DEBORAH DELANO

Deborah Delano rides headlong into older age: wiser, faster and a teeny bit more rad.

When we think of older woman, if indeed we do, our thoughts might turn to baking, auxiliary childcare for grandchildren or the creaking encroachment of debilitating medical conditions. Before we progress, I must tell you I am a woman of advancing years who does not think sixty is the new forty, nor yet forty the new twenty-five. Sixty is sixty. It is not a harbinger of imminent death, it is not the end of anything. Let’s not deny the inherent spiritual wealth and beauty in this most serene state of maturity by implying that forty is somehow preferable. For me this age brings opportunity unfettered by self-consciousness, love founded on knowledge and understanding. It brings accomplishment, a sense of purpose and, to my very great surprise, it brings mountain biking.

I began writing a decade ago. I was fifty. Shortly after this I took up running and soon after that mountain biking. I love running, but mountain biking, I confess, was foisted upon me by my partner – a small and ferocious French woman who cannot look at a mountain without wanting to hurl herself down it on some moving contraption. She was put on skis in the Alps at the age of two and has progressed through snowboarding, white water canoeing, and now, her new great love is her mountain bike. To me, bicycles conjured memories of slogging home with my mates from school during the scorching summers of the 1970s, without so much as the price of a Strawberry Mivvi in my elasticated purse-belt, nor even a paltry Cyd-A-Lol – a cider-flavoured lolly from which we tried regularly, and unsuccessfully, to achieve intoxication. Such are the unquenched desires of the 13-year-old girl.