About The Long Ride
Greg Pallone
I am 70 years old. I survived stage 3 cancer at 45, co-founded a retirement advisory firm at 39, led it for twenty-five years, and merged it with a larger institution at 64. After I rode the elevator down to the car park for the last time, I discovered that while the financial planning for what came next was thorough, the psychological preparation was not.
I returned to competitive cycling after cancer and have completed numerous Gran Fondo events throughout my fifties and sixties. I am currently working toward my NASM personal training certification, with a focus on strength, nutrition, and corrective exercise for adults in their sixties and seventies.
None of that makes me an authority. It makes me someone who has lived the questions this publication tries to answer — and who is still very much living them.
Aging well is a sport. Let’s train for it.
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Most writing about aging is either too clinical to be useful or too vague to be helpful. The Long Ride tries to be neither.
The publication covers two things. The science of aging well — what the latest research says about muscle, protein, sleep, cardiovascular health, loneliness, biological aging, and the habits that distinguish a body that ages with intention from one that ages by default. And the emotional interior of getting older — grief, identity, the losses that arrive without ceremony and those nobody can quite name.
The wellness industry has built a significant enterprise around the first of those two things. It has almost nothing to say about the second. The Long Ride covers both, because the evidence is clear that how well we age physically and how well we age emotionally are not separate questions. They are the same question, asked from different angles.
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I started with a series called The Long Losses — six personal essays about the grief that quietly accumulates in your sixties. The shrinking table. Parents who are gone. The career that took a piece of your identity when it ended. The guilt of feeling well when the people around you are not. The clock you can’t unhear once you’ve started listening.
Many readers told me they found something of themselves in those pieces. That response shaped the voice of everything that followed. It is why The Long Ride is written the way it is — with honesty about how complicated this stage of life is, and without the relentless optimism that makes most aging content feel untrue.
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The newsletter is free and will remain so for the first year. Trust is earned before it is asked for. When a paid tier eventually arrives, subscribers who have been here from the beginning will have access to founding member pricing and everything behind the paywall.
No ads. No agenda beyond the writing itself and a genuine interest in connecting with people navigating the same terrain.
If you are in your fifties, sixties, or seventies — or heading there with your eyes open — welcome. I hope you find something here worth staying for.
