Category: Aging

I am and avid cyclist and am considering carrying a concealed hand gun for which I have a license to carry concealed. Does anyone else carry while riding and what are folks using to holster the gun?

Originally Posted to Quora

I was an elite road cyclist and expert/elite mountain bike racer from Colorado where I competed throughout for almost twenty-five years while holding down a high-level engineering career. This is not an easy thing to do, particularly over such a lengthy period. After sixteen years in the foothills of the Front Range (about seventy five minutes from Denver) but working closer to home, in Golden, I made my home in Durango for the last fourteen years of my thirty years in Colorado. While living in such a hugely competitive state for mountain athletes, with Durango being considered the “Mountain Biking Capitol of the World” (it may still be), I was compelled to continue racing and did well enough into my mid- forties to win (or place top five) in the few events I entered during my years in that much less populated part of the state. Towards the end, I was racing in just one or two events per year.

Being an accomplished elk hunter, both rifle and archery, and learning how to shoot and be safe around firearms by the age of seven, I have always been a “pro-gun” individual, but I have also lived and spent much of my time in rural, if not remote places, so I never felt the urge to “carry” while out riding. But that all changed in 2011 when I was forced to leave my adopted home state and move to Houston, if I had any chance of remaining gainfully employed in the oil and gas industry. It was a rough deal because I had hoped to stay in Southwest Colorado to retire, spending my “Golden Years” hunting and fly-fishing to my heart’s content. My wife and I made the reluctant move to the Houston area where she had already secured a solid position with BP at their US headquarters in Westlake, thirty minutes west of Houston. I found enough consulting work to get by at a time when I had two major back surgeries to coincide with the horrible (for me) move. I had to give up all my mountain activities but, after I healed from the surgeries, I continued to run and ride and enter a road racing event every now and then here in Texas.


Before I could even wrap my head around such a move, I was riding through some pretty rough areas of Houston, still in significant pain, to get to some halfway decent roads without getting hit, and I was set upon twice by small bands of the “criminal element” in a car moving in quickly from my left and they’d push me to the side of the road (as if they were well practiced in their craft) under some bridge or another. But I never rode with anything of value except for thirty bucks and the bike I was on.

During each of the two instances, I was able to “talk my way out” by first handing them the thirty and then stepping off the bike, showing absolutely no fear while making it known that I wasn’t going to make things easy for them. Standing six-four and weighing (at the time) between 185 and 190, (I’m not your typically diminutive rider and know how to defend myself), I somehow wriggled my way out of some bad circumstances based mostly on the “luck of the draw”. I had a gun pointed my way each time but no one with the gumption to pull the trigger and, like I said, I had nothing of value except for that thirty bucks and expensive bike. Fortunately, none of these “would be muggers” had the need or desire to attempt to take that from me.


From then on, I simply racked my bike and drove the fifteen or twenty minutes to reach those country roads, where I could safely park (though I did have my truck broken into once) and take off riding from there. After a couple of years, we were able to move to a nicer part of Texas, well away from the Houston area (a city I’d spent time in and learned earlier in life to abhor). Fortune had smiled upon as my wife scored a very good job in San Antonio, not far from her hometown where many of her friends and relatives still lived. We found some property and a wonderful new home in a very rural area, roughly fifty-five minutes from her new job. But she continued her “lucky streak, and, when combined with a strong work ethic and commensurate capabilities, she was given the opportunity to work from home for the last six or seven years. I managed to find a few sporadic consulting opportunities working from home and formally retired just over a year later, several years earlier than I had planned. Let’s just say that retirement has been tighter than I’d ever thought it would be, but the upside was that I would now be riding in some of the best cycling country Central Texas and the Hill Country had to offer, and again the need for carrying while I was riding went away as quickly as it had come.

Had this story gone differently and I’d been forced to remain in Houston, I could picture myself happily walking into a gun store, of which there were many, so I could have easily found what I’d have been looking for. After doing a bit of research, with all the options available today, I’d likely go with a Walther PDP 9 mm, as pictured below, with its 4-inch barrel.  There are several important reasons I’d choose this make and model above everything else available in the veritable  smorgasbord of handguns on the market today:


-It has the muzzle energy (“stopping power”) of a 9 mm;
-The four-inch barrel is a better choice for a 9 mm than anything shorter;
-The gun is relatively lightweight, but not too much so;
-It is Walther built and of Walther quality;
-It has good capacity for a compact at 10 rounds +1
-It is uber-thin and very streamlined with no major protuberances to get snagged on polyester jersey material;
-It’s a great looking gun and is well proportioned;
-Great sights and plentiful accessory options.

