is made by MPT to serve all of our diverse communities and is made possible by the generous support of our members.
Thank you.
Live from Maryland Public Television, this is "Direct Connection" with Jeff Salkin.
>> Jeff: Welcome to "Direct Connection."
Ahead tonight, MPT's Jim Hunter will have a preview of the Maryland Cycling Classic.
That's coming up.
We begin tonight with thoughts on a happy retirement.
Joining us now for the AARP consumer alert is Karen Morgan, a member of the executive council of AARP Maryland.
Karen, it's great to see you again.
We are here to talk about life after retirement with the headline that it is not just about the money.
How do you think about that because, frankly, for a lot of people, money and concerns about money are a big factor in retirement.
>> Yes, absolutely.
And so great to see you too again, Jeff.
Yes, money is a huge factor.
But from our standpoint, we get plenty of information about what to do with financial retirement planning, what to do with your 401(k), how not to time the stock market.
All of that sort of thing.
What we are not getting enough information on is how to plan for what you are going to do with your time after retirement.
When you retire, it's like winning the time lottery.
Like you've got like unlimited resources from a time standpoint.
What are you going to do with that?
Because just sitting around in a rocking chair or having lunch with your friends every single day, that's not a sustainable plan for 30 years.
>> Jeff: Well, if you don't mind, let me ask about your plan because you retired as an attorney with the state a few years ago.
Was there a rocking chair involved?
>> Okay, well lunch was involved.
I will say that.
And so was shopping; which I did for a good six weeks and then I started being bored.
And the pandemic started shutting things down.
Like in March.
I retired in January.
By March things were shutting down and I was like oh my goodness, what am I going to do because going to movies and shopping, that's off the table now.
But I was volunteering with AARP and we shifted to virtual meetings and virtual presentations and I worked on those and so I kind of backended into doing something that has been Extraordinarily fulfilling for me.
>> Jeff: Which is terrific and it's a great opportunity and there are plenty of places that people can volunteer.
Maybe there are people who want to play golf seven days a week though.
That's okay.
>> Yes, and if you can do it for 40 years, that can really help.
But I think there is something to having a purpose.
And also, the other thing I would say is that you don't just have the one thing that you do in retirement and have a bunch of things.
Five things, 20 things.
Shift things, change things.
I mean what interests you at 65 may not interest you at 75.
You may decide to become a philosopher at 75.
You may decide to become an author at 80.
You may be wanting to play tennis or pickle ball when you are 65, or you want to do all of those things.
You can do lots of different things.
I play the piano.
I knit and crochet.
And I volunteer for AARP and I walk with the walking group and, you know, and I have lunch with my friends and go shopping.
So there you go.
>> Jeff: Busier than ever, yeah you made the point that there is no shortage of information about the financial aspects of retirement.
Maybe less information about other important things like healthcare.
>> Yes.
And for me, health-- and I think for all of us, health, as far as most of us are concerned is the only true wealth.
That's why we spend so much time getting out to people how they can manage their health, how they can communicate with their doctor and get their needs met.
That stuff is really important, because if you don't have good health, I don't care how much money you have, you are going to be miserable.
You don't want to spend your retirement going in and out of doctors offices, visiting hospitals, scoping out nursing homes.
Retirement is to have fun and to be adventurous and do the things you couldn't do when you had a career that took up this huge block of time.
But you have to be healthy to really make the most of that.
>> Jeff: Well, that's obviously not guaranteed for anybody, and you have to roll with the punches as they come in.
A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out Medicare, Medicare advantage part b and all that stuff I know you have good resources for.
>> Yes.
We definitely do.
And Medicare can become complicated.
So that's why we point people to Medicare.gov and we point people to ship, which is like another objective resource that helps people ferret out whether they want to do a Medicare advantage type plan or traditional Medicare, the ins and outs of health insurance plans.
But taking care of your health in the first place, you know, retirement is a good time to sort of review how are you eating?
Are you getting enough exercise?
Maybe you got exercise during your day job but in retirement there is no particular call to exercise.
Well, maybe have you to make that your, you know, kind of a mantra, like I'm going to make sure that I'm not sitting, since that is the new smoking and I'm going to make sure that I'm doing stuff to keep my muscle tone up and to, you know, to just, you know, keep my microbiome in check as people like to say these days.
>> Jeff: One of the other things that you lose when you retire, is the structure of work; and not just the structure of it.
But the ability to interact with people all the time, whether it's virtual or in person.
That's something that maybe you need to put some effort into?
>> You definitely do.
I mean we identify with our work a lot, and you know, how we approach our work, a lot of times, will dictate how we approach retirement.
But social isolation is a huge issue, which is, again, why AARP focuses resources again on activities that can happen.
We have AARP.org and you can search for local events.
