Cycling into retirement:
Bluffton's Biking Beavers prepare for the years ahead by staying active
Thanks to the baby boomer generation that began turning 60 this past year, “growing old” no longer means what it used to. Roughly 78 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 now see 60 as the new 40, revamping how society has long viewed aging and its stereotypical components: a set retirement age, deteriorating health and financial limitation.
Today, boomers are prolonging retirement, retiring and beginning new careers, remaining physically active longer while caring for parents and children and, on the whole, doing more for many more years than past generations. Bluffton University’s boomers are no exception.
One group of Bluffton boomers have reconnected through cycling, informally naming themselves the Biking Beavers. Many of them have been riding for quite a few years—sometimes together, sometimes individually—for fun and for health. While aging may be inevitable, these boomers realize it does not have to slow them down, and can instead offer them the beginning of a new chapter in life.
Reconnecting on the road after Bluffton
It was not until well after their college years that the informal cycling club began. Everett Collier ’75, the village of Bluffton’s postmaster, began cycling seriously in 1987, at the age of 35, after several knee operations made running and playing basketball problematic. In the late 80s, he crossed paths with Wendell Miller ’76, a sixth-grade teacher at Bluffton Elementary School.
“Everett was a year ahead of me at Bluffton,” says Miller, who had been actively cycling since age 21. “We ended up attending the same church and finally figured out that we both liked to bike.” Miller had done some riding with Gary Habegger ’76, co-owner of Habegger Furniture in Berne, Ind., who had taken up cycling after college, and the three men soon began taking trips together, covering much of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Michigan, in addition to Kansas, Montana and Virginia.
During their travels, the men encountered Mitch Kingsley ’71, a lawyer in Bluffton, Ohio, who had been riding almost daily, and his brother, Phillip Kingsley ’65, Bluffton University emeritus professor of psychology, who had taken up riding as a means to get to work while teaching at a university in Africa and had continued upon returning to the United States. “I can remember driving to work, when I worked in Forest, Ohio, at 5 o’clock in the morning, and seeing a guy riding with a light on,” says Collier. “It was Phil.”
Through the Mennonite Central Committee bicycle fundraiser, Bike Skyline, a five-day, 265-mile tour of Virginia and Shenandoah National Park’s Skyline Drive, Collier, Miller and Habegger met Jim Amstutz ’76, co-pastor of Akron Mennonite Church in Akron, Pa., and Peter Passage ’76, development director at Fairmount Homes Retirement Community, Ephrata, Pa. Amstutz began riding five years ago, cross-training with the running he had already been doing for 10 years, and Passage had been riding since the year after graduating from Bluffton.
“Cycling is a fantastic physical activity,” says Passage, whose wife, Susan (Bohrer ’79) Passage, commutes 30 miles by bike each day to her job as an operating room nurse at Lancaster General Hospital in Lancaster, Pa. “It’s a stress reducer and provides a good time for reflection. It’s also a social activity in addition to being a personal challenge, and it’s a great way to see the world at a more human pace.” Collier agrees, adding, “When you’re cycling, you’re outside in the open. You see things you wouldn’t see if you were riding in a car. It’s great cardiovascular exercise, and I’ve met new people from all over the country, people I would never have met otherwise.”
Crossing the countryside
Each cyclist tries to get out on the road as much as possible between March and late November, some logging between 2,000 and 4,000 miles each year. Daily rides vary 
in mileage, depending upon the length of an upcoming trip and the weather. Some ride year around, bringing their bikes inside and putting them up on trainers when it is miserable out. “I used to keep my bike in our living room, which my wife detested,” says Collier.
Cycling has provided ample opportunity to explore new territory. Several have ridden the Tour of the Scioto River Valley, an annual two-day, 200-mile ride from Columbus, Ohio, to Portsmouth, Ohio, and back again. For their 25th wedding anniversary in 2003, the Passages traveled by tandem from Akron, Pa., to Vermont and back, over the course of three weeks. In 2004, Miller made a cross-country trip from Yorktown, Pa., to Florence, Ore., crossing 10 states in two months, riding approximately 70 miles a day. Habegger, Miller and Collier have crossed Montana, among other states, and Amstutz has cycled Skyline Drive three times.
Depending upon whom you ask, Collier or Miller gets credit for the group’s signature jerseys that reveal their Bluffton connection. “We decided we needed to design a jersey,” says Collier. “We wanted to call ourselves the ‘Biking Beavers.’” When the jerseys debuted in September 2006, at a bike ride in Findlay, Ohio, response was positive. “Wendell, Mitch and I rode the pace lines trying to go as fast as we could physically go,” said Collier. “People keep seeing our shirts and hollering, 'There go the Biking Beavers!' When we pulled in for lunch, people came up asking where we'd gotten our jerseys. You have to be a Bluffton graduate to get a jersey though."
Biking away injury and illness
As the years pass, these Bluffton boomers have become more and more conscious of their health and, while perhaps not wanting to admit it, their aging bodies. According to The New Retirement Survey from Merrill Lynch (2005), the unpredictable cost of illness and healthcare is by far boomers’ biggest fear. They are three times more worried about a major illness (48 percent), their ability to pay for healthcare (53 percent) or winding up in a nursing home (48 percent), than about dying (17 percent). Encountering a debilitating illness or injury is a big concern.
