planning perspective. So there's some examples of food intake that are part of this journey that I'm on. I want to build muscle and I want to have enough energy to go on two-hour rides several times per week. I've got about eight weeks now. Every pound that I would lose between now and the SDP is one less pound that I have to carry 206 miles. So I'm wondering what are some vegan options for me that would help me as I'm in this training phase, Because what are some good concepts to keep in mind as I'm training to put me in the best place to get stronger, to get more prepared for the SDP?

Heather Reseck RDN: 18:55

One of the key concepts to keep in mind is not only what you're eating, but when you're eating, and I find that people do better if they are front loading their calories. By that I mean eating a good hearty breakfast, a good substantial lunch, and then eating light in the evening, because our metabolism slows down in the evening and so that by just doing that with your eating can help you to become a little more lean, to also improve your insulin resistance or decrease your insulin resistance, so you're getting the most benefit from your calories and from all those good carbohydrates and fats that you're eating in your diet, as well as the protein.

Tom Butler: 19:49

You talked about the. There's this myth that you need to have animal protein in order to really build muscle. Do you think plant-based protein is actually better than animal protein?

Heather Reseck RDN: 20:03

Yes, I do believe that plant-based protein is better than animal protein. It's much easier on the kidneys to process. We used to believe that plant-based proteins were incomplete, that you had to carefully combine foods at one meal in order to get a complete protein. But now we understand that the body has an amino acid pool where it takes those amino acids the building blocks of protein, from each of the foods that you eat. It pulls them together and combines them to make the proteins that your body needs for all the different body processes. So, as long as you're eating a wide variety of food within a 24-hour period, you're able to get all the protein that you need. An athlete will definitely need to have more protein than a sedentary person, but it's still very possible and very easy to meet all of those protein needs on a plant-based diet.

Tom Butler: 21:09

Are there some plant-based foods that are complete proteins?

Heather Reseck RDN: 21:13

Well, it depends on your definition of a complete protein. Essentially, all plant foods have all of the amino acids in them. However, the amounts of those different amino acids that are essential for health will vary considerably, and that's where combining, say, beans and grains, complement each other and provides a more complete protein. But foods such as quinoa, because it's a seed, tends to have a higher profile of protein in it and is considered an example of a complete protein plant food.

Tom Butler: 21:58

Throughout the last year I've been so honored by the experts that have taken the time to be on the podcast. But the most enjoyable part of the podcast has been having conversations with others who are using cycling to regain their health. One of the best examples of this is Mike Baltillera. He shared his cycling metamorphosis on May 12. This starts out with some pretty tough talk from his physician.

Mike Baltierra: 22:19

She didn't sugarcoat it, she's just like I'm tired of messing around and she was pretty brutal. She's like listen listen fatty. I hate to use that word, but she's like listen fatty. When I first met you, you were about 300, 310 pounds. Now you're 370. You're a full-blown type 2 diabetic. Your A1C is 8.5. It should be down to the fives. Liver counts are through the roof. Triglyceride numbers are just all over the place.

Mike Baltierra: 22:46

My dad used to practice medicine, and I talked to him quite often about okay, if I don't do anything about this, what should I expect? And he just reaffirmed, or re-he just basically told me the same thing. She told me You'll have problems with your eyesight, you could potentially have renal failure, you'll have neuropathy due to blood sugar causing nerve damage. I mean, there's just, you'll just be miserable, you're going to live a slow, painful death, and that's not something that sounded very appealing to me. So I decided, like you know, I better take care of this sooner than later. And one thing I knew for sure, though I didn't want to be on medication for ever either. Okay, so where I live at, you have to basically climb up a little hill to get out of my neighborhood.

Mike Baltierra: 23:32

So my son and I. He hadn't ridden in a while either and he had a bike that was given to him from a friend so he can, because he was working at a Jersey Mike's Sandwich Shop, which is probably about a mile or two away from our house, and to give him a little bit of sense of freedom. You know, he had a bicycle, so it wasn't the greatest, it was one you can get off the rack of Walmart. It was good enough. So I had my Roscoe, my son, zach, had whatever bike he had and we literally rode like a mile. So I can get the feel of what it's like to ride a bike again. And we get back home and I'm just like, dude, this is terrible. I don't see anybody who could find this fun.

