Tom Butler: 0:04

This is the Cycling Over 60 podcast, season three, episode 28, crossing Bridges with Lisa Watts, and I'm your host, tom Butler I finally started a new meal strategy this week. This attempt to change my eating has revealed a clear aspect of my journey to stay healthy. I really don't like messing with my meals, so while I plan to make this change the third week in February, I'm only now moving forward with it. The idea is to try to see if this way of eating could improve my blood glucose levels is to try to see if this way of eating could improve my blood glucose levels. You might ask why the delay, and it's hard for me to answer that question, but I see at least three reasons. First, meals are more difficult with this new plan. I've mentioned before that I'm someone who doesn't mind repetition with meals and primarily I want them to be easy.

Tom Butler: 1:03

For this program, I do have meal plans. The creators of the program obviously believe that people want variety and that's probably true for most people and that means that they're switching things up every day in the plan. So that complicates everything from shopping to meal prep, and the meals have a lot of ingredients, so that means a lot of meal prep time. To be fair, they do structure meals so that there can be a good amount of advanced preparation, but even with that it is a lot more work than what I've been used to. Also, I've gotten used to two meals a day and this adds a third meal. Combining everything together, my meal planning and preparation now has gotten far more complicated. Thing together, my meal planning and preparation now has gotten far more complicated. I'm five days in now and I'm hoping that as time goes on, I will develop a routine that makes it easier.

Tom Butler: 1:52

Another factor is that I wasn't excited about this new plan because I'm losing foods that I really enjoy. For the last year and a half I've been eating foods that are high in fat. I don't eat meat, but I love dairy and I also love eggs, so cutting these things out makes meals less appealing to me. I definitely have made difficult changes in my diet before, and usually after a while my taste preferences do change, and that's a hope I have here. The way this program works is there is a six-week period that is designed to reset insulin sensitivity. It's possible that once I get through the six weeks, food choices might get a little more broad and I will find things that I really like. The truth is, the recipes they provide are pretty good and some are very good, but I enjoy butter and eggs and yogurt and other things that I'll have to leave behind if I buy into this concept.

Tom Butler: 2:47

Another problem with eating low fat like they suggest in this program. For me, fat is something that helps with hunger and I see that as a major factor with the success I've had before in losing weight. Once I started eating high-fat, high-protein meals a year and a half ago, I really started seeing a change with my ability to burn fat. What I was doing over a year and a half wasn't exactly a keto diet, but I did eat a lot of fat and I feel that my body got used to burning fat. Now that I have to cut that fat out, my body is sending me really strong messages that I need to eat and obviously that's uncomfortable. I've come to expect that I will be hungry if I expect to be healthy, and I have ways of distracting myself when I'm hungry, and that's just part of the journey for me. Sometimes my body gives me hunger signals because it thinks I need calories when I don't really, and other times I'll be hungry because I'm fasting. So I've just come to accept that a certain amount of time being hungry is a consequence of years of poor dietary choices that trained my body to eat the wrong way. I do fully expect that once my body adjusts to not having fat as a primary energy source, that a lot of the hunger signals will go away. So I just need to get through to that time. But I also don't expect all of the hunger to go away. Finally, I've been ambivalent about making the change.

Tom Butler: 4:12

From a conceptual level, the big difference of this meal is that it is aimed to keep fat under 15% of calories for the day. The opinion of the creators of this approach is that fat is the major culprit of insulin resistance. If you search the literature, you'll find many studies that conclude that a low-fat diet doesn't impact insulin resistance. The authors of this program believe that the studies that don't link low-fat to improved insulin sensitivity are flawed, and that flaw is that the percentage of the fat in the diets of the study participants weren't low enough. I have many, many questions about their assumptions. First, I fully believe that ketogenic diets are effective at reversing type 2 diabetes. Anyone who questions this needs to get familiar with the work being done at Duke University by Dr Eric Westman. He has been using low-carb, ketogenic diets in a clinical setting for over 20 years. It is true that we are still learning a lot about how to improve utilization of blood glucose, and I'm open to the notion that a diet very low in fat can make some positive changes at the muscle cell level, and that is the level I'm most interested in.

Tom Butler: 5:18

Some of you might be thinking that our bodies need fat, and that is absolutely true. To eat a diet that is under 15% fat means being very strategic to make sure and get high quality fats, so the meal plans include things like avocados, flax seeds and nuts to help ensure good fat intake. Another aspect to think about is getting enough protein, so the meal includes very low fat protein options like quinoa, which is a complete protein source. My taste buds aren't happy with my choice to eat this way, but unfortunately, if my taste buds got to choose my meals, about 95% of my calories would come in the form of pizza. One of the really positive aspects of this meal is that not all carbohydrates are the same. While a gummy bear is a low-fat, high-carbohydrate source, so is four cups of mixed berries, and I would rather have berries than gummy bears. So with this meal plan you get to eat a lot of berries and I do like that.

Tom Butler: 6:14

So, given all of my hesitation about starting this diet, here's something that is very important. I've been doing the diet for five days. Only at this point, but what you would want to have happen in those five days seems to be happening in my case. Plus, I haven't been 100% faithful to the program Not huge deviations, but enough that I probably haven't experienced the full benefit of their plan. Certainly, one of the reasonable explanations of what is happening right now metabolically for me is that my cells are getting more insulin sensitive and that means it's really probable that the program is delivering as promised. From everything I'm seeing now, it makes total sense for me.

Tom Butler: 7:11

To Lisa Watts, the author of Crossing Bridges what Biking Up the East Coast Taught Me About Life After 60. Go check out Warm Showers at warmshowersorg. They provide a great service for cyclists who are looking for places to stay while touring. I really enjoyed Lisa's writing and was very intrigued by her journey. It's always interesting to me to hear about how individualized traveling by bike is. Everyone has a different experience. I'm so happy that Lisa took the time to come on the podcast. Here's our conversation. I've been excited for this conversation ever since I got a hold of my next guest's book. Thank you, lisa Watts, for joining me.

