B
etty Olsen was just settling down to enjoy the golden years with her husband. The last of their five children was about to leave home. So, the couple had plans to travel. But then after thirtythree years of marriage, he sprung a little surprise on her. “I’m leaving,” he announced. He had found someone else, twelve years younger.
The pain rattled her entire soul and body. Life seemed over, at least the life she had known for the last three decades.
“Starting over at age fifty-five won’t be easy,” Betty said. But she decided it would do her no good to feel sorry for herself. So she got busy. She joined a speaking program, became a volunteer at the American Cancer Society and trained as a docent at a local art museum. She played bridge and tennis, worked at the local blood bank, and got certified as a nurse.
But no matter how busy Betty kept, her heart remained cold and lonely. Nothing really captured her spirit. Then one day, two friends asked her to go on a bike ride. Not just any bike ride, but a century ride - a sixty-four-mile journey up and down the hills of Gilroy, California.
The couple didn’t tell Betty, then sixty, the distance of the ride. “Or I would never have gone,” she laughs. Betty had poked around town on a bike before, but that was about it.
The threesome hit the road together with a pack of other riders. As Betty huffed and puffed up the hill, she couldn’t believe the breathtaking beauty of the country side - the sage thickets, the velvet green colors of the brush... Nothing compared to experiencing the wildflowers, the sweet, dank smell of woods, even people’s front yards. That’s when Betty became enrap tured with biking. She had determined when her mar riage came crashing down that she was going to find new frontiers, new worlds to explore, new dreams to dream. She exclaimed, “Life really begins at sixty!”
The enthusiastic novice joined two bike clubs and started to travel everywhere by bicycle. First, she biked one hundred miles in the Inland Passage of Alaska where she saw bear footprints and golden eagles in flight, and watched cruise ships from a mountaintop. The next sum mer she traveled to New Zealand. But these rides weren’t enough for Betty. She wanted to try something more chal -lenging. Like biking twenty-five hundred miles or so.
Her first long-distance undertaking was a cross-country ride from San Diego to Jacksonville, Florida. That was an eighty-mile-a-day, five-week trip. Her children were terrified, and her sister told her, “Don’t do that. It’s too strenuous.”
Betty admits, “I, too, was uncertain I could make it!”
But nothing could stop Betty, and she had no regrets when she found herself amid towering pine trees and fields of bluebonnet lupines. “I had never seen anything like it in my life!” she observed. In addition to the awesome sights, Betty loved stretching her limits and discovering new sources of inner strength. Invigorated, she convinced her forty-three-year-old son to tag along with her on some of her shorter rides, like the fifty-mile Tierra Bella.
Now seventy-three-years young, Betty has completed a total of three crosscountry trips, biked through forty-seven states, and visited thirteen national parks. She esti mates she’s done a total of seventy thousand miles on her bike since she started these great adventures.
Betty has made dozens of biking friends, and has been asked to remarry twice. “I turned both gentlemen down,” she says, “because they weren’t into biking or hiking.” Betty thinks she needs someone a bit more on the active side.
Her riding spirit and intense journeys - which include a trip from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and from Washington to Maine - have captured the interest of many journalists who have written her story a half-dozen times. “I find it’s an exhilarating fatigue,” she said. “I feel so healthy. I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been. It’s been a cure for loneliness. I have many friends. It’s not too strenuous. When you travel, you have no work, no shopping, no cooking, no meetings and no housework. And I’d like to get to know more of the his tory of our country.” Biking obviously is also helping Betty get to know herself better.
This paragon of health - physical and mental - has seen sights other people never see in their lifetimes. Once when touring in Yellowstone, with all the bikers riding single file, a herd of buffalo joined them across the river trotting single file, too. In Costa Rica, she came eyeball to eyeball with a monkey swinging through the trees right toward her. One summer, she saw swarms of stunning butterflies in the Ozarks.
These magnificent experiences are why Betty probably didn’t quit bike riding even after she got shot in the Napa Valley. She was at the very end of a bike line when a teenager shot her with a pellet gun. She was hospitalized for two nights, but doctors concluded that removing the pellet was too dangerous and decided to leave it where it was.
Within two weeks, this gallant lady -pellet intact - was back on her bike, cruising the Eastern Sierras. She had learned not to let a little detour stop her from exploring her newfound world. “Biking is so fulfilling,” she explains. “I just don’t have enough time to do all I’d like to do. I’d like to get to the garden, for example, but the weeds get there faster. I really love being with my children and my family, but I think biking adds a new chapter in my life.”
“When I rode the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail and the Natchez Trail, I felt like the pioneers.” She enthusias tically adds, “I hope my newfound discoveries will rub off on the rest of my family.”
Who knows? Maybe some of her family members are ready to embark on new journeys to broaden their horizons. Two of her teenage grandsons are joining her in the Tierra Bella, and her young grand daughters were at her house the other day when they said excitedly, “Grandma, let’s go for a long bike ride.”
Betty hoisted her grandchildren, one onto a tricycle and the other onto a twoseat banana bike. She hopped onto her bicycle, and together they rode an entire five blocks before the kids were exhausted. They enjoyed the exhilaration of a short jour ney that may well be their first taste of what it is like to embark on life-expanding expeditions - just like Grandma.
- Diana L. Chapman Woody McKay Jr.
Life is like a bicycle. You don’t fall off unless you stop pedaling.
- Claude Pepper U.S. Congressman