Mike Baltierra: 24:12

And then later on I had to tell myself, like you know, it's not a matter of it not being fun, I was just seriously out of shape. And you don't realize how out of shape you are until it's you versus yourself and you'd have to rely on yourself to get back home and doing an exercise like running or biking or hiking, right, and it was pretty demoralizing. But then it was also that was also another rude wake up call like, okay, dude, you got to. You got to get in gear. Man, it didn't come right away.

Mike Baltierra: 24:43

It's, like I said, because of being out of shape and because of my weight and the fact that I wasn't very active leading up to, I'm guessing me, about a six month window before I bought my first bike. Yeah, it probably took me a good six to eight weeks to finally get into a groove. I was like okay, I'm really getting into what this is doing for me because I'm I was sleeping better. I was feeling better. I was slowly losing weight. I could walk up the stairs without losing my breath. I can reach down and tie my shoes out. I was losing my breath because the big old beer belly wasn't there anymore. So I told my doctor I don't plan on being on meds a year from now. So I'm like I'll be off my meds in a year.

Mike Baltierra: 25:24

She's like no one ever does that and I'm like, well, I'm not everyone. So she's like, okay, I'll just take, I'll just take that with a grain of salt, we'll see if you really because you said you're going to lose weight before and you haven't done it yet. I'm like, yeah, you're right. It was probably about I'm guessing about the 12 week mark. Maybe you know, bring about three and a half months that I started to notice that my clothes were fitting bigger. I was sleeping a lot better, I wasn't as hungry anymore because I'll take that back. I wasn't hungry for the crappy foods I wasn't Jonesy for, like sugars and stuff, but I was really getting into the better carbohydrates and the fats to help fuel the rides.

Tom Butler: 26:00

I'm sure you left a big impression, made a big impression on your doctor.

Mike Baltierra: 26:04

Oh yeah, after nine months she was like dude, I didn't think you would do it. You're no longer a type to you, you can get off your meds now. So, and it's been it's been almost three years, I mean two and a half years actually, since no, I take that back. So this November will be two years since being taken off my meds. All together, it's been almost three years since being told I was a diabetic, and the doctor I see now she's. Every time I see her she's always super stoked that I keep the weight off. The numbers are still looking good because she says the number one thing that she has an issue with is people who are complacent, meaning that they get told their diagnosis and they're cool with just taking meds for the rest of their life and not doing anything about it or people who do something about it. Then they reach their goals and then they back off and then they get all back to where they were before.

Tom Butler: 26:50

A similar conversation happened on the December 1st episode with Judson Scott. From the beginning, Judson was sending me encouraging messages and I was really glad to have him come on and talk about how the bike helped him make life-saving changes.

Judson Scott: 27:03

I think it was probably the summer of 2018, somewhere around there I just started losing weight and I should not have been. Not the way I was. I was moving and not the way I was eating. Losing weight was not what I was supposed to be doing. So I thought, ok, I better go to a doctor. I probably got some cancer, I'm probably going to be dead in six months or whatever Turned out to be diabetes, you know, and I just took that wake up call.

Judson Scott: 27:24

I started swimming five days a week or six, and just I completely cut out all sugar, all carbs, all alcohol, just cold turkey done, and the combination got me down to 200, which was great.

Judson Scott: 27:39

Then the pandemic hit and all the pools closed. I'm suddenly I'm back up 20 pounds and it's like, ok, I got to find something to do and there was a bike in my garage that I had used to commute to UDUB for a couple of years and I pulled it out and I think I started with maybe three miles. I think that was in that like wiped me out. I was like, oh my gosh, this is really hard and I just did it every day. So now for me, a 20 mile ride is kind of my daily average. This year I crossed 7000 miles for the year and it'll be a push to make, push to get it up to eight by the end of December, but that's in the back of my head. That's a new goal, but I had set seven as the goal for the year, so anyway, so the bike really kind of saved my life actually.

