There’s a stretch of road I ride where the pavement runs straight for a long time and then stops being straight all at once. Nothing about it is dangerous if you’re paying attention. Everything about it is unforgiving if you’re not.
I’ve ridden it enough times to know what it asks of me. That’s the part worth talking about — not the road, but the asking. A motorcycle puts a question to you every few seconds, and it doesn’t accept a flattering answer.
I ride two kinds of machines. A motorcycle, usually with a group, usually on long days. And a bicycle, six to ten hours a week, usually alone. People who know me know both. What took me longer to work out is that they grade me the same way, and neither one cares what I think of myself.
I’m approaching 70. I don’t take any prescriptions. Those two facts sit next to each other in a way that makes people curious, and when they ask how I know I’m still in decent shape, they usually expect me to name a number. A resting heart rate. A lab value. Something with a decimal point in it.
The honest answer is that I know because two wheels won’t let me lie about it.
That isn’t a slogan. It’s the most useful thing I’ve worked out about active aging over 60, and it has almost nothing to do with what I eat or how I train. It’s about having something in your life that returns an honest reading whether you asked for one or not.
The Trouble With Grading Your Own Paper
Here’s the real problem with active aging over 60, and it isn’t the one people expect. It isn’t motivation. Almost everyone I talk to is plenty motivated. They ride, they lift, they hike, they play golf twice a week. Nobody has to be talked into moving.
The problem is that they’re grading their own paper.
You wake up, you take inventory, and you decide how you’re doing. That assessment feels objective from the inside. It isn’t. It’s filtered through what you got done yesterday, how you slept, what mood you woke up in, and — this is the big one — what you’d prefer to be true.
The filtering gets stronger with age, not weaker, because now something is riding on the answer. When you’re 35 and you have a bad week, it’s a bad week. When you’re 62 and you have a bad week, some part of your brain files it under evidence, and you’d rather not open that file.
So you don’t open it. You adjust instead. You take the shorter route. You skip the climb you used to take without thinking. You tell yourself you’re going easy today, and today becomes most days. Do that for two years and you’ve given up real ground without ever once admitting you were losing any.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s just what happens when the examiner and the person being examined are the same guy.
What a Motorcycle Actually Measures
People assume riding a motorcycle is passive. You sit down, you twist a grip, the engine does the work. Anyone who’s ridden a long day in real conditions knows better.
Six or seven hours on a bike in heat measures things a gym session never touches. It measures how long you can hold focus before it starts to degrade. It measures grip and forearm endurance, which sounds like a trivial thing to measure right up until hour four. It measures how you handle heat — not whether you can survive it, but whether your judgment stays intact inside it.
Mostly it measures decision speed. A motorcycle asks you to read a situation and commit, over and over, all day long. And the thing about decision speed is that it degrades quietly. You never feel slower. You just start arriving at things a half-beat late.
I can tell you almost exactly when my day has run long, because I catch myself braking earlier than I need to. Not dangerously. Just earlier. That’s the readout. That’s a machine telling me something about my current state that I would never have volunteered on my own.
And here’s what makes it useful: it isn’t a judgment. The road isn’t disappointed in me. It’s information, delivered by something that has no stake whatsoever in my self-image.
What the Bicycle Measures That the Motorcycle Can’t
The bicycle examines a different subject, and it grades harder.
On a motorcycle, the engine covers for you. On a bicycle nothing covers for you. The hill is the hill. Either the legs answer or they don’t, and you find out inside ninety seconds.
What makes it work as an instrument is repeatability. I ride the same roads. I know what a given climb costs me. When it costs more than it used to, that’s data, and it shows up whether I asked for it or not.
The second day is where the real reading lives. Anyone can put together one good day. What tells you where you actually stand is what you’ve got available the morning after a hard effort — and then what you’ve got the morning after that. Single-day performance is a snapshot. Recovery across consecutive days is the trend line, and the trend line is the thing that matters for active aging over 60.
Between them the two machines cover most of what I’d want to know. The motorcycle reads focus, heat tolerance, and judgment under sustained load. The bicycle reads capacity and the ability to repeat. Neither one asks how I’m feeling about any of it.
Active Aging Over 60 Runs on Self-Report, and Self-Report Is Broken
Nearly every conversation I have about aging well runs on self-report. How’s your energy? Better than last year. How’s recovery? About the same. Strength? Holding steady.
Those answers are sincere and mostly wrong. Not because anyone’s lying — because human memory for physical state is genuinely poor. You cannot accurately remember what a climb felt like eighteen months ago. You can remember that you finished it. Those are very different facts, and over time the second one quietly replaces the first.
What people are actually reporting when you ask is their current mood plus their most recent good day. That’s the least reliable instrument available to us, and it’s the one nearly everybody is running on.
It also explains something I used to find puzzling. Two people start the same program. Similar age, similar background, similar effort. Six months later one of them has changed something real and the other hasn’t moved. The difference usually isn’t discipline. It’s that one of them knew where he was starting from.