Last, (IMO), it is priced very reasonably when comparing build, features, and deadly capability.


Of key importance is that it would serve two important purposes. Its primary function would be as a personal/home defense weapon that had “concealed carry” capabilities for my wife. I would simply borrow it if out riding and would knowingly be passing through the kinds of places I described. Again, had I been forced to remain in the Houston area, this is the compact handgun that I would choose. I have huge hands and would have difficulty fiddling with anything smaller. For me, subcompacts and miniguns are out of the question.

Walther PDP Compact in 9 mm, with a 4-inch barrel

What Advantages Might Adults Have Over Learning to Play Guitar at an Early Age?

Originally Posted on Quora

I’m glad someone (or something) finally got around to asking this very question. I don’t believe in the theory that starting anything that requires a lengthy and difficult learning curve is iinherently easier if begun at an early age. While the theory has been around forever, it has also been riddled with holes. The further back we step in time, the more value can likely be assigned to the theory, but our youngest of generations are very different from those who were in the same place forty or fifty years ago. Time has steadfastly moved forward but it could be argued that our young are not learning commensurately with the speed of change. The requisite skill sets have not kept up with the complexities involved in moving today’s ball down the field. It is my belief that getting started early, whether at guitar or any musical instrument, offers only the opportunity to have more combined time to learn over the course of a given lifetime and become highly accomplished at a relatively younger age – given the same amount of learning time.

For me, in particular, once I retired and made the conscious commitment in time and resources to become a solid player of both the electric and acoustic guitar, I knew precisely what I was signing up for. I’ve been at it, in earnest, for fifteen years now. Granted, I have been consciously proactive in living healthy and remaining active to mitigate the inevetable aging process and learning to play guitar is one of the things I subscribed to those fifteen years ago, to keep my brain functioning at the same level, if not higher, than I found it, awash with exhaustion and burnout from a demanding career in large project engineering.

But, after engaging in some smart things to remain smart, I recovered and have gone on to spend this period of my life working on my “creative side” by taking up writing to augment the guitar playing (on average, I play for sixteen hours a week and dedicate about the same number of hours to writing. I spent about an hour a day reading about things that interest me, which does not include the news or current events. I could say that my life post-retirement life has, almost to a fault, has been about learning. I do not recall having the wisdom to thoroughly “apply myself” at a much younger age. Since I’m sure that I’m not alone with having such a midlife epiphany, this would mean that our learning process takes years to develop and (prodigies aside) learning difficult things when we are very young comes far more organically than we’re constantly informed.

I cannot speak to childhood prodigies who, almost as if by magic, are fortunate enough not only to have some sort of major proclivity at something, but who have someone they’re close to be aware of it and point them in the right direction. And, I can only speak to learning guitar as my instrument of choice, but, just like anything else, there is a range when it comes to prodigies. I think it is safe to say that it they’re surrounded by music, perhaps dad is a lead guitarist for a very good local band and mom teaches piano, and, between them they have a large music collection from which to listen and play to, then any offspring they might have is invariably going to have a leg-up on the local competition. Perhaps prodigies are not so much born as such as they are steeped in a musical environment that gives them wings at an early age. I suspect that it’s nearly equal parts of having their brains wired a certain way at birth and soaking in that musical cookpot set swaying over a gentle fire. Again, I do not know enough on the study of childhood prodigies to fully comprehend the mechanisms behind it. But if we limit the conversation you young prodigies getting an early start, then of course they hold the vast majority of players starting at any age at a complete disadvantage. But these tiniest of tiny circumstances have little to do with my overall comparison.

This has all been leading somewhere because, at least for me, I don’t think I would be any farther along in my playing, if, say I began at 12 and was now 27, as opposed to my actual age of 64, with the same 15: playing years under my belt. I would put my own ability to think and learn up there with any of the younger people I meet. And, it’s not just me. I’d bet my last dollar that my 55 year old aerospace engineering wife could be counted on for the same thing, as could many of my professional friends of a similar age. I would guess that there are many middle -aged people who feel precisely the same way. As I’ve said, the cross-section of young people of today is simply not the same as those of the same age bracket three generations ago I see on a regular basis that without their smartphones, they are ill-prepared to supply answers to even the most rudimentary of questions, let alone have the thinking and, therefore , learning ability (and mental discipline) to take on something as daunting as learning to play a musical instrument.

The question asks “Why might adults have an advantage over younger people when learning a new instrument, like the guitar?”. My shorter answer is that adults have myriad advantages over younger people at learning many things, and they’re not confined to learning how to play a new instrument. If a child never learns strong “thinking” abilities (this takes years) they will be forever disadvantaged when it comes to “learning”.