Tom Butler: 28:26

That's fantastic. Your diabetes was at the place where you're losing weight. That's a pretty serious condition.

Judson Scott: 28:34

Yeah, I know, OK, A1C is supposed to be like what? Five point six or something.

Tom Butler: 28:39

Yeah six.

Judson Scott: 28:40

So my A1C had gotten up to 10. And I know my body was. It was doing anything it could to like get rid of sugar out of my body because it couldn't. It couldn't handle it Right. So I was constantly having to go urinate because it was just like purging the diet and exercise got me down to six.

Tom Butler: 29:00

That's awesome.

Judson Scott: 29:01

So, yeah, no, it was. It was a huge drop and just my last doctor's appointment I was. I had bumped up to seven because I haven't been as good lately and I'm going to have to grab onto the diet again because I haven't cycled less. I've just been not as careful.

Tom Butler: 29:15

So the good news, it sounds like, for you is that you did not have to take insulin. Nope, did not. That's a fantastic thing, because that then opens up a whole another layer of of difficulties. You talked about going three miles and feeling pretty wiped out after three miles. There's an element of having to stick with it. You know, I think for me there's this thing of like the memory you know you were biking when you went to YouTube and so the memory about what it felt like to bike at 20 or whatever you were at that time. In comparison, it felt to me, and it still does somewhat feel that way to me. It's like really discouraging to have that contrast.

Judson Scott: 30:01

Right, I hear that, and of course there have been a few times when I've not been able to bike for a week because of snow on the roads or whatever. And you know, even just after a week my legs feel heavy. So you know, like having taken a big gap. Well, and of course I did take a big gap from when I was commuting to recently, but I think that gun to my head of diabetes, like that really like, was a big motivator.

Tom Butler: 30:26

I particularly like stories of people who overcome major challenges. Anita Elder is one of those people, and she shared her journey on the January 4th episode that highlighted her incredible perseverance.

Anita Elder: 30:38

Sure. So I was inactive for probably a couple of decades due to bone on bone knees. I had a lot of sports injuries while I was in the Air Force. The worst one was when I tore my ACL playing racquetball and they never fixed it, they never did anything about it. They just kept saying, oh, you just sprained it and from there it just kept getting worse. And then I can't remember what I was doing. And then I tore the meniscus in the other knee and and just it just kept getting worse. And as it got worse I kept getting heavier, which you know. Just it was kind of like a vicious circle. I couldn't get a lot of exercise.

Anita Elder: 31:21

I've always loved the outdoors, you know growing up poor and you know spending all my time outdoors, and I've done a lot of camping, a lot of hiking. You know. I thought to myself I could either sit and wallow in my pain or I could get outside and enjoy what I could. So most of the time I would drive to a location, walk us around as much as I could, taking photos, which is another hobby that I like to do. So I had both my knees replaced six years ago and to do that I had to jump through hoops. First I had to be over 55 and I had to get my weight down some as close to 200 as I could, which was hard when you're in pain. I was on insulin, which also makes it very hard to lose weight, and then the final thing was getting my insulin under control. So I really pushed on that.

Anita Elder: 32:14

I guess it was 2016,. That late spring, early summer, I really did a push and finally met the criteria. I was well over 55 at that point, got my knees replaced and once that was done, I knew it was my chance to improve my health. Two months after my second knee was replaced, I hiked up the rattlesnake ledge, which you know it was a pretty big deal for me. I hadn't done that in a very, very long time. And then, five months after that second knee, I did an eight mile hike at Mount Reneer, which that had a lot of elevation. So, bit by bit, I got healthier and more active. Last February I was taken off insulin. That made it even easier to lose weight and I've lost about 100 pounds since my knees have been replaced. Today I started my final push to lose that last 35, 40 pounds to reach my goal weight.

Anita Elder: 33:16

So it's just trying to keep a positive attitude and you know, I see a lot of people in chronic pain which I was and they give up. I wanted to see too much of this world and do too much to just give up.

