California, Here They Run . . . : Why I (Still) Ride : How Do You Know When to Hang Up the Helmet? : A rare spill for a biker at age 60 stirs up some worry. Could it be that the end of his motorcycle riding days is fast approaching?

The irony was that I had been riding fast all morning, and I’d had no problems.

My motorcycle, a 1987 Ducati built specifically for racing, had taken me safely around many laps of California tracks, through tricky turns where riders fall with some regularity. Now, with my ride through the hills south of San Francisco almost over, I turned off the freeway and was half a mile from my house, doing about 35 mph. I entered a little right-then-left turn that I usually took at a higher speed, and suddenly I was down.

My helmeted head bounced along the macadam, the motorcycle slid ahead of me, and I ended up on my back, staring up in bewilderment.

What could have happened?

I felt a sharp pain in my right knee and saw the friend who had been riding behind me peering through my plexiglass visor. Quickly, the classic post-accident choreography began: Cars stopped, someone called 911 on a cell phone, a couple of good Samaritans lifted my battered bike and rolled it off the street, and the sirens of approaching paramedics wailed in the distance.

I have occasionally complained about how much good helmets cost, but I never will again: Though I’d hit the pavement hard, I never lost consciousness or had even a mild headache later.

My throbbing knee was another matter, however. I was scheduled to meet my wife in Italy three days later for a long-awaited month’s vacation, so if I was seriously injured it would be a double disaster. Despite the pain, I bent my leg, operating under an old (no doubt inaccurate) axiom that if you can move it, it’s not broken.

The paramedics were methodical, insisting I submit to a neck brace, but also calm and reassuring. This was not the first time they’d dealt with a motorcyclist down, though, at 60, I must have been on the gray side of their usual biker clientele. I waited for a comment about my age--even an expression of impressed surprise would have hurt--and was grateful when nothing was said.

(Though later, when one of them remarked on my excellent blood pressure, I idiotically felt proud.)

Checking me over for cuts or scrapes and finding none, one paramedic mimicked the cheerful voice of a taped phone greeting: “Thank you for wearing leathers!”

I didn’t let them take me to the hospital, fearing that if an X-ray showed a problem, I wouldn’t be able to get on the plane. Instead, I spent the rest of the day with an ice bag on a knee the size of a cantaloupe.

Two days later, I limped down a ramp at San Francisco International Airport and boarded my plane. For the next 30 days, as I hobbled over the countless arched bridges of Venice, I thought about what had happened.

*

Though I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was 19, I had fallen only once before, 20 years ago on the North Fork of Long Island. I was riding a mid-size Honda at the 55-mph speed limit when a man on a bicycle swerved across the highway in front of me. I grabbed the front brake and went down, sliding along the road just in front of the astonished bicyclist. I didn’t wear leathers in those days, so I lost some skin and spent a few hours in the hospital.

I recovered quickly, but I had small children at the time, and the implications of the fall scared me; it seemed irresponsible to take risks with their security. So I put the bike away until I moved to California in the late ‘80s. By then the kids were teenagers, I was well-insured, and I found myself in prime motorcycle country.

I’ve since bought several sportbikes, each faster than the one before. Four share the garage with my wife’s car. That I began riding so enthusiastically at age 55 no doubt strikes some of my friends as peculiar. (When my father bought an Alfa Romeo roadster in his late 50s, I remember my mother muttering darkly about his second childhood.) And there’s no denying that my determination to ride as fast as younger men may have its roots in the vain wish to hang onto youth.

Not for nothing did my wife wryly christen my first Italian motorcycle Il Testosterono. But age-appropriate or not, on most weekends for the last few years I have happily joined the hundreds of riders who take on the “twisties” in Marin County and Napa Valley. In a lucky life filled with many pleasures, few things have given me more joy than these rides.

It’s not just the speed, but the beauty and elegance of the machinery, the need for mental focus and physical grace, the intimate interaction with California country roads, the pleasure of doing something challenging and the instant camaraderie with other men and women attracted to these same things.

*

So the second fall reverberates even more disturbingly than the first. Before the accident, I sometimes wondered how long I could go on riding so aggressively. I see other men with gray hair and beards at the various places riders stop for coffee, but not many. One of my friends, a lawyer my age in Kentucky, is back on his Ducati after a disk operation. But another, 10 years older, recently had a bad accident when he simply lost concentration--what riders call “brain fade.” Could this be what happened to me?

Knowing when to quit isn’t easy, especially when you’re quitting something you really care about.

Some athletes hang on well past their primes, when it’s obvious they should go out while they’re on top. They like the action, the friendships and the attention, and after all, playing the game is what they do.

Getting older, I’m discovering, is a drawn-out process of giving up things you hadn’t realized you’d have to give up. A wise French poet once observed, “It’s always the others who die.” For me, it’s always been the others who get old.

I can’t, therefore, see ahead to the border where I will have to surrender my passport to the country of the young. Do I imagine myself riding until 70, or 75? I have no idea. Maybe. After all, there’s John Glenn and those wiry octogenarians still throwing the discus at geriatric sports events.

About all I had ever decided was that I would give up my bikes if and when I had a serious crash. Not surprisingly, I have decided this wasn’t “the big one.”

And yet--to use a cliche I have come to detest for its inescapable truth--I know that I have come to the beginning of the end.

*

Owen Edwards is a contributing writer for GQ and a consultant and columnist for Forbes ASAP. He is coauthor with Netscape founder Jim Clark of “Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft” (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).