What Athletes Don't Know After 60

Dave Medema (right) and his wife, Fenna Diephuis, on the White Pine Trail in Michigan. Dave's ordeal after a bike accident taught him some lessons all older athletes need to learn.

By Ray Glier

The saying goes that when you reach your 60th birthday, “There is nothing left to learn the hard way” because you’ve been through every bruise life has to offer. You, with your wisdom and wrinkles, chuckle at the kids, “You’ll learn.”

Except…

…it’s not true. We know it's not true.

Take Dave Medema, 72, who went hurtling over the handle bars of his bike four years ago and landed on his head, thankfully while wearing a helmet. He was paralyzed for several days and had to learn to walk again. Even now, Medema (Mee-duh-ma) struggles to walk a mile and his balance is crummy, so no more two-wheeled bike. If he pedals too hard on his 3-wheeled bike, his back fills with pain.

Dave said he still had lessons to learn… the hard way. Those lessons are a reason why he reached the 100,000-mile biking benchmark April 19, which was the four-year anniversary of his crash.

One lesson Medema learned the hard way was a saying first popularized by Japanese author Haruki Murakami in his 2007 memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
 
"Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional."

“I had to learn to live with and accept limitations, so I didn't waste a lot of energy thinking about poor me as a victim,” Dave said. “I knew that I was going to suffer, that I'd have to go through painful recovery, all of that. But I also knew that I had to choose my attitude.

“I allowed myself to feel all my emotions, but I didn't let my emotions drive the bus.”

Dave also learned that he didn’t need to be so compulsively productive, either with work or the bike. It is the reckoning so many have faced when struck down by illness or accident, or slowed by age.

“My cognitive pace really slowed down, and my stamina, physically,” said Medema, who is an organizational consultant and lives in Rockford, Michigan. “I learned what to hand off to my partner. I could do less work than I used to, and I learned to accept that I couldn't do what I had done in the past.”

Physically, Dave focused on what he could do, which was ride a battery-powered, 3-wheeled trike. He was at 94,000 miles when he crashed. The snow and cold of Michigan, plus less stamina, kept his mileage down, but Medema made his way to 100,000.

Two months ago, Dave and his riding pals marked the spot precisely when he reached the hallowed 100,000. He planned for the milestone to be at the spot where he crashed four years earlier.

That there is a red 100,000 written on the path, and not a chalk outline of Medema, was because of Dave’s choice of clothing, the hero motorist who saw him go over the handle bars, and just dumb luck.

Medema was on the White Pine Trail, a 93.7-mile stretch of asphalt from Grand Rapids to Cadillac. It was late in the afternoon and 40 degrees. That night, the temperature would drop to 35 degrees, and hit 32 with wind gusts.

The piece of the trail where Dave was riding, which is about three miles north of Cedar Springs, MI., is remote that time of year. There was a downed tree partially blocking the bike path. Medema had scooted around that tree on other rides. This time, though, he was lost in thought.

He came up on the tree. Saw it too late and hard braked. Even at 13-14 mph, he said, Dave went flying. Medema hit the ground and was knocked out. There was no other biker on the trail to call it in.

A man in a truck happened to take his eyes off the road on Northland Drive, a two-lane state road, and saw Dave flying. He saw it because Medema was wearing a bright green shirt. The man pulled over and walked 50 yards down and up a ravine. He rolled Dave over on his back and nudged him awake.

“Ray, if he hadn't have seen me and stopped his truck, and if he hadn't come through the ravine and up to the trail and revived me, I would have died of shock, or hypothermia,” Dave said.

The ambulance came and the first responders asked Dave if he had been drinking. Littered around him were beer cans. 

“In Michigan, you can recycle them and get 10 cents per can, it's a recycling thing,” Medema said. “When I'm biking, I pick up beer cans, and stuff them in my jacket pockets and my water holders, and so I had probably six cans and they go spilling out of my bike and jacket all over the ground, so they thought I had been drinking.”

More of an issue was no feeling in his legs. The grim looks from rescuers and their poking of his extremities and no feeling was scary. When he got to the hospital, an ER doc stood over Dave and was pulling gravel and pine needles and dirt out of Medema’s head

Dave looked at him and said, “I'm pretty f*cked up, aren't I?”

The doc said. “Yeah, you don't look so good.”

Medema asked him to pull out Dave’s phone and get a picture.

“I've got the most god-awful couple of pictures of what I looked like,” he said.

Here's one:

The rapid and expert response of the trauma squad at Corewell Health in Grand Rapids likely kept Dave from permanent disfunction. An operation relieved pressure on the spine. It took several days, but he could feel his legs again, and move them.

“I had to relearn how to walk and that was several weeks," he said. "I had lost all control of my legs, so even though they moved, they were quite out of control for a while.”

What Medema knew and his caregivers understood is that he had to be reconnected to the bike to heal mentally. Slowly, over time, Dave built himself back, but on a 3-wheeler, not a road bike. He rides White Pine Trail many days and often rides over the spot where he laid.

You don’t learn everything by 60. Dave was 68 when he crashed.

**

There is one other canon we might not learn the hard way before 60.

Do we have the courage to let someone else take care of us when we face our crucible?

Dave learned he did. He said the watchfulness of his wife, Fenna Diephuis, was a significant factor in his recovery. 

“I listen to my wife very carefully,” Medema said. “She gives me good feedback and challenges me sometimes to do more than I'm willing to do. Sometimes it's about just questioning my ambition, like, am I being realistic?”

“For any athlete, whether you're married or not, you got to have people who you trust, who you're going to listen to, and who will hold you accountable.”

Geezer Jocks still have to make their own choices on how hard to push themselves after 60. Just understand we have some things to figure out.

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