Lisa Watts: 7:52

Thank you, tom, I'm excited too.

Tom Butler: 7:55

You are the author of Crossing Bridges. What Biking Up the East Coast Taught Me About Life After 60. I'm grateful that Michelle at Warm Showers connected us. That was awesome of her and I want to encourage listeners to also pull up your interview on the Warm Showers Bike Life podcast. It is episode 110, posted on November 24th of last year, and I'll put a copy of that in the show notes. Could we start by having you share your earliest memory of the bicycle?

Lisa Watts: 8:26

Oh sure I'd love to. I was a kid in Atlanta, georgia, the youngest of five, and we had an awesome concrete driveway and my brother, just older than me, would be out there shooting baskets and I would bike in circles on the driveway. I was a big reader, so I lived in my head and I would pull a wagon behind me and I was either driving a covered wagon or I was driving a train, but it was always kind of. I mean, to this day, biking means freedom. I can take off, you know. So when I got a little older, freedom I can take off, you know. So when I got a little older, I could ride to a public golf course clubhouse and take I don't know a nickel and buy peanut M&Ms. That was incredibly empowering. We didn't have candy at my house.

Tom Butler: 9:20

Gotcha, I love that and I just love that picture of the bike unlocking a world of imagination. You know being out on it, that's cool. You wrote a book about growing up in Ohio and I wonder if you could talk a bit about that book and if you think your desire to explore is rooted in your upbringing.

Lisa Watts: 9:48

That's a great question and thank you for knowing about Good Roots. So it's actually an anthology that I proposed and collected Famous, you know, Pulitzer Prize winning authors. A bunch of them grew up in Ohio. I was born in Cleveland, my mother's hometown, but we left when I was three. But I found myself back there in my 40s raising our kids. My husband took a job at a small liberal arts school in Ohio and I started thinking what it meant for our kids you know, because I grew up on the East Coast what does it mean for them to grow up in a small Ohio college town? And then I started realizing how many writers I respected did. So I created this anthology and I think the answer to my question is related to your question. I think it's a very grounded upbringing and it allows you to dream big, because all of these writers someone noted about Good Roots later, yeah, but they all left Ohio, but they had the grounding to just dream and I think that's my takeaway, yeah.

Tom Butler: 10:52

Gotcha, were there influences in your family that kind of unlocked that capacity to dream in you?

Lisa Watts: 11:03

I always describe it as a very suburban childhood. We lived in the suburbs of Atlanta and Baltimore and then Boston. Finally, by the time I got to high school, kind of nondescript, and my parents were good parents but nothing terribly interesting about their lives and again, I was a reader. I think I just dreamed of doing more exotic, interesting things. So I should probably credit my mother. She was a reader and she took me to the library early on. So you know, maybe she did indirectly feed some of that, but mostly it was an itchiness of kind of like is this really all there is? I would like to see and try more.

Tom Butler: 11:43

Yeah, well, shout out to public libraries, you know for unlocking that let's protect them.

Lisa Watts: 11:48

Absolutely.

Tom Butler: 11:49

Crossing Bridges was never going to be a guidebook to a cycling route, you said, and so I'm wondering if you can share your thoughts about capturing that journey to share with others.

Lisa Watts: 12:25

Yeah, that's a great question and it's complicated by a couple of things. One at the time that I took the trip two months up the East Coast Greenway, I was actually working for the nonprofit, the East Coast Greenway Alliance, as their communications manager, so it had been my job to tell the story of the Greenway and point people to different stretches of it, the safer ones especially, I think. To me they were two very separate things. There was my professional work and of course, it would help for me to see all of the route, but I was really doing this very selfishly, for myself. It was something that I had dreamed of for a long time and I posted on Facebook seven years ago nightly, you know, three or four paragraphs right up of the day. I took the trip with my friend Dee and she and I started to build this following of our followers and her partner, sally, was sharing it on her Facebook and that was kind of fun that we had these people cheering us on and, you know, telling us how great we were. But they were truly following. Like I just heard the other day a woman's like sometimes you didn't post till 10 o'clock at night and what that was was kind of the live time story of watching these two women make their way up the coast on a two month trip, and so there was a tension Is it going to be okay? Are they going to run into anything? But afterwards, when I thought I wanted to write a book about it, that tension's gone. We had a great two-month trip. There were no amazing hurdles that we overcame, neither of us was getting over a terrible illness or anything.

Lisa Watts: 14:05

I realized that story itself didn't amount to much, and my journalism professor, who I was still writing with back then from 30 years before, said well, you're writing a guide to the East Coast Greenway and that's never what I wanted to write about. I wanted to tell my stories, and the other complication is I have this bias that I think bicycle tourists should be somewhat resourceful. They shouldn't need somebody to hold their hands and show them where every public toilet is and you know where, every place where you can stop and get coffee. I feel like some of it should be an adventure, and so, even though I'm actually doing an updated guide for the East Coast Greenway Alliance about Connecticut and Rhode Island, I'll tell you so much, but I want you to find some of it yourself. So I think I'm sure I've helped bring more awareness of this route, the East Coast Greenway, but I don't really want to walk people through it mile by mile. I'd rather tell stories. It's more interesting to me.

Tom Butler: 15:09

I like that, and I've had people talk about serendipity before that a trip that's too planned, you don't have the opportunity to really have some experience that you didn't even know that you wanted to have, and so I like that element of what you're talking about 100%, although we did kind of map out our accommodations.