Tom Butler: 33:31

Anita also talked about something that I felt was very important, about how she found the Cascade Bicycle Club community that really embraced her.

Anita Elder: 33:40

Now I knew about Cascade because I had done some design work for them on a brochure, like probably around 2008. So you know, I reached out to them and joined a couple of the free group rides, which there weren't that many that first year of COVID, but I did go and I was the only one on an e-bike at the time and they were just so welcoming and supportive of me. You know, I was heavier than what I am now and, like I said, I was on a cargo e-bike trying to ride with them and it didn't have gears. But I kept up and just started to get more and more involved. Now, when I go on free group rides with Cascade, there's so many e-bikes these days, so I'm really glad that they support that community as well.

Anita Elder: 34:28

My first event with Cascade I did the Lake Shalantor, and that was on the cargo e-bike and I didn't look like a lot of the other riders on that, but I didn't let it stop me. I didn't care if I was too slow, I just wanted to have fun. Nobody gave me any crap about being like I was, you know, riding with them. Everybody was great and not everybody was a Cascade member. There was people from out of state too. So they're just that nice feeling of being accepted for who I was just gave me more encouragement to do more and more with Cascade and other bike clubs around the area. So everybody in the bike community has been so supportive and encouraging and because of that feeling I'm now a long distance bike rider, which I never thought I would ever say that.

Anita Elder: 35:23

I never thought I'd ride a hundred miles at my age. But there I go To my STP this past year that's back to back hundred miles. So these days I try to be an inspiration for others. A lot of people if they see me on an e-bike, if they're out walking on a trail and they'll ask me questions and I answer or or I tell other people that I see riding e-bikes. I'm like you know, join one of the bike clubs because they are welcoming and you'll be surprised at how far you'll start riding.

Tom Butler: 35:54

I have learned a ton about bikes over the year. Potentially the most valuable thing I learned was what a huge difference a good bike fit makes. On the June 2nd episode, my son-in-law, garen, talked about his fitting, as we discovered that none of our bikes fit.

Garren Miler: 36:10

So I think to me there were kind of two major categories of adjustments that both felt very different. There was the lower body adjustments the pedals and the seat and then there was the upper body adjustments, which is primarily just the handlebars. Those two subsets were very different. With the lower body stuff it was all very subtle, kind of nitty gritty changes. Those kind of things where you would say, oh yeah, like you know, I put a couple millimeters of spacers on your pedals. Does that feel better? And it's almost like when you're at the eye doctor and they're like is A or B better? And you're like kind of splitting hairs. I mean, yeah, I guess it's better, you know. And it's those kind of things, especially with the lower body, where if your knee is not twisting on your stroke or you're able to be more in line with your pedals, then those kind of changes are going to add up. As we're riding, you know, 200 miles, my knees are going to think me by the end of it, but just sitting there on that exercise bike you don't really notice a big difference. You know he'll adjust something, you'll try it again, and it's like, yeah, that's marginally better, given the short duration of my ride on this trainer. But those kind of things are going to save your knees over not just high mileage rides but over years of riding a bike. Those are the kind of things that are really going to make a big difference.

Garren Miler: 37:12

But then, as soon as we got to the upper body, to the handlebar adjustments, that was just absolutely night and day. The big thing we did. We switched out the stem. I think we lost about a centimeter off of it. The specialized bikes apparently come with pretty long stems on them. I think even the longest it might have been like 110 millimeters, I think it came with. And so I knew from the moment I got on that bike that I was a little stretched out and I had no doubt about that. You know, commuting to work that I was stretched out and I hadn't really paid much attention to it because I knew I was going into this fitting. So I didn't want to mess with things beforehand, but shortening that step made a big difference.

Tom Butler: 37:43

I think that's an interesting thing is that I know that you felt like you needed to do some adjustment on that bike the moment that you bought it. If you hadn't got to the discounted bike fitting then you probably would have just kind of tweaked that yourself, but you wouldn't have done that with the level of precision that he was doing. Is that a? Is that a fair comment to me?