So you can just, you know, attend a movie screening if you want to.
Or you can join a book club, or you can go to concerts.
In prince Georges county, we have the fairwood concert in the park series.
I'm at a table along with other volunteers for AARP and we pass out literature.
But anybody can come and just listen to great music.
So that's a lot of fun.
>> Jeff: I'm thinking about the great senior centers around the state.
I'm sure every county has at least one.
>> Yes.
>> Jeff: And when I was a young person, I'm sure that I walked by thinking that I would never walk in the door of one of those places.
And maybe it's, you know, walking in the door there, like signing up for Social Security or Medicare, is an admission that we are getting older.
But if you don't walk in the door, you can't be exposed to any of these opportunities.
>> Exactly.
And as far as I'm concerned, here's something I'm always saying.
Nobody leaves this world younger than when they came in.
We are all getting older.
We have to get older to live.
So let's just stop demonizing getting older.
When you get older, that means you are alive and that you have another opportunity for growth and to do well.
And senior centers, they're pretty cool.
There are so many great things going on in senior centers.
Not just pickleball, but, you know, lectures on different topics, literature or math or Physics.
And there are activities that people can do and they can get together and you can meet new people that way.
Prince Georges County where I live has a number of senior centers, and there is even something called an eagle pass.
I went on a cruise, I went on a cruise on the Anacostia and the discussion was on the War of 1812 and I learned about the War of 1812 and what the Battle of Bladensburg, what that meant as far as the war was concerned.
It was really interesting.
But with my eagle pass, it was free.
>> Jeff: What do you hear from your friends who have retired?
Did anybody have particularly good advice as you were heading into retirement?
Is there a diversity of how people have approached it?
Maybe somebody did the, you know, traditional rent the R.V.
thing.
Somebody did something else.
What did your friends experience?
>> Well, Jeff, I'm sorry to tell you, I think I'm the oldest of my friend.
I used to be the youngest of all my friends and now I'm the oldest of all my friends, so none of my friends have retired.
>> Jeff: That in itself will keep you young.
>> That's what I keep telling them.
But you know, what I used as an example are my parents, to be perfectly honest, and my aunt.
My dad was the typical retiree.
He had a great career that he absolutely adored for nearly 40 years, and when he retired, he didn't want to do anything work related.
And for a while he bowled and did a lot of walking.
But then his health kept him from doing that.
And he started becoming depressed and just, you know-- he just declined.
My mother, on the other hand, she retired in her 50s, and she went to check with her financial planner about their retirement portfolio and came back with a job.
And my dad was like what do you mean you have a job?
She was like well, we got along so well and, you know, they asked me if I wanted to be an assistant.
I'm like sure.
So it was like five minutes away.
It was a five minute community.
She did that for 10 years and she always had an interest in travel and she started working with a travel agency and she became Vice President of that group and put together trips for seniors to casinos, to hot springs but also historical trips.
She designed a trip about the underground railroad and they went to the underground railroad in Cincinnati to check that out and my aunt took up quilting and sewing and the piano and organ.
They had a fulfilling retirement without the decline I saw my father experience.
>> Jeff: It's a whole wide world out there and we hope everybody gets to experience it for a very long time.
AARP has a lot of great ideas on their website.
AARP.org/wise friend.
Karen Morgan, we do appreciate your time.
Thank you very much.
Back to the R.V.
>> Thank you.
I do not have an R.V.
but thank you, Jeff.
♪ >> Hi everybody, I'm Jim hunter at the MPT sports desk and the countdown is on to the Maryland cycling classic, a Labor Day weekend of events in Baltimore leading up to the race on September 3.
And with us now is Robin carpenter, one of the best American cyclist who knows a thing or two about cycling.
He has been racing professionally for several years.
This is the second Maryland cycling classic.
What do you like about the race in Baltimore.
>> One of the things unique about the race in Baltimore is that it's a 120-mile roadways.
>> Wow.
>> And it goes from point to point.
We start out in the county in sparks Maryland and finish on these fast city circuits in downtown and these kinds of races, they don't exist in the U.S. as much anymore.
And so it's a rare opportunity for us to get to, us Americans, to show ourselves on kind of the international or world stage.
>> So this is nice for the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore, to put together this unique type of race.
>> Definitely.
We are extremely fortunate to have like these partners that want to come in and help put on the race and help facilitate the race.
It's a huge accomplishment to put on something that, you know, like I said, it's 120 miles and we go all over the county.
Have you to close down the roads.
We have volunteers everywhere making sure the course is closed and safe.
It's a huge endeavor and it only comes together with a lot of help from a lot of different places.
>> You are one of the top American cyclists.
Why did you get into the sport?
>> I got into the sport with my dad when he turned 40 and bought a bike to lose weight.
I think I was about 10 years old.