Lisa Watts: 15:37

I basically took, you know, the map of the Greenway and broke it up into roughly 60 mile blocks and tried to figure out accommodations which we had agreed. We weren't going to camp, we were just too old to camp. So we had a fair amount of friends and family along the route you know it's East Coast but then also some Airbnbs and motels and we 95% stuck to that spreadsheet. But a friend of Dee's made fun of us. You know he had ridden across the country and probably in other countries and said wow, a spreadsheet. That's really an adventure, isn't it? But what happened from the morning when we left till we got there at night? We didn't know. So that was left. We just didn't have to worry about where we were staying all afternoon, you know, texting people or anything like that.

Tom Butler: 16:29

So yeah, there's a certain level of unknown, like we've got to find a park bench to sleep on because we don't know where we're gonna stay. I'm really ready to back that out of a trip and have enough of a spreadsheet, so I know where I'm gonna stay.

Lisa Watts: 16:44

Exactly, there's a, there's a comfort in that and you know kind of points you in the right direction, but you don't know what's going to happen the rest of the day.

Tom Butler: 16:51

You described an itch to do something a bit extraordinary as you were approaching 60. I'm wondering if you could unpack that a little bit.

Lisa Watts: 17:01

I think I'm aware of living my adult life with a real focus on balance. Balance has always been important to me, so you know my work has been sedentary, I sit at a computer, so I always wanted to be active. You know, running, biking, yoga. But when you are always carefully balanced, you don't do anything to an extreme. You end up doing everything kind of mediocre. That was my feeling, like I hadn't let myself do one thing outside of that careful balance and I wondered what that felt like.

Tom Butler: 17:38

When I was 59, and you know what launched this podcast was my decision to do the Seattle to Portland ride. Um, if you're not familiar with it, it's 206 miles over two days and I thought you know when I found, as I started riding it, you know, mid fifth, mid year, 59, you know I was six months away from turning 60. That, wow, you know I was six months away from turning 60. That wow, you know I, I'm not doing bad on this bike in. Uh man, I I've always wanted to do stp. I better do it now because I'm approaching 60 and I might not have a chance ever to do it again. I'm, you know I'm old, and now I look at that and I think you know I wasn't old.

Lisa Watts: 18:32

I mean, that's just two years ago, I know.

Tom Butler: 18:35

I know, so I'm wondering if you have thoughts about how our culture portrays aging.

Lisa Watts: 18:44

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's this storyline that by 60, it all just starts to slide downhill, you know, in not a good way, not a like wee way.

Lisa Watts: 18:55

And to some degree, you know, we get slower and our joints hurt and things like that. But I feel like the little secret that nobody talks about is, in many ways, ways your world can open. You know, because you have more time, I started scaling back work to part-time and I just retired six months ago. I'm reasonably healthy my knee isn't good, you know, but I'm capable and bicycling is so forgiving, you know, it really doesn't pound your joints, you can take it at whatever pace, and so my feeling is the 60s have been my best decade and my 25-year-old self would never have believed that, but's this feeling of just. You know your world gets smaller and smaller and you know nothing fun is left, and I just don't feel that way.

Tom Butler: 19:55

Right, it's so awesome and I think it's important, you know, to try to get that message across. You know, people were saying that to me when I was in my 40s. They're saying saying, yeah, so after 60 it didn't sink in, and so people like you being an example, I think is just wonderful and thank you for being that example well, and I always had the friend who I did the trip with Dee as my example.

Lisa Watts: 20:23

She's nine years older than me and always a stronger athlete, so you know you collect people like that to remind you. Nah, you don't have to stop.

Tom Butler: 20:36

Well, talk more about Dee. She's a central figure to this. Talk more about how she inspires you.

Lisa Watts: 20:44

Sure, yeah, I met her when I was 25 and starting a job at Northeastern University in Boston and she was starting as a marketing professor. I was editing the alumni magazine and we got on a bus to go to employee orientation and I had a cup of coffee and the Boston Globe and I asked if I could sit down next to her and she said, oh, that was a good idea. She's British, british accent on and on about how well, because I'm starting a job that's sort of in journalism, I really need to, you know, keep myself updated on the news, blah, blah, blah.

Lisa Watts: 21:24

And she said I meant the coffee and I loved her ever since and we realized as we drove, you know, out of Boston that she was a runner and she liked to ride bikes and so we started playing together and I really looked up to her. You know she was older but she's also traveled the world and she's biked down the West Coast by herself and she's hitchhiked across South America. She's done adventures I could never imagine and very strong. I stopped doing marathons and she kept running to a year and we stayed in touch. I moved out to Ohio and then North Carolina and we kept doing things together a couple of times a year. She knew I always wanted to do this bike trip and she was the perfect person, the only person really I considered to do it with.

Lisa Watts: 22:06

But there was definitely tension on the trip and for a while I thought this means I can't write a book about it because I can't say anything bad about my friend. And I went through a couple editors had really advised me like three versions of this and the first one said I get Dee, she's an interesting character. I think you just have to see that you're the main character and in every scene you need to tell us what's going on with you, what you need and want. And that was really painful, but I did. I went back and I realized, you know, it's always easy to see yourself as a victim and Dee was being bossy and I was getting tired of her, but really I was not my most laid back self. This was my big trip. I had a lot riding on it, you know, and I probably wasn't as tolerant as normal, but the big thing was I learned how to speak up when something was really bothering me, and I write about that in the book a little bit. I'm really proud of that.

Lisa Watts: 23:11

And it went very well with Dee. She didn't get passive, aggressive on me because I was being honest with her and I'd say our friendship is stronger than ever now, which I'm proud of, because that was one of my fears. You know, like you're in the middle of a trip, you're having this intense time together. She's driving me crazy. I don't want to lose my friend, you know. So just good communication and a couple people noted along the way. So just good communication and a couple people noted along the way. This is so normal. It's such an intense thing. You're spending 24 hours, weeks and weeks with somebody. You're going to get kind of tired of each other.