Garren Miler: 38:04

Yes, absolutely. And to give you a really specific example of that, I knew I was stretched out on the bars. What I didn't know was by how much or by how much I should try to be under stretching myself. So what I mean by that is I felt like I was reaching too far. It was putting straight on my back and my shoulders and I could tell.

Garren Miler: 38:20

But what Russ said was that the goal is to be somewhere around a 90 degree angle between your torso and your arms, as they're found of you, and so when you put your hands on the bar in your most comfortable riding position, you should be at about 90 degrees between your arms and your torso. I would not have known what that target was to shoot for. I could have definitely switched out the stem, I could have, I could have rolled the bars around and done all that kind of stuff and I would have maybe felt it out. But it would have taken a lot of trial and error and even then I wouldn't have known what I was trying to achieve and I wouldn't have known if maybe I'd gone too far and made the bike too comfortable at the expense of performance or at the expense of durability or longevity of my ride, et cetera. That to me, was was really nice to have those, those targets.

Tom Butler: 39:01

With knowledge about how to eat and training behind me. On July 15th I started the ride. That was my goal for season one. The next week I did an episode on how the ride went.

Jesse Ferguson: 39:15

Okay, we crossed the giant Portland bridge very steep hill coming up there. I don't know if this audio is going to work. You need a hind wind here tailwinds. It was a very steep hill coming up the Portland bridge but it wasn't a long hill Cross that. Now. Tom and Garen are in front of me and we are full of adrenaline because we're just a couple of miles from the finish line. I'm excited for Tom because he's been on this quest to do this. Garen keeps shaking his hands, obviously in pain, and we're all staying hydrated, having enough potassium and electrolytes so that we don't have any cramping, which we haven't. We've done really good with cramping Thanks to all the education that we have been getting. It's a very nice ride here in Portland. We made it. Don't go too far. We have wives to go back to, but I know that they want us to race by through the finish line. Tom, did you make it? We made it.

Tom Butler: 41:10

We absolutely made it, we did, we are in Portland, that is the goal and I feel good. I'm taking my bag coming off.

Jesse Ferguson: 41:18

I'm so full of adrenaline right now I don't know what my body feels like.

Tom Butler: 41:22

You took off. You took off, like there, with a few blocks. It's like, okay, jesse's going to pump it up to 20 miles an hour 30 if possible.

Jesse Ferguson: 41:34

There you go. That's a high five. That's a high five. One more, yes, three-way high five. Oh man, that was a good angle of perfection. That was really hard, it was hard.

Tom Butler: 41:49

I think the heat made it harder too. I think it would have been cool. It would have been much easier. You did it, good job.

Jesse Ferguson: 42:01

I'm so happy.

Tom Butler: 42:03

You did it yeah.

Tom Babin: 42:06

We are in Portland.

Tom Butler: 42:08

About the nine months of training. The person who did the most to help me make my goal was my wife, kelly. So on July 28th I brought her on to share what the experience of being with me on the SDP was like for her.

Kelly Butler: 42:21

Well, it was fun to be able to cheer you on. It was fun to be able to get the updates, the blow by blow as much as possible, about what was going on and how it was going for you. The community aspect of Garin and Jesse there with their wives our daughter McKenna and Jesse's wife Brenda we got to hang out together and then experience all of the interactions with you guys together. Not that we got to be on the whole ride, it was just meeting you morning, noon, night. Basically, to be involved in the whole journey like that was very fun. It was very fun to be able to experience the culmination of the previous year of preparation and to see it play out and then to experience the satisfaction of you guys doing a great job and going through some tough stuff.

Mike Baltierra: 43:06

Yeah.

Kelly Butler: 43:07

It was crazy. It was crazy and it was touch and go there for a little bit for you and to see you come through that made it even that much more meaningful.

Tom Butler: 43:17

That certainly was a big goal accomplished for me, but it wasn't the end of my cycling journey and I wanted to keep doing interviews, so I kept the podcast going Along the way. I got to speak to representatives from organizations that have made a huge impact on the cycling world. Rails to Trails is a prime example of an organization that has helped improve cycling for many, many people. On August 10th, brandy Horton, vp of Communications for Rails to Trails, talked about the impact the organization has had.

