{"id":14951,"date":"2024-05-30T15:21:52","date_gmt":"2024-05-30T15:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/?p=14951"},"modified":"2024-06-06T14:42:06","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T14:42:06","slug":"join-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/spring-summe-2024\/join-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Join In"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Caroline Paul, (The Gutsy Girl)<\/p><\/p>\n

K<\/span>ittie Weston-Knauer puts on her helmet and instructs me to do the same. Her helmet is the cool kind, with a jutting protector around the lower half of her face, while mine is a plain old bicycle helmet.<\/p>\n

In addition, Weston-Knauer, also known as Miss Kittie, is wearing black canvas pants that hint at wild crashes on asphalt, while I could only find a pair of my mother\u2019s discarded Lycra bike leggings, complete with crotch padding.<\/p>\n

All this makes clear that I don\u2019t know what the heck I\u2019m doing. Luckily, I am about to be taught by Miss Kittie, who has been riding BMX bikes for thirty-five years. In fact, at seventy-four years old, Miss Kittie is the oldest female BMX racer competing in the United States today.<\/p>\n

I am here on this beautiful spring day, a little nervous and a little exhilarated because I want to understand how a rigorous outdoor contest like BMX racing can benefit older women.<\/p>\n

Studies show that competitive sports help youth with physical fitness, social skills, leadership skills, self-confidence, and time management. This leads to more success in the classroom and, later, healthy boundaries.\nSo why can\u2019t competitive sports help us as we age?<\/p>\n

BMX bike racing has a formality and structure akin to triathlons or the 5K running race for a cause that people gather and train for weekly, and I thought I could explore those similar outdoor activities through the lens of this lesser-known sport.<\/p>\n

Miss Kittie, who stands five feet, five inches tall with a gap-toothed smile, has been on a bike most of her life. She grew up in North Carolina, the third sibling of five brothers and a sister. \u201cIn our family, when you turned ten, you got your first bicycle. Well, you got your only bike, to be honest about it.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t until one son, Max, was invited by a friend to a track that BMX came into their lives.<\/p>\n

Miss Kittie, who also coached basketball and softball, was prone to yelling instructions at Max during his races. \u201cI was on the sidelines saying You-ought-to-be, how-come-you\u2019re-not. And finally, he said to his dad and me, \u2018If you think this is so easy why don\u2019t you try it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

On Mother\u2019s Day 1988, she got on Max\u2019s BMX bike. \u201cI was hooked,\u201d she says. She was almost forty years old.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Miss Kitty talking to fellow rider Lucy “Tough Cookie” Cooke, age 12, about the track. Photo: Caroline Paul<\/p><\/div>\n

When I ask her why she found BMX so compelling, then and now, she says, \u201cYou need to learn something new every day on this earth, and I am still learning in the sport of BMX.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently she was on a track that had dirt turns instead of the usual asphalt. She wasn\u2019t used to that, she tells me, and had to reassess the way she rode. \u201cWhat did I have to do to be safe when I hit those turns?\u201d<\/p>\n

The physical fitness that comes with intense exertion is also important to her, she says. BMX cycling improves the heart and vascular system, with its fast bursts out of the gate and its steep hill climbs. It may even be considered weight-bearing, since there is no seat-sitting as in traditional riding, and thus it also helps the bones.<\/p>\n

And there is the camaraderie, she tells me. The race circuit takes her all over the country, where there \u201care so many interesting people to meet. Being able to have conversations with girls and women especially\u2014you need to find something that allows you to continue to grow into old age.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t race forever, but I\u2019ll be at the track forever.\u201d There is also the sense of adventure.<\/p>\n

\u201cHitting a turn at twenty miles per hour. Can you imagine that? That\u2019s where the exhilaration comes.\u201d Finally, she says, BMX biking is just plain fun. \u201cIf you aren\u2019t having fun every day, you\u2019re wasting your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are actually many reasons Miss Kittie should, in theory, not be racing, period. She has suffered from osteoarthritis since she was in her twenties, which makes her joints hurt and which may explain why she walks with a forward tilt and a piratelike gait, legs sweeping outward as if to accommodate a scabbard at her side.<\/p>\n

Then, about ten years ago, she began the process of replacing both hips and both knees. She told the doctor each time that she needed to be healed by racing season, so she had the operations in successive winters and was ready to get back on the bike each April.<\/p>\n

But surgeries are nothing compared to the accident she had just a few years into racing at age forty-five. Attempting to learn how to jump, her pedal caught, and she pitched forward. She broke her neck, \u201ca C-4-5 break, like Christopher Reeve. And he was Superman, and totally paralyzed.<\/p>\n