Tom Butler: 23:47

Well, I think that's interesting because I do see biking as a real social event. There's also times that I really like being out on the bike all by myself and just kind of on the road experiencing it. I wonder if you have some thoughts, both before and as a result of this trip, about that social aspect of cycling.

Lisa Watts: 24:12

Yeah well, what you just described, I agree with both. And the thing about Dee again, we've had four decades of running together and biking together. That's always been compatible. The actual activity itself. She and I have always been well-matched in pace and on a typical day we might chat for 45 minutes and it might be something political or historical or personal, and then we'd be quiet for another hour.

Lisa Watts: 24:41

And I definitely am a daydreamer. I like to just. That's why I do things like run and bike. I can just think about whatever I want to think about. And sometimes it's too loud, you can't talk anyway. But it is nice to me if you're going to be out there biking all day to have someone to check in with and then when you see something gorgeous or something scary, you know you have somebody to share it with. So I think I've always found it's not that easy to talk to other people when you're biking. You know, if it's windy, just to have a little bit of conversation mixed with quiet is a really nice balance, and you know I like balance. So I think I couldn't imagine doing a two-month bike trip by myself. I would bore myself. I really appreciated having the company and you know, from time to time we had friends also ride with us for a day or two, which was nice for, you know, a little change of pace and conversation little change of pace and conversation.

Tom Butler: 25:41

Did you see it as a way of meeting strangers? Did it create some?

Lisa Watts: 25:43

interesting conversations along the way. Yeah, you know, all along the way, from our host to people we've met, they'd always say you know what's your favorite part? And to me I think they were always wanting us to say that their town or their city was our favorite one, you know. And Dee would always say, oh, the people we met. Because she was surprised that here we were, two friends traveling together and yet we still talk to a lot of people. But I feel like it always happens on a bike trip.

Lisa Watts: 26:11

There's something people see you and your bike and your bags and it's clear that's all you have and they want to help you. You know, they offer you cold water, they help you with directions. There's something very non-threatening about it and we never wore bike gear. We never were in kits or jerseys or things, so we just look like two normal older women you know out doing some crazy adventure. But I found the conversations happened very easily and of course, they always say where are you going? And I would say the next town where we were staying that night and Dee would say Canada, which would? That would blow their mind.

Tom Butler: 26:51

Right yeah, in a very good way, I would have to say it opens your mind. Yeah, opening their mind. And again, I hope that there's people that along that way, kind of saw the two of you and opened their mind up. Well, maybe I should do something like that. I would love to know that, and I'm sure the Facebook group or page helped with that as well. I'm going to risk taking a turn here that might be hard to come back from, but I'd like you to talk more about the East Coast Greenway.

Lisa Watts: 27:37

I grew up along the East Coast so it was always my dream that that would be something really fun to do, to just go along the coast, which is beautiful, but connect the dots of the places where I live. So I was in my 50s, I think, in North Carolina and learned that there was a nonprofit working on this route from Key West to the Canadian border in Maine and that was west to the Canadian border in Maine and that was, you know, incredible serendipity. So it started 30 some years ago with bike travel planners in Boston and New York City, two very advanced areas for bike paths and bike planning, and they talked about trying to configure a route between the two cities. And it just kept growing from there to reach the whole East Coast With the concept.

Lisa Watts: 28:21

One of the many things I love about it multi-use is the goal that one day you can walk, run, push a stroller, skateboard your way 3,000 miles up the coast on protected paths, multi-use paths. It's almost 40% of the way there. So it takes a long time. It takes a lot of money it's an average of a million dollars per mile to build a greenway. But I love how the route was planned to go straight through all those major cities you know from Miami, charleston, richmond, virginia, new York, philadelphia, boston because locals use it for commuting and, just you know, bike travel, and then it's a long distance route. So I love that aspect of it A lot of travel, bike travel routes.

Lisa Watts: 29:14

Think that you want to go way outside the city and avoid all that, but there's so much good bike infrastructure in most of our bigger cities. So my answer to when everybody said what's your favorite part was coming into these cities and thinking we just got ourselves there. You know, and if you travel the East Coast, you're on the West Coast. You travel the East Coast. You think of it as driving Highway 95. You know it's awful, but it goes the whole length of the coast.

Lisa Watts: 29:40

Who knew that there's this beautiful bike path, probably going along a river, taking you safely into downtown? It's very cool. So I think the people at the East Coast Greenway Alliance have gotten nervous as there's been more awareness of the route that people from Europe, people all over the world, are thinking great, we're going to come, we're going to bring our family and we're going to bike up the East Coast or down the East Coast. It's not quite family ready yet. You know, like 60%, you're still riding on roads. Of course they're trying to find quieter roads, but it's just piecing together section by section, trying to connect this route and you can you can read more at greenwayorg and check out the map.

Tom Butler: 30:27

Fantastic. One of the problems with this podcast is almost every conversation. There's another place that I want to ride. I don't know if it's possible to take a year off somehow and just do everything. But right, you know, just, and all over the world you know yes it's so it's interesting to me.

Tom Butler: 30:50

There's an interesting aspect of this to me which last episode I talked a lot about a trip absolutely loved. It went out and stayed in kind of a funky campground in a tent. They called it a yurt I don't know what the real definition of a yurt is, but it was a nice size tent and biked the Olympic Discovery Trail.

Tom Butler: 31:15

And you know, when I think about the Olympic Discovery Trail, there's such a contrast between that and what the East Coast Greenway is, because you don't pass any. You know cities, I mean there are what I would say are towns along the way, and then you get into this vast areas that it's just the wilderness. And so to have both those experiences, all the experiences available, I think, are really wonderful. And but that is the thing about the East coast greenway, that biking in the Boston would be super fun.