Brandi Horton: 43:49

Well, we can talk about it in actual technical terms and the numbers, which is one way to understand it. And that is when all of this started, in the mid-1980s, there were only a handful of multi-use trails in the country, all of them rail trails. At that point in time, I think no understanding of the potential, of the scope or the scale or how well received they'd be. Today, less than 40 years later, there's more than 40,000 miles of multi-use trails across the country. Every single state has a multi-use trail network in development that includes rail trails, that includes other types of very similar facilities. Rail trail is kind of the majority of that 40,000 mile multi-use trail network.

Brandi Horton: 44:34

But it all works together. They're all relatively flat, they're all accessible on foot, bike, other kind of human-powered ways of getting around. But that's a huge, just surge in growth in such a short amount of time. But when you think about the cultural implications, you think back to who rode bikes, how they rode bikes, where they rode bikes, who exercised, who walked, who had access to green space in their communities 50 years ago and who has that access now. It is vastly different. We still have a long way to go, but it's vastly different.

Brandi Horton: 45:13

There is now a demand for these spaces and an understanding that having walkable, bikeable communities is really a human right. We need spaces to move. We need spaces to be out in nature. Nature is all around us. We can't gatekeep these resources any longer. I think that our founders probably envisioned that there would be a national network of trails. That has been part of our mission from the very beginning. They thought about those 40,000 miles and they thought about they knew where the railroad network went and what if we could turn all of that into trail network? I don't know if they fully understood the cultural impact of what they were creating. I think that is one of the greatest gifts and legacies of this movement.

Tom Butler: 45:56

Adventure Cycling Association is an organization that has truly fostered the love of cycling in tons of people. Executive Director Jen O'Dell joined me on November 16th and I learned more about the association and how they have shaped adventure cycling.

Jennifer O'Dell: 46:11

I think people have been adventuring for years. People have also been riding bikes around the world since they were invented, whether they're with different cycling groups, for racing or just for fun. But I think what our founders did was being able to take that drive to experience the world to a completely different level, I think was very revolutionary at that point in time. They created this movement, this national movement that created paths and routes and ways for other people to follow behind them. I think that that foundation was very lasting. They've created a legacy and I would say that they really were pivotable and pivotal in making the industry what it is today and really kind of founding what we're now seeing emerging in a lot of places as the bikepacking movement. I think our founders were the original bikepackers. It's really exciting to see that come around again to another generation and see a whole new group of younger cyclists get excited about it. We're looking forward to continuing it for another 50 years, for the next generation as well.

Tom Butler: 47:30

Spending a lot of time on a bicycle made me really aware of the fact that roads are not bike friendly, but Bellingham, Washington, is a place that goes against the norm. I asked Joel Funt from the city of Bellingham to talk about why they are so bike friendly On the November 23rd episode. He talked about the bike and pedestrian plan that has made a difference there.

Joel Pfundt: 47:53

Yeah, I do think because of, like I said earlier, that timing of when it was just as a lot of these ideas around a more safer, all ages and abilities type of bike network, they weren't bleeding edge at that point, but they were still pretty new. It really was this emergence of these ideas from Europe that had really started to take root in the United States, but it really not expanded very far. I think when the plan was developed and these ideas were new, bellingham was very willing to innovate and be on the leading edge of those things and do some of these treatments that were still, at that point, pretty new bike boxes and green bike markings and those types of things. I think that that was an important piece. The public involvement around the plan was robust and they got a lot of people coming out to meetings and being that were involved in the plan. We have a pretty active advocacy biking advocacy community in the city and so they were involved.

Joel Pfundt: 49:09

Then really, one of the big things was prioritizing this list of infrastructure projects and then really being focused on let's look at these corridors where we've got extra vehicle capacity. We just don't need it or we've got assigned parking along the side of a corridor where nobody's parking, which basically means you've got lanes that are almost 20 feet wide in some cases. Let's put this valuable real curb to curb real estate to work and not have it just sit empty. Then we had wide streets that just had extra capacity to them. Once that was identified, then the city was like and now we're going to go after these and we've got a council and a mayor who are on board with us doing that. We've put the money and the design engineers and the consultants to work on that so that we could do those things pretty rapidly, because there's a lot of distractions. There's a lot of other projects.

