So This Is Fifty

What learning something new in your late forties — and what a mountain bike in Santa Cruz taught me about joy.

For those who knew me when, mountain biking may have been the last thing they would have expected me to pick up in my late forties.

And yet, here I am. I turn fifty this week. We rode Park City, Utah in the Fall. Rock trails at ten thousand feet and it felt like a breeze. What started as terror became, transformed over time, and one day I realized it was such a wonderful source of joy in my life.

The idea of learning something genuinely new and hard as I moved toward fifty had been living in me for a while. Somewhere in the background of a life that was already expanding and changing in significant ways, there was this quiet thought: I want to give myself something that asks something real of me. Not just growth in the ways I already knew how to grow. Something with a learning curve steep enough to humble me.

My friend Natalie planted the original seed. She decided to learn how to dance in her late forties — tango, cha-cha, hip hop — and then threw a recital with a hundred people watching. She had been inspired by her own mother, who learned the violin at fifty. That quiet chain of permission — women choosing to begin hard things at the threshold of a pivotal new decade — stayed with me. I thought: I want that too. My own version of it.

I tried guitar first. Lessons for the better part of a year during the end of the pandemic. I gave it an honest attempt, but that instrument doesn’t resonate in my body the way others do, and I set it down without much grief. The desire was still there. I was still looking for my thing.

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Mountain biking arrived as a surprise, which was a perfect bit of magic.

My life partner Cliff is a lifelong athlete. Mountain biking is where he finds flow — the meditative state that comes when the body is fully engaged and the mind finally goes quiet. We lived in Santa Cruz, California, which happens to be one of the finest places in the country to ride. Wilder Ranch State Park sits just north of town — this extraordinary stretch of coastal trails, redwoods, open ridge lines, the Pacific glittering below. He asked me to go. I thought I would try.

I was terrified. The ever so slender single track trails. The hard, unforgiving dirt. The roots. The rocks. The drop-offs — those moments where the trail simply ends and you have to commit to going over the edge and trust that your wheels will find ground on the other side. Single-track trails where speed is the only thing keeping you upright, and slowing down is its own kind of danger. Cliff made it look effortless, which is both inspiring and slightly maddening when you are on your third attempt to get over a root cluster without crashing.

Going fast over obstacles was terrifying in the beginning. I definitely crashed on Occassion, mostly out of fear. And then, without quite knowing when it changed, it became exhilarating. I learned to trust my bike and I learned to trust myself.

Cliff was remarkably patient. He would wait at the bottom of a technical section and call up on the walkie talkie with encouragement, and then wait again, and somehow never make me feel like the slowest or most frightened person on a mountain bike in the history of the sport, even when I almost certainly was. That kind of patience is its own form of love.

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What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I was learning all of this while navigating the increasingly difficult symptoms of metabolic syndrome — the fatigue, the inflammation, the days when my body had almost no bandwidth for anything extra. You can read the full story in my last post. The short version is that I was not well, and being not well while trying to learn something physically demanding is — well, hard!

There were days on the trail when I had to slow down not because of the terrain but because my body or my mind simply couldn’t push harder. Days when I got home and was done for the rest of the afternoon. Days when I wondered if this was actually a reasonable thing to be doing.

But we went religiously. Week after week, Wilder Ranch, the view of the Pacific Ocean far down below, the cascade of wildflowers through the meadows, the spicy scent in the forest. And something started to shift — not just in my riding, but in me. The air on my face. The immersion in terrain that would take a day or two to reach on foot. The way the body, when asked to navigate roots and rocks and dropoffs, stops thinking about everything else entirely. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything else or I would crash. The trail requires your complete presence. It is, in its own way, a form of moving meditation.

Mountain biking became the most fun thing we were doing. It got us through the mold in the house, and the health issues, and the eventual move. It was something we shared that created connection in the particular way that nature and shared physical challenge creates connection — a bond that lives in the body, not just the mind.

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Last fall, we went to Park City, Utah to ride.

Park City is not a beginner’s mountain. The trails run at eight to ten thousand feet of elevation, on the sides of mountain tops, on rock. It is the kind of riding that requires not just fitness but confidence — a deep cellular trust in your own body’s capacity to navigate what’s in front of it.

I rode it. Not just survived it — rode it. And it was a breeze.

It was a true testament to perseverance and capacity. To what becomes possible when you stay with something long enough to stop being afraid of it.

I thought of Natalie on that mountain. Of her mother and her violin. Of the chain of inspiration that moves through women when one of them decides to do the hard, unfamiliar, slightly terrifying thing and lets people watch. I thought of all the ways we talk ourselves out of beginning — too old, too late, not the right time, not naturally gifted, not athletic enough, not well enough.

And I thought: none of that was true. It was never true. It was just the story that lives in the space between wanting something and beginning it.

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I am turning fifty this week. I am in better shape — physically, metabolically, spiritually — than I was at forty. And I’ve learned that learning things is not only for the young.

If you are sitting with something you’ve always wanted to try but haven’t started yet — the instrument, the language, the physical practice, the creative work — I want to offer you this:

The time is not coming. This is it. And you are more capable than the story you’ve been telling yourself about why you haven’t begun.

Start.

So this is fifty. It turns out it’s pretty good.