The doctor told my husband, \u2018I don\u2019t think she\u2019ll have full use of her limbs.\u2019 And I said, \u2018I\u2019m going to walk on out of this hospital.\u2019\u201d And she did.<\/p>\n

Miss Kittie talks about the ensuing couple of years as if they were a gift, not an excruciating procession of slow nerve regeneration in her feet and long hours of physical therapy.<\/p>\n

As she recovered, she began to lurk around the track. \u201cI was walking around with a collar on my neck, wanting to qualify for Worlds.\u201d In September 1994, a year after the accident, there she was at the starting line for the World Championship 41\u201345 Men\u2019s Cruiser class; she had to race against men because there were no women from any countries in that age group.<\/p>\n

Of her fellow racers, she says, \u201cThey were shocked that a woman was there. That a woman of color was there.\u201d (In the 2007 Worlds, racing against women in the 45 and Over Cruiser class, fifty-nine-year-old Miss Kittie finished in seventh place.)<\/p>\n

When I first interviewed Miss Kittie, I was sure that my quest was to go deep into how competition invigorates us as we age. The BMX world had seemed a colorful template, especially gritty and macho, with an audience bloodthirsty for brawling wheels on the straightaways, shoulder bumps in turns, and spectacular crackups. Whoever came out on top would be revered, certainly. How would that sharpen our gaze and fire up our neurons, I wondered? But nowhere is any of that on display today. The watchword on the BMX track is more \u201cfun\u201d than \u201cwin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miss Kittie herself let me pass her on the turn. She is competitive, sure, but not if it means getting hurt. That\u2019s not to say that the BMX community doesn\u2019t appreciate a good race. There are many aspects of competition at play.\nThere is the camaraderie, the goal setting, the physical challenge, the way you can gather with your friends and just whiz around. In fact, becoming a BMX bike racer is similar to becoming a runner or a triathlete, especially when you decide to engage in these competitive sports through a large local group or regular meetup.<\/p>\n

\u201cHappy people tend to spend more time with others,\u201d says Yale University cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, also known as the Happiness Professor. \u201cThis is one of the clearest things we see from the science.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is not just the human connection that provides the well-being, though, but what studies call \u201cthe sense of community belonging\u201d or simply \u201cbelonging needs.\u201d This deeper feeling of cohesion is why outdoor activities like BMX can be so sustaining, also offering us what Santos calls a \u201ccultural apparatus\u201d to get outside ourselves and our own problems. She says that much modern self-care, with its inward focus and advice to concentrate on massage routines and personal downtime, may actually be self-defeating; a better happiness regimen is to, say, line up on a starting line with a group of like-minded speed enthusiasts, or take a new BMX biker under your wing.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite Miss Kittie-isms is \u201cEvery time I get on my bike I win.\u201d Like all her sayings, this is not flip. After all, Miss Kittie is not supposed to be here at the BMX track, in so many ways. As a woman, as an elder woman, as a woman of color, as a survivor of a traumatic accident.<\/p>\n

And yet, here she is. She knows she\u2019s the keeper of a flame, and a role model, an educator in a new kind of school. People look up to her, women especially. Kids look up to her.<\/p>\n

Miss Kittie is determined to age gracefully. \u201cGracefully means I am still active and engaged and involved. I don\u2019t know what my body is going to be, but I\u2019m not going to complain, \u2018Oh, Miss Kittie, it\u2019s awful . . . I can\u2019t do this, I can\u2019t do that.\u2019 I will always have a good time.\u201d She understands that there may be a day when she will no longer ride.<\/p>\n

But until that day, she will race against whoever shows up, pushing her bike to the starting line, hearing the names announced, lining up. The lights will flash, the riders will be ready. Into that suddenly quiet moment before the pandemonium of legs and tires will slide the creak of a bike being balanced, the slight sibilance of a brake pressed, and the whisper of humans breathing almost in unison before the gate drops.<\/p>\n

Caroline Paul is the author of The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure<\/em> and Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology<\/em>, which has been translated into fifteen languages. Her TED Talk, \u201cTo Raise Brave Girls, Encourage Adventure,\u201d has been viewed over 2 million times. A longtime member of the Writers Grotto, she lives in San Francisco.<\/h5>\n
From Tough Broad: From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking \u2013 How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age<\/em><\/a> by Caroline Paul, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright \u00a9 2024 by Caroline Paul. All rights reserved.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The positive effect of outdoor adventure on aging<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14985,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[186,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spring-summe-2024","category-spring-summer-2024-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14951"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15276,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14951\/revisions\/15276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}