And we just started riding together on a path in Philadelphia.
And we both just progressed and got better and better and wanted to do longer rides, more miles.
Eventually I discovered amateur bike racing, which is kind of a hidden gem, hidden thing.
It's hard to find.
It only exists in sort of office parks on the weekends, places where you aren't going to disturb traffic and disturb the neighbors.
But I love the competition.
I love the thrill of the speed and the jostle in the pack and it's just something I've been doing for 15 years now.
>> Now how does one become a professional cyclist?
You know, the American sports, baseball, football, basketball, hockey, there are drafts and players are drafted into an organization.
How do you become a professional cyclist?
>> The first step is to realize you don't have any hand-eye coordination.
[Laughter] So what's left, right?
Endurance-based sports.
I started out running in high school and that's the high school sport that I did.
But cycling is really-- there is not much support for it on the academic school-based level so it's something people find elsewhere, someone else that they know, a family friend, someone in the family who understands that amateur bike racing is actually even a thing.
And you sort of progress up the levels.
You do bigger races, harder races.
Maybe you start to think about traveling to nationals, and it's such a small community, that it's, once you start winning these races, winning something on a regional level, national level, people take notice.
>> Now, how many events do you participate in during the course of a year?
>> This year is not so many.
I had some nasty injuries earlier on.
But typically you can say we are doing anywhere from 30 to 50 events every year.
>> Now tell me about your first professional win.
I understand that was exciting.
>> My first professional win was in Colorado in 2014.
It was a stage race.
Multi--day race.
Maryland is a single day event.
Colorado is this week-long race.
Seven stages.
We do a certain amount of miles each day and this was stage 2.
Finished in Crested Butte, which is one of the famous ski towns in the area.
And I was in the early breakaway, which is kind of this small group that breaks away from the pack early on in the race and takes a gamble on trying to stay away to the finish line.
Most of the time it doesn't work.
But occasionally, if you are sneaky enough, and clever enough and on that day also the weather was horrible, we were racing in a thunderstorm going up over a mountain at 11,000 feet and just happened to time it right and outsmarted the rest of the field and stayed away solo by about 10 seconds.
>> Wow, 10 seconds.
That's impressive.
Now, let me ask you.
How do you prepare for a race, especially like the mayoral classic that's 120 miles.
If you started in downtown Baltimore, you would almost be at the boardwalk in Ocean City by the time the race ended.
How do you prepare for suspecting like that?
>> Cycling is an endurance sport.
You will see the best guys in the world training for like the Tour de France, which is happening right now in France, those guys are training anywhere from 25 to 30 hours a week on the regular.
In terms of miles, that's, you know, it could be 500, 600-mile weeks but it's not only just riding long distances.
You are having to do intensity and intervals and efforts and that kind of training where you are maybe doing repeats up a climb that is similar to a climb that's on course.
So a race like Maryland early on, there are a lot of these little kicker climbs between a minute and three minutes long so one of the things I will be doing in the next month is doing a lot of repetitions of that kind of like distance of time, or length of time and intensity to try to replicate the course.
>> Do you work out in a gym to build up your strength or do you do it all on the bike?
>> Almost all on the bike.
Some guys will do gym work in the winter when it's cold and you can split time off the bike and do more strength training but most of the time these days it's on the bike.
>> Let me ask you about your diet.
I'm someone who should get a better diet going here as I begin to age.
But you are very thin.
Obviously you are on the bike all the time.
How important is the dietary habits that you bring in before a race?
>> So fueling is massively important.
Yeah the amount of carbohydrates we eat would blow everybody away.
Carbohydrates are the things that fuel the effort on the bike.
So not only before the race you will see guys putting down a couple plates of pasta or a couple plates of rice, but on the bike as well you will have riders trying to consume, you know, four to 500 calories of carbohydrates every day.
The drink mix with electrolytes or gel pacts you packets you might have seen, almost like gummy bears.
A simple sugar that goes down easy and breaks down quickly, that's the kind of stuff that we like.
>> I remember when Michael Phelps was winning all his Olympic medals he would say he would eat six meals a day because he needed to have the nutrition to keep it going.
>> Exactly.
My base metabolism is probably 2,000 calories a day but a race like Maryland, I would say we are probably going to be at around 5 to 6,000 calories.
Like burned on the bike to finish that race.
>> Now when the race begins, you say it begins in sparks and that's out in the country in Baltimore County.
There are a lot of hills on the roads you are going to be heading downtown to.
How do you navigate that, and do you go out ahead of time and look at the entire course?
>> Yes, definitely.
It's actually a-- last year it was one of the things that made the race most interesting last year there were a fair amount of teams that clearly will not done proper recon of the course so if you had a little local knowledge, you can see what is coming.
A race like on the roads out in the county, it's so important to know what's coming up because the sight lines are short.
