Back in the early 1980s, when Ajax Motorcycles was still a modest little operation tucked into a strip mall on 89th Street in south Oklahoma City, I walked in looking for my first real dirt bike. Denny Beitler sold me a Husqvarna WR250—a fast, light two-stroke woods racer that felt like pure mischief on two wheels. It was the only time in a long motorcycle career that I managed to be a somewhat competitive amateur racer. The shop was small, the inventory was focused, and Denny and his wife Marilyn were already building something bigger than the four walls around them.
They had started Ajax Motorcycle Accessories in the fall of 1973 in a thousand-square-foot space. Seven years later they needed 2,500 square feet. By 1993 the name had become Ajax Kawasaki-KTM, and they poured everything into a brand-new 16,000-square-foot building on South Interstate 35. They rode the wave of KTM’s racing success, introduced a lot of Oklahomans to off-road riding, sponsored racers across different series, and helped grow the entire dirt-bike scene in the region. Denny himself was a fast racer—quiet about it, of course—and he stayed competitive long after most guys hang up the boots. When the off-road years finally took their toll, he switched to automobile racing and found success in Mazda circles at Hallett Raceway and other tracks around Oklahoma.
He crashed hard more than once. The accidents left him bent and broken in places that never quite straightened back out. Recovery was slow, sometimes measured in years rather than months, and he never fully returned to the blistering pace of his younger days. He just kept showing up. Eventually the same stubborn streak that kept him on motorcycles carried him onto mountain bikes. Well into his seventies and now his eighties, Denny was still out there on the trails.
Fast-forward to 2019. I was deep in the long, uneven recovery from open-heart bypass surgery. Six months before the operation I had finished a full marathon. Six months after, another one was on the calendar and I was nowhere near ready. Complications piled up. Confidence cracked. Some nights I lay awake wondering if the old life—the one that included long runs, hard rides, and the simple assumption that my body would keep cooperating—was gone for good.
I decided the only way forward was to get back on a mountain bike for some cardio. I headed to the Draper Lake trails in Oklahoma City, the same place where Marilyn had later started her Dirt Divas group. And there, looking a little stooped and moving carefully on foot, was Denny—then well into his seventies. He invited me to ride with his group. No long speech. Just a nod and a quiet “come on.”
That was the day I discovered what everyone else already knew as “Denny Pace.”
On the trail the quiet, older man with the battered body simply disappeared. He set a blistering tempo that left most of us gasping. He didn’t talk much while he rode. He never had. Denny preferred to listen, and when he did speak the words were few, deliberate, and usually aimed right at the heart of the matter.
After the ride we sat at a picnic table. I did most of the talking. I laid out the surgery, the setbacks, the lungs that wouldn’t quite fill the way they used to, the heart that still felt unfamiliar, the marathon I was probably going to miss. Denny listened with that familiar little twinkle in his eye. When I finally ran out of steam he leaned in just slightly and delivered six words:
“Sounds like an excuse to me.”
Dammit.
He was exactly right. The words landed like a clean slap across the face. I had been rehearsing a story of limitation, and Denny—who had spent decades recovering from broken bones and never once used any of it as a free pass—simply refused to buy it. From that afternoon forward I decided the excuses stopped here. I would do the best I could with the hand I had been dealt, every single day, and be satisfied that I had done my best. Nothing more dramatic than that. Just the quiet, stubborn persistence I had watched Denny practice for as long as I had known him.
Seven years later I still hear those six words when the old doubts start whispering. Denny is well into his eighties now. He has switched to electric-assist bikes, but he is still out on the trails. No fanfare. No long explanations. Just Denny Pace, adjusted for the tools he has left, still moving forward.
Some people shout their philosophy from the mountaintop. Denny never needed a mountaintop. He just kept showing up, kept recovering, and every once in a while—when it mattered most—he would look you straight in the eye and tell you the plain truth you needed to hear.
I still look up to that quiet strength. And I still try to live without the excuses.