Lisa Watts: 31:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, just keep collecting them all, keep a list because they'll always be somewhere you can go. A couple of years ago, in the fall, I biked on the Eurovelo Route 6, which they call the Rivers Route, and we started an hour south of Paris, biked about three weeks into Germany and then my husband came and we did another 10 days to Vienna. That was a really nice combination of lots of little villages, lots of days of just not much along the river, really easy campsites Europeans know how to do good biking campsites and then a few big cities, you know, or smallish cities.

Lisa Watts: 32:41

I really like that blend. Somebody asked me well, why didn't you ride across the country? You know that's supposed to be the big adventure. And I again, I grew up in the suburbs, I'm used to having like a convenience store if I need one, and so a couple of weeks across the desert and climbing mountains, that sounds like hard work. We kept things relatively flat and every day there was a good chance there'd be a convenience store where you could get an iced coffee, you know.

Tom Butler: 33:10

I love it.

Lisa Watts: 33:11

Yeah.

Tom Butler: 33:13

Talk about the East Coast Greenway Alliance. Why is that important for the future of the route?

Lisa Watts: 33:39

the nonprofit champion, with advocates in each of eight regions trying to help all those cities and towns. The big challenge is always funding. I think more and more communities are starting to see that walking and biking paths are great amenities that their residents citizens want, but at a million dollars a mile, how do you, you know, argue for that over? You know, paying teachers more or firefighters or things. So a lot of it is funded by federal transportation grants. At the tiniest, tiniest fraction of what it costs to build like one big highway bridge, you could finish the East Coast Greenway. So that's their work, and for all this time they have focused on the actual building of the route.

Lisa Watts: 34:18

So if you go to the website, it's still not allowed about. You know how to enjoy or experience it. They are very cautious. They urge you to look at a few areas that are more finished than not, and in general, the northern half, from Washington DC up to Maine, is more finished than the southern half. So there's that there's some nice sort of week-long loops you could do, involving Boston and Cape Cod and a ferry, things like that, and I think in increasingly challenging budget times currently they're also building strong alliances with other trail organizations across the country. Again, you know strength in numbers and I think the pandemic helped everyone realize how valuable paths like these are for our mental health, physical health, emotional health. People are using them more than ever.

Tom Butler: 35:19

Yeah well, I think it's organizations like that that have a vision and can rely on that collaborative approach and bringing knowledge from people and experience from people. I think organizations like the East Coast Greenway Alliance are vital for that work, so shout out to all the folks there.

Lisa Watts: 35:45

Absolutely, hey guys.

Tom Butler: 35:50

I'd be curious did you experience pushback from friends or family prior to the trip? Pushback from friends or family prior to the trip? You were just the two of you kind of heading out together, and how did your husband feel about being left behind?

Lisa Watts: 36:04

Bob was definitely sad.

Lisa Watts: 36:07

He was teaching at the time at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and we were leaving as he was wrapping up his spring semester, which left him with lots of empty time and an empty house, so I felt bad about that.

Lisa Watts: 36:22

The one thing I'm proud of is we had two dogs then, and Bob is not a dog lover, I'm the dog lover, so if I had left him and left him in charge of the dogs, it would have been too much. So I'm very proud of we had a little getaway place on the river in coastal North Carolina in the middle of nowhere, and I posted on Facebook that there's this great getaway riverfront, there's two kayaks, there's two you know adjustable bikes in the shed for you and two sweet dogs that you could spend time with. And my husband said this is never going to work, but it did. I lined up eight weeks of people coming to watch the dogs and then they would hand off on Saturday to the next one and they would send me notes occasionally so that I never had to feel guilty about that part.

Lisa Watts: 37:10

You know it was selfish enough of me to take off, but he didn't have to worry about the dogs. Mostly, I think, people you know didn't understand why this would be such a big dream of mine. I remember people saying how do you just step out of your life for two months? And I'm thinking, how do you not?

Lisa Watts: 37:30

But about four or five days into the trip, in the middle of a heat wave in Florida hot, humid, headwinds I went to bed one night and thought I'm over my head, I'm not going to be able to do this. And I thought of everyone I had told about it and all the dog sitters lined up and my work. We had hired a young woman to kind of fill in for me a bit at work. This is going to be humiliating because I can't do it. And so then I thought like why did I tell so many people what I was doing? But I had a good night's sleep and we started early the next morning in the cool and I couldn't really explain it. But I was just starting to feel better and a friend who knew me well in North Carolina said Lisa, you just got stronger. You know, it takes a few days on a bike and then your body does kind of kick in and it got easier.

Tom Butler: 38:24

That's awesome and, again, I'm glad that they got to see your progress. You know, if people were nervous, we live in a time where you know they have, you know they can check in on you every day, so that's awesome.

Lisa Watts: 38:38

Yeah, we also, dee and I, laughed on the trip, the little place that we had on the coast again in the middle of rural coastal North Carolina, we were adding on a guest bedroom and bathroom and the contractor was really curious because I was starting to plan the trip when I'd stay there. And one day he said so, will you be packing? And I said yeah, yeah, I have two saddlebags, you know. And that wasn't what he meant. He meant would I be packing Because here we were, two women on our own.

Lisa Watts: 39:11

And Dee and I just laughed. Especially the first time we had an angry mad driver was outside of boston, just north of boston like haha, we should have had a little pistol in my handlebar bag and just whip it out.

Tom Butler: 39:23

We should have been packing we did not pack okay, okay I'm glad you didn't wish you had, so that's good not necessary did the physical act of biking and that time, a reflection that you talked about, where you're just kind of just you and the bike and the road. Do you feel that provided a unique space to analyze aspects of your life, or do you think you would have done that anyway?