Joel Pfundt: 50:07

I also think the other thing that has happened at the city is that they did this very comprehensive identification of all these different projects. They had this 10-year plan they wanted to do, but they were also very opportunistic in that we look at it really holistically, from the perspective of wow, if we're going to go out and do a major sewer project and we're going to tear up a street to put in a new sewer line, let's grab the map layer for the bike plan and see if we should be doing some bike stuff at the same time and not look at those things as two separate things, but look at it as a set of infrastructure where we can maybe, if we're doing this project, let's do this project and actually make the things even better for the community. We've been tried to be very opportunistic in leveraging our money so that it goes, and even our design resources for projects so that they go as far as they can go.

Tom Butler: 51:06

Tom Babin is an author and the creative mind behind the Shifter YouTube channel. I asked him to come on and talk about winter cycling on December 21st. Tom also gave some excellent insight on the difference between cycling-centric cities around the world and what we see in North America.

Tom Babin: 51:23

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I hadn't thought about this maybe since the book came out, but now that you're talking about it, there is definitely a rhythm to a city like Copenhagen or Amsterdam. Even coming from Paris that has implemented all this change in the last couple of years, I don't think their rhythm is quite there yet. I think they're getting there, but I think that rhythm they've done so much work so quickly, but there's still lots of connections that need to be made, like bike lanes in some areas just don't connect that smoothly to others. There isn't a complete network that could facilitate a rhythm like that too. It definitely takes some time. I'm sure Paris will get there and they're moving so quickly that it won't be long, but in North America it's definitely not coming.

Tom Babin: 52:04

I felt it most in Montreal. Montreal is 30 years ahead of any other North American city right now when it comes to bike lanes. I do think in some of the more dense neighborhoods in Montreal, where they've had bike lanes for 20 years or 30 years in some cases, and now they've just every year they improve the system a little bit more, they add a bit more length to the networks, they make connections, they're building new ones, they're rebuilding streets to make them more pedestrian and bike friendly. You're starting to feel that. I think you can see it. That rhythm also comes from the life on the street. Montreal in the summertime this year I think they've pedestrianized 10 streets this summertime. There's a vibe, their feeling in the streets and the culture of cycling just fits really nicely into that. I'm seeing good things happening in Vancouver. New York, of course, has made big strides. I'm hoping to make it to Seattle in the next year because I'd like to see what's happening there as well.

Tom Babin: 53:05

The problem, I think what we're seeing in North America, is that we don't see a lot of sustained growth. I think you get a city hall administration or a mayor who pushes it, we make some progress and then priorities change or government changes and then we lose it and then it's sort of piecemeal. To get to the point where Montreal is at, you need 25, 30 years of a plan that is implemented consistently and it's built and it works. I think you can really see the results. It's not rocket science. I think it can happen everywhere. We just need to prioritize it. I see bits and pieces here and there, but I haven't seen a real comprehensive push forward like I have anywhere outside of, say maybe Montreal or maybe less so in Vancouver.

Tom Butler: 53:49

Again. Those are some of my favorite moments from over the last year, but I certainly didn't have time to include all the great moments. Thanks for tuning in this last year If you've listened to all 50 episodes or just one. I am especially thankful for anyone who reached out through email or through the show Instagram. I am looking forward to this season's challenge. I have a long way to go to get ready for a 400 mile ride across Washington and you should expect a few discussions with my wife because she is questioning my decision to do that ride. I am also looking to start up a cycling over 60 Strava group. I'm doing some research to see if that would be a useful tool for helping to build connections between people. If you have an opinion on this, I would love to hear it. You can find my email and the show Instagram link in the show notes. I am looking forward to another year of cycling and interviewing. I hope you find episodes to build your cycling knowledge and inspire you. And remember age is just a gear change.