On March 27, I finished a 60-minute Power Zone ride on my Peloton. Average watts: 175. Distance: 19.6 miles. Average speed: 19.8 miles per hour. Calories burned: 961. Seventy-six percent of the ride in Heart Rate Zone 4. Thirteen percent in Zone 5. I set a personal best — 626 kilojoules, up from 570. Leaderboard rank: 192 out of 939 riders.
Top 20 percent.
The average Peloton subscriber is 38 years old. I am 72, living in Portugal, and apparently I didn't get the memo.
Watching friends and family age has sharpened something I couldn't ignore. Ageism is the last socially acceptable prejudice — and it hides in plain sight. Consider the casual vocabulary we've built around it. They're past their prime. They can't keep up. They're a burden on the system. They don't contribute anymore. Swap in women and you have vulgar sexism. Swap in a racial group and you have something we'd rightly call out in public. Swap in older people and it passes without comment — at the dinner table, in the boardroom, in the doctor's office.
We have built legal and cultural frameworks, imperfect but visible, to confront sexism and racism. Ageism we accept. Quietly. Systemically. Without outrage.
Becca Levy at the Yale School of Public Health has spent her career documenting what that acceptance costs. Her book Breaking the Age Code makes the argument with evidence: we absorb aging stereotypes from childhood, internalize them, and over time they shape our physical and cognitive reality. Internalized negative beliefs about aging degrade memory, slow physical function, and shorten lifespans. The mechanism isn't psychological. It's physiological. Positive age beliefs are linked to better health outcomes and can add roughly 7.5 years of life.
The stereotypes are not just offensive. They are biological. They get inside the body and do their work there.
I think about that on the bike. 192 out of 939. Zone 4 for 45 minutes. A personal best at 72, in a field that skews 34 years younger. The data doesn't care about the stereotype. Neither, apparently, does the body — if you refuse to hand it the script.
The longevity industry will sell you supplements, protocols, and optimized sleep. What it won't sell you is the thing that actually matters: a culture that stops treating getting old as a problem to be solved. The leaderboard already knows that. I'm just keeping up.