Lisa Watts: 39:57

no, absolutely it, absolutely. It was all that time on the bike, hours and hours of you know it's a repetitive motion definitely gives you time to think and all those hours, all those days away from my desk and work was just really freeing. I mean, it literally gave me perspective on I've always taken work very seriously and very personally and to be able to step away and think what's that all about. And I got, I grew physically much stronger so that 60 miles a day was nothing. That was just what we were doing and again approaching 60 and thinking, well, that will never happen again. That was awesome. There were tremendous lessons learned from that time and they were both physical, emotional. Somewhat I was kind of embarrassed to think back and think I've been so ambitious all my life about work. Is it really necessary? But it was healthy. The distance.

Tom Butler: 40:57

You described an experience that you had where you returned to I guess normal life might be the right way to say it and this kind of a shift in viewpoint that what am I doing with all this stuff? Can you talk about that?

Lisa Watts: 41:15

Sure, you know, for all the people who didn't understand why I thought this was a treat to go off for two months on a bike, a big piece of that was I had done you know, eight or 10 week-long bike trips, most of them with Dee, and I love that feeling of everything I need is on my bike and my two panniers. I wanted to know how that felt for a long time, long enough that it kind of felt like this is how I live and that's exactly what I got you know, so that and we kept, you know, weaning or making our bags less and less, so by the end of the trip really only needed one pannier. To me, that's just really freeing.

Lisa Watts: 41:53

Look my life is really simple. I, you know clothes and stuff I don't need, and so I got home. We had a three bedroom house that really wasn't that big. But you know, I opened a closet like why do I have all these clothes, even books? I love books, but do I really need all these books? You know, it ended up with very dramatic impact. I convinced my husband to sell our house, which we loved just fine, and buying a townhouse that was much simpler and downsized. You know, it had real impact and I have a bike friend I've known for since I was in high school, charlie, who said this is common, it's called the Pannier effect. So I felt it big time uh, I love it.

Tom Butler: 42:37

It's to me it's like should be assigned uh, life experience for everybody you know. Go out on the road for two months, come back, you'll be changed so yes, I like that I don't know, it might hurt our capitalistic economy exactly it definitely would hurt walmart Target, but that's okay.

Lisa Watts: 43:10

I'm always curious about the creative process and I really like the title Crossing Bridges, because I think there I have to give credit to the first editor who helped me. She just said you know, by the way, you talk about bridges a lot in this book and I thought, oh my God, she's right and I hadn't seen it. But you know the leap from the literal bridges which I am scared of. So that's the piece.

Lisa Watts: 43:35

The very first day of our trip we have to bike over Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys into a headwind. So it might have been fine if we had a tailwind and we were just sailing along, but instead we had to go very slowly. We were down to seven miles an hour and so I was on that bridge for an hour, petrified. And then, of course, if you're going up the East Coast, you know, over harbors and bays and things, there are bridges nearly every day. So I really had to wrestle with my whole fear of bridges and edges. But the other piece of the metaphor was, you know, crossing into this phase of life where, welcoming adventure and being kinder to myself and knowing my strength, I think that was the big bridge I crossed, so yeah, I love it, but I didn't come up with it.

Tom Butler: 44:24

Right. Well, still, I think you embracing it and understanding the layers. I love it. I was intrigued by what I think was a detour into Lutherville, especially at that moment in your life. Can you talk about Lutherville and the impact of that visit?

Lisa Watts: 44:44

Yeah, that whole time on our trip was funny. And when I lived in Lutherville I was in junior high and probably a real low point in my life. We had moved from Atlanta. I was in seventh grade. I went from a little tiny elementary school to a great big junior high. I was awkward, I was pimply, I was unhappy, but our house was in a development that had been a horse farm.

Lisa Watts: 45:09

As there are a lot of areas outside of Baltimore in the suburbs and my bike was my salvation, I would just take off and ride and pretend I was on a sailboat. So as Dee and I came into Baltimore we rode through horrendous rain and floods and Dee has Raynaud's syndrome A lot of my runner friends have that where they lose sensation in their hands or feet or worse, it's painful. You know her lips were turning blue. That was one place we had a warm showers arranged. It wasn't really working out and I went to the little tourist office in the harbor of Baltimore and they sent us to a hotel that had Biltmore in the name and it was right out of an Ann Tyler novel. She's a novelist in the Baltimore area who writes about Korea. There was rain coming down the walls of our hotel room. It didn't matter, because Dee was getting like emergency level. I took her bike, I had to carry it upstairs but go take a hot shower.

Lisa Watts: 46:11

And then we were in the hotel room, we were warm and dry and I looked at the map for the next day and like three miles from our route was my old neighborhood, this development, and I said, would you mind terribly if we did this? And it was a trip, because if you've gone back to somewhere you haven't seen in decades a good 30 or 40 years it looked exactly the same. You know this sort of suburban development. And there was the split level house that I had thought a lot about.

Lisa Watts: 46:42

Again, I wasn't happy, my parents weren't happy, during that time, my middle sister was pretty miserable and the house kind of looked the same and it just it gave me great pause. It just brought a lot of things back. I texted my sister a photo and she said, oh my God. And Dee meanwhile was just floored that this sort of nondescript suburban neighborhood. I think she maybe she thought I grew up in mansions or something, I don't know. But it was a fascinating day and it wasn't expected and all of that stuff, every reconnection I had on the trip. I think was really good for my brain to sort of sort things out, you know.

Tom Butler: 47:21

Do you feel like there was some value? Did you experience like here I am who I am today and yet, being in the surrounding, I can kind of be back in who I was at that time. Did you feel anything about that juxtaposition?