Thirteen years ago, Mitch Kingsley’s doctor told him he had 10 years left before he would need a knee replacement. “For nine of those years, I was sweating it out,” Kingsley says. “My thoughts were: ‘What’s it going to be like?’ and ‘How miserable will I be before I have to have it replaced?’ If I go by that doctor’s prediction, I’m three years overdue already.” With his older brother having undergone an angioplasty in the mid-1990s to remove artery blockage in his heart and his father having experienced some heart irregularity, Kingsley is well aware of the importance of maintaining a healthy diet and exercise with age, and he credits cycling with keeping his body mobile and healthy. “Part of the reason I bike is to keep the ticker exercised,” he says.
Miller is also highly conscious of unpredictable illnesses, having witnessed his father and two of his children battle cancer: his father, lung cancer; eldest son, a brain tumor as an infant; and second son, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma while a senior in high school. While his father passed away in 1993 as a result of the cancer, Miller’s children made full recoveries. “I make it a point to be alert to health issues, prevention and healthy eating,” says Miller. “I try to maintain physical and mental activity to make for a better rounded person.”
With society pushing the lean, athletic shape as the look to have, boomers can be driven to exercise in excess, which can wreak more havoc than good on one’s body. A soccer player in college, Amstutz found himself playing in an “over 40” league. He says he was using muscles guys his age normally do not use and after suffering from a pulled groin, pulled hamstring and pulled Achilles, he thought, “You know, I’m one collision away from really knocking myself out of being able to run or bike. It wasn’t worth the risk.”
“In our culture, the media bombards us with everything we could possibly need to stay young,” says Miller. “We are taught that to feel good about ourselves we’ve got to look like this or look like that. I’m all for being healthy and young, but you reach a point when you have to face reality too. There’s an art to growing old gracefully, and I’m not quite sure baby boomers have found that yet.”
Out-cycling the standards
What boomers have found is a limitless supply of healthcare resources available to them that was not available to previous generations. Just 15 years ago, it was rare for doctors to reconstruct a knee’s anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in patients older than 50, says an April 2006 New York Times article detailing how active baby boomers are keeping their doctors active. Now it is common, as are surgical repairs to rotator cuffs, ankles and elbows, and knee and hip replacements.
Mitch Kingsley, now 57, had his ACL repaired at age 44. When he tore the ligament four years prior, his doctor said repairs usually were not made for a person of his age and status in life. “Now it’s easy to say, ‘We don’t think we can afford the healthcare we want,’ but when it comes down to deciding, ‘Will we avail ourselves? Can we?’ Well, we almost always do. It’s available to us, and if insurance covers it, why not?”
In addition to fully using available healthcare, baby boomers are taking advantage of the “longevity bonus” created by the increasing life span. Since Social Security established 65 as the “normal” retirement age, life expectancy for a 65-year-old has increased by seven years and continues to lengthen (Merrill Lynch 2005 study). “Baby boomers are pushing the limit of what mid-life means,” says Amstutz, who is just now finishing seminary at age 53. “We are getting older, but we act younger. I don’t think I’ll be ready to stop when I’m 65. I’m looking ahead and thinking,
‘I’ve got 20 years ahead of me yet!’ I want to stay active and healthy in those 20 years.”
“We baby boomers have expanded what was the traditional age category of middle age and old age in terms of activity for certain age groups,” says Passage. “Before, when people turned 60, 70 and 80, we were told you should not be able to do this or that. Boomers have questioned this assumption and gone on to do things people told us we couldn’t do.” Passage says that for the last several years, a group of his friends have ridden a three-day, 100-mile ride through Shenandoah Valley. Last year, one guy was 76. “The rest of us look a little sheepish when we say we are old,” says Passage.
Riding the path to retirement
The expanding life span is providing many boomers with the opportunity to retire, change careers and begin anew. While 76 percent of boomers intend to keep working and earning in retirement, on average they expect to “retire” from their current careers and then launch into an entirely new one (Merrill Lynch 2005 study). “Many people in my generation said, ‘This was a great occupation, but now I want to do something else,’” says Mitch Kingsley. “We started taking on different occupations—going back to school, going in a totally opposite direction—in our 30s, 40s and 50s. Now we’re hitting so-called retirement age, and some people I graduated from Bluffton with have been ‘retired’ for years. Retirement creates a whole new opportunity.”
Retirement is not yet on Kingsley’s mind, having started his career as a lawyer later in life. He has no plans to stop any time soon and sees cycling and keeping up with his grandson as primary fitness components. His brother, Phil, retired from teaching this past year and now devotes his "free" time to organic farming and the practice of sustainable living.
As a pastor, Amstutz has no immediate plans for retirement. “I can always preach part-time or do interim work,” he says. “There will always be those kinds of activities as long as I stay sharp mentally.” With his doctorate to be completed this year, he hopes to eventually do some teaching.
Miller and Collier both see at least five years remaining at their current careers before taking retirement more seriously. Neither plans to sit down and relax for too long, and both intend to continue cycling for as long as their bodies will allow. Passage anticipates retirement “sometime in the future” and hopes that when it does come, he will have the energy for a cross-country trip across America. On his bike, of course. No matter how the Biking Beavers end up spending their retirement, it is likely that their bikes will never be far from their sides.
by Jill A. Duling
