My Next Race--Fighting Back Against Aging

Riding at Camp Adder, Iraq.

The Army won't deploy a soldier who is more than sixty years old without a waiver signed by a general officer.

I had one of those waivers in 2013 when I turned 60. I was supposed to deploy to Afghanistan with the 56th Stryker Brigade.  But President Obama cut troop deployments to our nation's longest war and I stayed home.

In preparation for that deployment, I went to a three-month Army school at Fort Meade, Maryland.

During the school I was training to do an Ironman triathlon the following year.  If the deployment fell through, I would have a huge athletic challenge. While I was at Fort Meade, I took two fitness tests. I scored 296 and 300--the max.  I completed the Ironman at age 61.

Since the Ironman, I have tried a couple of times to start running again, and could not.

The next year swimming got more difficult. My left shoulder would last for a mile before giving out, then less.  It's a good thing I did the Ironman when I did, because running and swimming got harder and harder in the two years following.

Last year I rode across Eastern Europe.  This year I rode to Boston but I was having knee trouble.

Now, four years after the Ironman, I get knee surgery in three weeks. Next week I get an MRI for a lower back problem and I just got a cortisone shot in my right shoulder.

In 2013, I was ready to deploy to Afghanistan with an infantry brigade.  In 2014 I did an Ironman.  In the coming year I could be getting one or two more surgeries as a result of injuries and a genetic tendency to arthritis.

One of my riding buddies is 71 years old and has none of these problems. He also has no arthritis.  I have an Army buddy who is younger than I am but the cumulative damage of Airborne and Ranger service means his serious workout days are over.

In some ways, I am amazed I could get this far.  Today I rode 10 miles to the doctor to get the shot. On the way back, I met another riding buddy on the road and ended up riding almost 40 miles.

People ask me what my next big event is. My next big event will be getting healthy enough to do another big event.

Catching Up with a World Traveling Friend: Ivan Porccino

Ivan Porccino at a visit to Georgia Military Institute

Twenty years ago I worked for a big American company that bought a big Brazilian company. As a result of this deal Millennium Inorganic Chemicals acquired a manufacturing plant, a sales office and a mine in Brazil; I got a friend I have kept in touch with ever since. I recently met Ivan for dinner in New York. 

When we met in Sao Paulo in 2000 Ivan Porccino was a 27-year-old junior sales guy who knew lots of people in Sao Paulo and could help his American colleagues like me navigate the biggest city in South America.  We worked together in arranging a big event for our CEO to talk to all of our new customers through the acquisition. 

Ivan seemed to know everyone and languages of Brazil’s biggest communities.  So whomever we needed to talk to, Ivan could talk to them in Portuguese, German, Spanish, and Italian, then talk to me in English.  Although Ivan saw his future in international business, he was also interested in philosophy, history and read great books in all the languages he could speak. 

When we were stuck in Sao Paulo cabs going slower than Amish buggies we could talk about whether Hume was right about free will, whether Adam Smith, John Locke and the philosophical Scots were the true beginning of the modern world, and if Dostoevsky saw the world most clearly of all the Russians. 

Ivan was back in New York to take over a major commodity chemical shipping operation. He sees it as the next stepping-stone toward a top job in international commerce in South America. In his eyes, America creating tariff barriers is bad for the world, but it creates opportunities for other countries that live in the shadow of the world dominance of the U.S.  For Ivan, America is the greatest and most brilliant sociological experiment in the history of the world, and it is currently being squandered.

But the long game for 47-year-old Ivan is to get his teenage kids through University then have more time to spend with philosophy and literature. He may retire before he’s 60. After we talked about business, we were back to talking about Dostoevsky and Machiavelli, because they are the authors that see the evil as well as the good inside all of us. 

By the way, dinner was Japanese because what else would a North and a South American eat in New York City?

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Unforgettable Moment, B-52s Scramble, Hill Air Force Base, 1974

B-52 Bombers taking off on full throttle on Strategic Air Command alert

I was stationed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, from 1972-74. Early in 1974, Strategic Air Command stationed a wing of B-52s on Hill.  

My duty station was four miles from the airfield on the north end of the base.  Sometimes I went to the hangar for electronic parts.  On a warm spring day, I happened to be in the hangar when I heard an enormous roar, then another, then another, and another.  

Six B-52s filled the air with black smoke and the howl of 48 jet engines on throttle. The planes took off one after the other less than a minute apart. When all six formed up in the sky above the base, the giant airplanes flew east toward the Rocky Mountains and disappeared.

It was magnificent.

I was 21 years old when those planes took off.  Those airplanes were about my age, first entering service in 1952, a year before I was born. Like me they have had a lot of maintenance, but still have an active life today. Some of them, like me, are in their 60s.  

Fishing My Phone from a Storm Drain

This grabber saved me lots of money 

Yesterday I rode south from Lancaster for about fifteen miles. On the way back I was coasting down a hill on Route 272. I pulled my iPhone from my jersey pocket--and dropped it.

I briefly heard the sound of the phone skidding on the road, then nothing. I looked back and saw the steel grille of a storm drain. I turned around. At the drain, I looked down and there was my phone. It was not submerged, but sitting on a small pile of gravel out of the water.

I rode five miles home, got in my car and drove to a local shopping center with both a Verizon Store and a Home Depot.  The phone was insured, but it would cost almost $100 for a replacement and it would be sent to me. Getting a phone in the store meant buying a new one for $300.  Since it was Saturday on a holiday weekend, it would be 2 or 3 days to get the phone.  And there was a chance I could fish it out. So I left Verizon and went to Home Depot. There I bought a three-foot grabber, the longest they had, and drove back to the storm drain.

The grabber would not reach the bottom of the drain, but there was a gap between the steel drain and the curbstone. I could reach just barely around through that gap. After a few tries, I was able to clamp and lift the phone. It still works.

A few weeks ago I bought a phone holder for my handlebars.  I meant to use, but I am so used to having the phone in my pocket, I did not.  But now I do. Today I rode about 35 miles with the phone clamped on the handlebars.

 Phone clamp on the handlebars of my bike

The phone holder mounts differently on each of my two road bikes, so I will get another phone holder for other bike with carbon handlebars.

And I will use the phone holder instead of my pocket.  By the way, I lost another phone last year exactly the same way--pocket to storm drain. So use of the phone holder is overdue.