“Enjoy the ride.”

Even if you’re in an airport terminal, an amusement park, or a velodrome parking lot, when some deep thinker who’s a laid-back dude says this to you at the end of a conversation, he’s doing more than just saying goodbye. He’s sharing his life philosophy.

When deep thinker and laid-back dude extraordinaire Ryan DeWald founded a cycling team in 2013, he used this saying as the team’s motto. Since then, Team Skyline has grown and grown and is now, in the words of Wikipedia, “one of the most internationally active [professional] American teams ... capable of animating races at the highest level despite limited resources.”

When I raced for Ryan, “Enjoy the ride,” was written across the shoulders our racing jerseys, one of which I still wear occasionally. The last time I placed it on a hangar, I thought about what it is that deep thinkers and laid-back dudes are ultimately suggesting when they say that to you.

To let go of control.

Then I remembered a time when Ryan DeWald was forced to take total — and I do mean total — control. For in April of 2014, you see, feeling bad on the bike led to a trip to the doc, and the 14-year cycling pro was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.

An unexpected bump on the ride? More like a Road Closed sign.

But DeWald didn’t see it that way. Instead, he worked with his doc to best learn how to ride with an insulin pump, contacted Novo Nordisk — a pro team designed to create increased awareness of the disease — and guest rode with them from July until the end of the season.

And did taking control like this ever pay off on the bike.

That season, DeWald finished first in 4 criteriums (multiple-lap races done on short circuits often in towns) and in the top five in 13 other crits. Those placements in particular earned him the title of best Category 1 criterium rider in Pennsylvania and placed him seventh nationally out of nearly 1500 Cat 1 riders.

So what in the world, besides a double dose of inspiration, are you supposed to get out of DeWald’s double success? That if you follow his lead and take more control of your health, amazing things can happen.

But let’s be real here. You’re not living to be 194 years old.

According to a paper still being edited and soon to be published by Nature Briefing, however, 1759 years of age is our “theoretical non-aging baseline” if we could only eliminate somatic mutations, those DNA changes in the cells of the body’s tissues and organs caused by environmental factors or improper cell division. But we can never do that.

What we could do one day, however, is eliminate the diseases that lead to early death. Then the soon-to-be-published paper predicts median lifespans will be “approximately twice current human longevity,” and up to 194 years of age.

Which would indeed be truly amazing, as is this statistic from a study published on July 15 online by JAMA Cardiology. Unfortunately, this stat suggests eliminating one of the diseases reducing lifespan will never happen.

For of the 473,000 deaths from coronary heart disease in the United States in 2023, 88.7 percent of them “were attributable to modifiable risk factors,” with risk factors like high blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol levels, and poor diet “being the greatest contributors.”

In other words, about 90 percent of the deaths from coronary heart disease don’t have to happen. So what I’d like to see happen is for you to exert the sort of control over your health DeWald did upon learning of his diabetes diagnosis — even if you got a two-thumbs-up at your last checkup.

For the fact of the matter is, my friend, you can never be too diligent when it comes to your health, for all facets of it are interconnected.

Proof of this is found in a study published on July 7 online by Annals of Internal Medicine.

In it, 95 adults who tended to sleep at least seven hours a night were instructed to delay their bedtime by 90 minutes for the next six weeks. After that, they were told to sleep as they usually did for six more weeks.

Before, during, and at the conclusion of the 12-week study, the researchers measured participants’ waist circumference, weight, and body composition, as well as fasting levels of the hormones leptin, ghrelin, and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), all of which help regulate hunger. And during the study, all participants wore wrist monitors that tracked their physical activity and sleep.

What was revealed at the end was more than just an average 1-pound weight gain and an increase in the hunger hormone leptin during the six weeks of sleep restriction. During that time sedentary time also had increased by nearly 30 minutes for the males and the postmenopausal females.

Yet participants didn’t necessarily expend significantly less energy overall during the sleep-restriction period, which suggests the lack of sleep led to increased calorie intake.

And that remembering what today’s title tells you never to forget is really important.