Lisa Watts: 47:40

Yeah, totally, and you're articulating it way better than I am. That was exactly it. I was remembering, you know the 13-year-old, that I was so lost and so miserable and so lonely, and it made me realize my life is good and I turned out to have a happy life and the perspective was amazing. Also, there had been this sort of gravel bike path behind our house that had been the long driveway to probably the big farmhouse on all of that property and they had now paved it and I realized that was my first bike path because I would spend hours on that. You know again, my bike was my true salvation during that time of my life. So to make that connection was really fun too. But yes, the perspective was life has turned out far better than it was back then.

Tom Butler: 48:32

What a cool experience and again, just read the book. You'll get a lot more details on that than we can talk about here, but it's a cool moment. You talked about some negative aspects of the trip and again I'm really glad you did. I'm wondering. There's this element of being tempted to get fixated on mundane things. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit.

Lisa Watts: 48:59

Yeah, I mean there's a lot that's repetitive about a multi-week bike trip. Every day you kind of do the same things to pack up your bike and then, when you get where you are, you do the same things and hope to get a shower. It gets repetitive. I'm not good with repetition, I like variety. But there's also something familiar to runners and cyclists where you fixate on the end goal, you know like well, we got to get to Annapolis, that's where we're going today, instead of just enjoying the journey. And so I was working on that.

Lisa Watts: 49:32

I had an older friend tell me try to go see one thing every day, don't just like aim for the destination. And Dee and I just laughed like we would go past a state park sign or something. We saw it. We weren't really, you know, in the mindset of going to a museum. We did kind of want to get where we were going and be done for the day.

Lisa Watts: 49:54

Of course, it was in the last week or so that it dawned on me oh, my God, this is almost done. This has been such a privilege, it's been such an easy way of life with so little to worry about, savor every day. But it took probably until the last two weeks to kind of for that to sink in, and that it wasn't about am I going to make it or not. It's like you should enjoy this. This may be, you know, a one-time thing, but when you're tired and hungry, little things can also get to you. So you kind of have to pay attention to that. And I think I have the friend that I biked in Europe with could sometimes see that energy level of mine going down in the afternoon and she'd be asking questions and I'd be getting grumpy and she would just go in and order a coke and a plate of french fries and put them down and she knew let's just do a little refueling.

Tom Butler: 50:47

Yeah that's awesome yeah. I think it's something to realize Again. It's a different way of existence than what happens day to day and there's going to be kind of different things that come up, and kind of learning about yourself and what you can get fixated on is a valuable thing to do as well.

Lisa Watts: 51:18

Yeah, I also remember standing on a sidewalk in New York City and we took two whole rest days. Our pattern was we tried to take a day off each week and so it was eight weeks of the trip with one day off. We had two days off in New York for various reasons, but I stood on the sidewalk on a Monday morning we were about to start, it was a beautiful day, probably mid-June and just watched the bustle, you know, people going to work and school and thought I have dreamed of days like this when, instead of being part of that bustle, I get to go ride my bike. So again, you know that was almost three quarters of the way it was. I started having reminders of like this is this is something to not rush through and to pay attention to. You know it's, it was privilege.

Tom Butler: 52:11

There was a moment where you had a bit of a conflict with Dee that you can withdraw from, that you talk about in the book. That was an interesting moment for me thinking about. You know what can happen on a journey by bike where you know you're together. It's not like you're going to go home or something. It's like you're together the next day. So could you talk about that? Did you learn something about yourself in moments like that?

Lisa Watts: 52:43

Definitely, definitely. I have three older sisters. We were raised in a household where you don't confront things head on. You know, our mother would just get passive, aggressive and there'd be days of silence and that's what we grew up with. You know, we didn't. We don't know how to actually say to somebody. What you're doing really bothers me and I thought it was just.

Lisa Watts: 53:05

This whole tension was building with Dee. She kept bossing me around and telling me how to do things and I was feeling you know that that wasn't nice to me and I called up all I could remember from parenting teenagers, when you need to talk to them and get them to listen and you're not supposed to say you, you, you you're supposed to use I words. And I just asked D if I could sit down and talk to her before we went to dinner and I was nervous but I just tried to really plainly say this is how it makes me feel when you keep telling me here's how to bring your bike in through a door, here's where you should put your coffee cup, and it was very enlightening to her. She had been completely unaware and she just said thank you for telling me and I really I wanted to call my sisters, because none of us are very good at that, and it was.

Lisa Watts: 53:56

It's a good skill. It's much healthier than just like not talking and I couldn't do it. I had to, I was forced to because we were leaning on each other. We had, you know, three more weeks to go. So and again I have realized since then and people were mentioning it some of these tensions are normal. You know, we were spending all day together, all night. When we're biking, we're only three feet away. I don't spend nearly that much time with my husband, you know proximity. So yeah, I'm proud because I feel like it was a new strength, a skill I developed for myself.

Tom Butler: 54:31

That's wonderful. You have worked for East Coast Greenway Alliance and then you do this trip that. I think that's like this cool element of the whole thing. I'm wondering what your thoughts after doing this trip are about cycling navigation.

Lisa Watts: 55:06

Yeah, that's a great question. I have very strong thoughts about maps and apps and navigating. I mean it was the hardest part of our job and remember this is seven years ago, so apps were where they were better. She kept toggling between there's an East Coast Greenway map that is just strictly the route which, in theory, you could just follow that. But then of course, you know we had to go off course to find our Airbnb or to find a you know a diner or something. So going back and forth with that to me I have to stop. I have to get out my good glasses, I have to. I don't toggle between the two as well as she did.

Lisa Watts: 55:37

It was a lot of work and you know the Greenway. I felt allegiance to following the East Coast Greenway route as much as we could. She's a little smarter than that and realized, you know we could actually take this right and you know that was a little bit of tension. But my bike trip through Europe we kept going back and forth between commute and ride with GPS and I realized that you know the technology keeps getting better and the idea that you could actually have an app that speaks to you and says, right, turn, you know, coming up in 20 feet. That's amazing to me because it's a lot of work. I am about to bike from Cleveland to Cincinnati on the Ohio to Erie Trail.

