A century and a half

September 26, 1958; a day that will live in infamy. This future goofball was born!

50 years, huh! How did that happen? Well, I suppose that since I’m here, I might as well celebrate.

I know that we use years as milestones because they’re easy to count. Still, I always thought it would be much cooler to use every billion seconds as a major milestone in our lives since they only come around every 31.69 years. Somehow it doesn’t seem so bad to say that I’m just over a billion and a half seconds old.

What I really wanted for my fiftieth birthday was for my four adolescent children to treat each other nicely for an entire day. Since that’s about as likely as Michael Jackson’s children turning out to be normal, I chose a more personal goal.

Every year, I go on a 100 kilometer bike ride on my birthday. This year I decided to do a century, which is a one hundred mile bike ride (162 kms). My original goal was to do it in under six hours but to do that, I would have to lose another 25 pounds. Nevertheless, I still managed to complete the distance in just over six and a half hours. Not bad for a fat man of 105 kg (that’s right, metric weights don’t sound as bad).

Here is a picture of my final few meters!

And in case you’re wondering what six and a half hours in a cycling helmet does to your hair…

I am now far more aerodynamic than I ever was!

Not only that, I now come in two-tone!

Here is what I wrote about goal-setting in this week’s column:

A century and a half
(Source: Journal Métro; Pédaler 100 miles à 50 ans, October 21, 2008)

Well I guess it was inevitable. Despite my best efforts at slowing down our earth’s orbit around the sun using the power of my mind, I still turned 50. So what did this old guy do on his “half-century” birthday? I got on my bike and rode my first “century.” For the uninitiated, a century is what cyclists call a hundred-mile ride (162 kilometers). It is considered the cycling equivalent of a marathon.

Stepwise Goal-setting
Achieving my goal for my fiftieth birthday has taught me a great deal about the process of setting and achieving goals. This particular one took nearly twenty years. It started when I decided to buy a bike. I remember how thrilled I was with my first “long” ride of 12 kilometers. Next came 20, 30, 50 and my first Tour de L’ile at 67 kms!

Twelve years ago, I started riding 100 kilometers every birthday. The symbolism of it made it more motivating. About four years ago, I started thinking about the possibility of doing a century. It was hard to imagine when I considered how I typically felt after just half the distance (81 kms)! Nevertheless, I worked at it all summer, building up to it with many long rides of between 100 and 130 kilometers. I also made sure to tell my goal to everyone I knew. This way I would be too embarrassed to back down. When the day finally came, it was total agony but I didn’t care. I even sprinted over the last kilometer!

Mapping out a route
We all have goals; to be fit, to be rich, to complete an education, to travel. The problem with most of them is that they are too big to achieve in a single step. Goals are easy to state but unless we map out a route with intermediate steps that are doable, the end point won’t be reached.

I like to imagine the steps along the way as climbing a ladder in soft ground. As you take a step, the ladder slowly sinks into the ground. Once back on level ground, the next step is only one rung up. Looking up at how far we dream of reaching could easily discourage us. If, instead, we wait for the next step to get closer by mastering the previous one, it is often a piece of cake!

Make each goal reachable, symbolic and fun and you never know how far you will get. As for me, after having achieved my goal for my fiftieth birthday, I now turn to the next one. I think for my 51st birthday I’ll set a more modest goal. By then, I hope to be able to sit once again!

Tagged as cycling, Goal-setting.

Posted in Life.

Posted on 25 Oct 2008