The alternatives most people reach for aren’t much better. The mirror is the worst of them and easily the most popular. It measures body composition, poorly, and tells you nothing whatsoever about capability. I’ve known people who looked excellent and had to regroup at the top of a flight of stairs.
The scale is marginally better and still nearly useless on its own. It moves for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with whether you can do the things you want to keep doing.
Lab work is genuinely valuable and I’m not waving it off. But it runs once or twice a year, it reports on systems rather than performance, and no panel is going to tell you what you had left at hour four.
The wearable on your wrist is the interesting case, because it measures a great deal and interprets very little. It can hand you a recovery score of 62 and you still have no idea what you’re actually good for today. Numbers without a task attached are just numbers.
None of these are worthless. All of them are indirect. And what they have in common is that every one of them lets you keep the argument going. You can always explain a number. You cannot explain a hill.
The Day the Machine Told Me Something I Didn’t Want to Hear
A few years back I went out on a group ride and got dropped on a climb I had no business getting dropped on.
It wasn’t dramatic. Nobody said anything, and nobody had to. I came over the top somewhere around a minute and a half back, which in the scheme of a life is nothing at all. But I knew that climb. I knew what it usually cost me. And it had just cost me considerably more than that.
My first instinct was to explain it. Bad night’s sleep. Long week. Ate too late. Every one of those things was true, and not one of them accounted for a minute and a half.
That’s the moment I’m describing in this whole post. Not a crisis — a reading. The machine had returned a result I hadn’t authorized, and I had two options: argue with it, or use it.
I used it. I went back and looked at what had actually changed over the previous eight months, and it turned out to be a lot less mysterious than I wanted it to be. Sleep had gotten worse and I’d quietly normalized it. I’d let the strength work slide because riding felt more urgent and more fun. My eating had drifted in a direction I’d have flatly denied if you’d asked me about it the week before.
None of that was visible from the inside. All of it showed up on a hill.
What an Honest Instrument Looks Like
You don’t need two wheels. You need something with four properties, and the activity itself matters a lot less than the properties do.
It has to be repeatable. The same route, the same course, the same lift, the same distance. If the test changes every time you run it, you aren’t measuring anything — you’re just collecting anecdotes.
It has to be hard enough to have an edge. Something you can finish comfortably in any condition tells you nothing at all. The reading lives right at the point where it starts to cost you.
It has to return feedback you can’t negotiate with. A time. A distance. A weight. A finish or a not-finish. Keeping up or not keeping up. Something that exists outside your opinion of yourself.
It has to happen often enough to show a trend. Once a year is a memory, and we’ve already established what memory is worth here. Weekly is a trend line.
Golfers have this and mostly waste it. The back nine on a hot day is a capability test if you actually pay attention to what happens to your swing around hole fourteen instead of just cursing at it. Swimmers have it. Anyone who lifts and keeps a log has it. Hikers have it the moment they start walking the same trail instead of a new one every time.
Active Aging Over 60 Starts With Knowing Where You Are
I think in principles, and this is one I keep coming back to: you have to know where you are before you can work out how to get where you want to be.
Written down, that sounds obvious. In practice it isn’t, because virtually all the attention in this field goes to solutions. Protocols, programs, stacks, routines, morning regimens. Every one of them quietly assumes you already have an accurate read on your starting position.
Most people don’t. What they have is a story about their starting position — and the story is usually a year or two out of date and tilted in a flattering direction, because they wrote it themselves.
Keep doing the same thing and you get the same result. That’s not a motivational line, it’s just arithmetic. But the corollary gets skipped: if you don’t know what you’re currently doing, you can’t know what to change. And you will happily spend a year fixing something that was never the problem.
The One Thing I’d Do First
Pick your instrument this week. One activity you already do, that meets the four properties above, that you’re genuinely willing to repeat.
Then go do it, and write down what it cost you. Not how it felt — what it cost. Time, effort, how long before you were ready to go again. One line in a notebook or one line in your phone. That’s the whole exercise.
Do that four times over the next month and you’ll know more about where you actually stand than you have in years. Some of what you learn won’t be pleasant. That’s rather the point — the pleasant information is the stuff you already had.
And once you know where you are, the next question gets a great deal simpler. Not what should I be doing, which has ten thousand answers and no way to choose between them. Just: what’s the one thing carrying the most weight right now?
If you’d rather not work that out on your own, that’s exactly what a discovery call is for. It’s a straight conversation about where you actually are and what one thing is most worth your attention next. And if the honest answer turns out to be a change in behavior rather than anything I could ever sell you — which it often is — then that’s the answer you’ll get. Book a discovery call here.
P.S. — On August 20 I’m running a free session called Built to Last: Why Consistency Beats Intensity After 50. It picks up where this post leaves off — the daily rhythm that holds together on the weeks when nothing goes to plan. Details and registration are on the event page.
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