Lisa Watts: 56:24

What I've heard is it's I forget 300, 350 miles, 95% of it on bike path. I don't think we're even going to need navigation. I don't think we're even going to need navigation, and that is so much easier than you know. Again, the East Coast Greenway 60% on roads. You are having to navigate and we tried to put it very clearly on the website. You should be careful. You should be comfortable riding on roads and navigating through some. You know busy towns and things like that. So I believe the apps are going to keep getting better and better. The mapping's going to keep getting better. I want it to be as simple as possible and visible.

Tom Butler: 57:05

Yeah, and I hope that bike paths get more and more common too, like, for example, if it was a dream scenario where the entire East Coast route was dedicated bike lane, protected bike lane that would change so much. I hope for that, you know, I hope that happens, that comes about Maybe not for us to see, but someday I hope it comes about.

Lisa Watts: 57:34

It will someday. I think there's yeah, it's just hard to say when. And again, it's frustrating when you look at the federal transportation budget and realize what a tiny, truly like less than 1% would do it. And you know the East Coast is so highly populated. You would be affecting the lives of so many millions and millions of people.

Tom Butler: 57:59

Well, I currently am embracing the concept of the bike as a medical device, and it's been that way for me, and it's like I wish the transportation budget or some budget would acknowledge just the real value, the immense value of active recreation and active transportation. But again, that's something we could get sidetracked on, I'm pretty sure.

Lisa Watts: 58:26

I'm with you. I'm with you and to me a bike has been a mode of transportation, not just. You know travel and I think that's really important. You know there's all kinds of studies about how much of our travel in cars is within three miles of our home, and if you made it so people could do that easily on bike what it would mean for health, for gas, for the environment. You know I happen to live in a place where I can do that and it's wonderful. I ride a mile to the grocery store and it makes me happy. I know it's good for me, but many, many people don't.

Tom Butler: 59:01

Yeah, you have stated that you aim to nudge others to pursue their long-held desires. After all of this and kind of you embracing this adventure, what's the biggest piece of advice you would offer someone who kind of feels the same restlessness that you experienced?

Lisa Watts: 59:22

Well, nike said it first. But you know, just do it, because I can say it's incredibly empowering. And you know, I know all the excuses that we have and all the fears that we have, but just letting yourself pursue it, the lasting impact is just, they're incredible gifts, you know. You realize you learn things about yourself, you kind of open up to other opportunities. And you know I debated again this book, went through like three or four versions and for a long time I just put it on a shelf and thought it was a nice bike trip, Lisa, let it go, but it kept feeling like. But there is something I really wanted to share and that's that it's like I am just your normal person. I am not a super athlete, I don't have, you know, special access to anything and I could do this and I want other people, especially our age and older, to know that they can, because of how it changes your life truly.

Lisa Watts: 1:00:24

And it was probably the first or second year of the pandemic, dee and I met a mother and daughter who were kind of restless in the pandemic. She was home from college because you know the pandemic, and they lived in Rhode Island and I happened to be at the southern end and Dee at the northern end, and we met at their house with the windows open so we wouldn't share germs. So they could ask us questions, great questions, and they had been doing a little training. But the mother, who was maybe younger than I was so at that point I'd probably be 60 and Dee was 69. She said, well, just looking at you two, I know I can do this and that's a great message, like we're just normal people and you can do this too.

Lisa Watts: 1:01:12

That is cool that is cool and I think there was that feeling which you know I would kind of forget as we went along, but people would see two sort of older middle-aged women biking for day after day. It kind of gives you pause, it makes you think about what is possible.

Tom Butler: 1:01:32

Yes, and a pause, a needed pause really. You know I'm finding as I get older and you know Dee is an example for us, right? I mean, you know, in what she continues to do.

Lisa Watts: 1:01:44

Exactly.

Tom Butler: 1:01:53

So you completed the journey and there's time to reflect on it. You know that is the writing about it. I'm wondering if your definition of a fulfilling quotes. Third act of life, if that has been impacted, if it's evolved.

Lisa Watts: 1:02:04

Yeah, great question, definitely. I think again I had some time away from my job to think about ambition and what all that was about, which was like just a lot of peddling uphill and trying to prove things. You know, my work is very product oriented. I can show you here's my magazine I made, or here's my website, and look, here's my whole portfolio. I'm like what you know, what's that all about? Maybe it's time you know to give up some of that ambition which was freeing and you know, just good perspective on yourself and, I think, in general, like coasting. For a long time I thought that should be something about the title of the book. We Went Up the Coast, but I learned to coast, that sometimes you can just enjoy the ride, and it doesn't mean to me sit around, it just means think about the ways that you push yourself and what are you enjoying?

Tom Butler: 1:03:00

the journey or and it's been such a fun conversation- I think Crossing Bridges is one of those books that does a great job of providing an interesting exploration of cycling, but it combines it with really meaningful explorations of life, and thank you for writing that, and I'm glad that you shared some of your journey here with us today.

Lisa Watts: 1:03:35

Thank you, tom, great opportunity. I appreciate it.

Tom Butler: 1:03:39

All right, take care now. One of the things that really jumped out to me in our conversation was the lasting impact that living out of panniers for two months had on Lisa. I see riding a bicycle as a complex and rich experience. In this case, it's interesting that the simple life that is possible while traveling by bike has been transformational for a lot of people. It's just one of the layers of cycling that I don't think about very often. I really appreciated Lisa's ability to analyze her journey, and she is able to convey the impact in a meaningful way for others. That was true in our discussion and also in Crossing Bridges. My hope for you is that cycling is opening a lot of opportunities to learn about yourself and to take on challenges, even some challenges that you thought you would never attempt. And remember, age is just a gear change.