The Art of Conscious Aging: Riding a Bike Around Tahoe at Age 79

By Will Apotheker

“I think a lot of people in the latter part of their life don’t reach out to try to extend themselves to do something challenging. For us, at this time of our lives, honestly, we’re having the greatest time of our lives.”

-Warner Wong, Tahoe Donner Resident

Warner Wong is about to turn 80 in January, but you’d never know it. Not by the way he looks, the way he carries himself or by his extracurricular activities. This spring, Warner and his wife participated in “America’s Most Beautiful Bike Ride,” a 72-mile ride around Lake Tahoe. This event is a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. 

“There’s a lot of good that comes from this bike ride,” says Warner. “Cancer patients and survivors are riding in it, people who have lost loved ones and supporters of the charity ride in it. So for us, it was a great chance to support a great cause while doing something special together.”

Warner grew up in a native village in Hawaii and was a football player at the University of Oregon before serving in Vietnam. He met his wife, Sandy, later in life, when they had both been widowed, and he moved to Tahoe Donner full-time with her about 6 years ago. Sandy’s family has lived in Tahoe Donner for about 50 years. She bought her home here in 1974, and has always wanted to do a bike ride around Lake Tahoe. So when this opportunity presented itself, they jumped at the chance. 

To train for the event, they spent two months going on extended bike rides of about three hours at a time. Warner estimated this ride to take about seven hours to complete. Warner works out daily at the Trout Creek Recreation Center, so he’s in great shape, but he admits that this race was still a challenge. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We chose something challenging, something that we had to reach for and not just something that was easy to do. I’ve biked around parts of Lake Tahoe before, but never the entire thing. So I thought, well, this is an opportunity to really challenge myself and do it before I turn 80.”

If he sounds a bit enlightened, that’s no accident either. Warner and Sandy are Meditation leaders here in Truckee, representing Ananda located outside of Nevada City and supporting Yoga/Meditation communities worldwide. They hold weekly group meditations at their home in Tahoe Donner. Warner says a lifetime of meditation helped him immensely with the bike ride.

“Meditation supports you because it gives you a focus. When you find that focus and that sense of stillness, you can begin to draw more upon your intuition. You open yourself up to higher consciousness, to more than what’s going on outside of yourself. You focus on the importance of an inner life.”

Warner says he visualized himself completing the race before it even began, which gave him a sense of calm heading into the event. “My mantra, if you will, was simply, ‘Just Do It.’ That’s it. Just do it.”It also helped that he was doing this for a reason bigger than himself: charity, of course, but also for his relationship. Sandy rode for 5-year-old Emilia Fischer from Medford, who has leukemia.

“I’ve done a lot of things physically over the years, but I wanted a goal that was bigger than myself. Doing it with Sandy and then having that opportunity to share it – not just for the moment, but for years to come – we can look back at us riding around Lake Tahoe together as something to feel good about and that we did together.”