Like you can't see all the way down the road to see what is coming.
And the hills are kind of-- they can add up.
They can be nasty.
So knowing when to like time your effort, make your effort is very important.
>> Now what do you look most forward to as a race is about to begin and you are leading up to the-- this is as you said, one-day event different from some of the other races you have been in.
But what do you look most forward to leading up to and then on race day?
>> You know, I've raced in Europe for a number of years.
And I will say that there are tons of fans there, but they may not really speak, you know, my language or I don't really know any of them and they don't know who I am.
And we are kind of, you know, the foreigners, the interlopers out there.
Coming back to the U.S., the thing I most look forward to is like relating to the people on the side of the road and seeing my family, who are from Philadelphia and will come down to see this race.
My wife will come down and see this race.
It's having the support from people that you know and love is the thing I think most look forward to.
>> What about the events surrounding the Maryland classic?
It's a weekend event, but the race day is on Sunday September 3.
What are the events that you look forward to in participating to leading up to race day?
>> Race day is great.
Being on the circuit and watching us come through the corners as fast as possible is exciting but there is also the bike gym, I think on the Friday, which is a community-based event.
We had a lot of speakers come in from out of town to sort of like educate people about bikes.
And I think there was like a bike Rodeo.
There was kind of an obstacle course around one of the parks.
There is a charity ride that happens, I think on Friday morning or Saturday morning before the race and we get to mingle with the crowds and the recreational cyclists around and answer their questions and just sort of, like I said, being with the fans is quite rewarding.
>> Do you ever get asked by younger people-- and you are certainly not old by any means, about your profession and how do you go about getting into it?
>> Last year I actually did a career day up in Boston where I currently live.
And it was funny, you know, I don't think most people understand that cycling is like a real sport or anything outside the Tour de France, let alone something that you could get into.
But I will say not often.
It doesn't happen often.
>> But if someone does come up to you, how do you encourage them?
>> If someone comes up to me, you know, the number one thing I tell people is to just get out and figure out what they enjoy and what they love the only reason I do this sport is because I love riding my bike.
I love how it takes me to places.
It's like the perfect speed to see a local area.
You can stop easily, you can take it in.
And I love being able to like take myself somewhere on my own power.
So as long as you, you know, are enjoying it and have a destination in mind, that's the most important thing.
>> Well, we appreciate you coming in.
It's a pleasure to meet you and talk about the sport of cycling.
And I'm going look forward to being down there September 3.
I want to see the end of the 120-mile journey thanks so much.
>> It will be a fast sprint.
I look forward to seeing you there.
♪ ♪ >> Now as we look forward to HBCU week this September, MPT's Charles Robinson with a visit to the HBCU sports summit at M&T Bank Stadium.
An event where schools are promoting the next generation of athletes and students.
It's all part of an opportunity to develop sportsmanship, teamwork, cooperation and competition and a chance for families and students to learn about the experience of attending HBCUs.
>> Christie Lynn Thor keeps a watchful eye on her son cabril as he goes through the drills at the HBCU Sports Summit.
She has firsthand knowledge of the impact Lincoln university, an HBCU, had on her life.
>> I went to Lincoln and his Godfather went to Moorehouse and his uncle went to Hampton, so I'm pretty much trying to put it into him, it runs in our blood for whatever university you want to go to but when it comes to HBCU, it's natural love you have to an HBCU.
>> A chance of a lifetime for these people to practice on a field used by professionals.
What most people don't know, only 1% make it to the NFL.
That's why the HBCU sport summit gives them another opportunity.
>> Going to an HBCU, I feel like it's going to be a better environment for us where we can grow and be nurtured and I also feel like they do get recruited from there, you know.
But we need to talk about that.
We need to highlight our HBCU players and let people know that guess what, we can make it going to an HBCU and we can be looked upon.
>> Rochester reached out to a number of schools, specifically those in the mid eastern athletic conference.
>> This is a great opportunity for our member institutions to reach a really broad group of high school students and let them know who we are.
The elite 8 HBCU great academic institutions, so it's really important to be a part of this first initiative of the HBCU sports summit.
>> While a lot of work was done on the field, parents and students got to hear from leaders about the HBCU experience.
It included how to apply, financial aid, and new degrees in tech fields.
>> We want to be able to educate them on who we are, our culture and just what you would get from coming from an HBCU.
Being with people who look like you, who have the same interests, you can really be your authentic self.
>> On hand was the president of Morgan State University, who has experienced a record number of applications like many of his HBCU counterparts.
The theme running through all of these institutions is we are family.
These schools provide a unique skill set to nurture and connect well beyond their academic life.
In Baltimore, I'm Charles Robinson.
>> Jeff: And now for all of us at MPT, thank you for watching and have a good night.
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