The Midlife Cyclist: The Road Map for the +40 Rider Who Wants to Train Hard, Ride Fast and Stay Healthy

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Mr. Cavell asks himself and the reader as he lays the groundwork for the cerebral cornucopia to come, The final chapter, ‘The Mindful Cyclist’, gathered importance during the writing of the book. It grew from a single sentence into an entire chapter. Why? Because every consultant, medic, coach and athlete that we interviewed went out of their way to highlight the emerging importance of a holistic mind-body approach to effectively balancing hard training, ageing and general life health. All the cardiologists flagged up unspecified ‘inflammation’ as a possible contributor to potential problems. We look in depth at the role of the autonomic nervous system, alcohol and even sleep to help you become faster, calmer and healthier. I guess the answer might be to plan rides for the weekend where you can trundle for most of it but 'bank' your threshold efforts for the fun bits e.g. that 10 minute long gravel secteur or that signature climb etc. I have had more crashes and injuries than I would have liked in my life. One of them very seriously. I really don’t want anymore either. So I totally understand the sentiments and motivations behind the statement. I ride more defensively and take less risks now. I have a young daughter, wife, and dog that need me.

The book then takes you on a magical biological tour of your ageing body, to understand what’s happening at a cellular level as we all get older. It looks at how exercise (especially cycling) can be used as a panacea for solving the worst physical and cognitive effects of ageing as an athlete. It’s something I’ve heard time and again from the medical community (people not normally given to hyperbole) – no drug or medical intervention has ever been devised that has the efficacy and power of simple movement, at any age. My concern when my clients ride too much indoors is that they are going too hard too much of the time. If the client can afford a temperature-controlled workout space with a huge fan then that is much better. Ep. 4: One Woman’s World of Esports with Special Guest Team USAs and World #1 ranked Zwifter Liz Van Houweling Writing the book has made me a more grateful and humble athlete/person. Understand my body more. Forgive it and myself more when it lets me down and doesn’t want to do what I want.This seems to be suggesting a polarised training approach although he doesn't name it as such, which generally works on a 3 zone model rather than the more regular 7 zone model but whichever is used I agree with much of what is said with the odd caveat. You can’t have a midlife cyclist without having a bicycle. We take the opportunity to study this wonderful machine that we all seem to venerate unquestioningly. We also examine the first principles surrounding these miraculous machines – how did the bike evolve in the first place? Is it still the best expression of human biomechanics, over 130 years since it was first invented? Is the bicycle really humanity’s finest ever invention? Or have we just neglected to rethink the basics? We use our decades as cycling biomechanists to critically review how well the bicycle expresses our human potential, and why the basic bicycle architecture has remained valid, but largely stagnant, for so long.

For me, there was a lot of good news in the book. I’m not just a cyclist. I do resistance training. I run regularly. And I couldn’t help but feel this didn’t need to be a book just for cyclists. Yes, there was a lot of bike-related content, but there is a running book here too, and a book for anyone who is trying to maximize their remaining time above ground. Are you middle-aged? Are you slower than you used to be, more tired? Read this book. It will help you. The positive change in my view on racing, and the sport-related anxiety I once suffered, has made me a better person and athlete.

The Midlife Cyclist is my attempt to square the holy triumvate of age, speed and good-health, using the very latest clinical and academic research. Would I push myself to that brink of physical shutdown, either in training or competition, at my current age of 58? That’s the main question behind this book. If the answer is ‘no’, then where is the line that I will not cross and what is its intellectual underpinning? If the answer is ‘yes’, and I should push the performance envelope without regard to age, then am I risking injury or even death? Mindfulness is almost certainly where the gold is buried in terms of harmonising future performance and longevity for any athlete, but most especially midlife cyclists. Our contention is that professional teams will spend ever more resources and time in this arena, as a way of achieving and preserving athlete performance. These concepts taken together are not something written about much. We have a lot of books on training plans, some designed for older athletes, and the author does not stray into this area at all. But Cavell’s views, both from his past as an amateur racer as well as his profession, are food for thought. He gently ridicules our attachment to numbers, pointing out that V02 max is nothing really useful and even FTP, the measure of functional threshold power, should not be our focus. As someone with biomechanical expertise, he feels that some drills, such as one-legged pedalling, are useless or injurious. He is not impressed with our pursuit of high cadences, or even smooth pedalling, noting that the people who stomp on the pedals tend to be the ones winning the races. I was reminded of watching a Giro d’Italia stage years ago where a Russian and a French rider had escaped and Phil Liggett pointed out how awkward and gawky the Russian looked compared to the elegant spinning of the Frenchman but Paul Sherwen interrupted, pointing out that they were both going the same speed so what did it matter? As someone who has spent years building souplesse, that effortless and beautiful fusion of man and machine, well, I was a bit disappointed but sometimes looking good is better than being fast, yes?

Data from Dr Jon Baker, who was a coach with Team Dimension Data for four years, says that his amateur clients (that’s you and me) are closer to fatigue and nearer to being overtrained than the professionals who ride for a living and race nine months of the year all around the world! That statement was genuinely worthy of an exclamation mark. And underpinning this startling mismatch is a fundamental misunderstanding about how the human body works, and therefore improves. It drives us to develop skills and coping strategies. It is intrinsically a dynamic model. Outside we are also coping with ever-changing weather, road, trail conditions, and topography. Robot fell in love with cycling watching the older neighborhood kids ride wheelies down the street. It was the early '70s, and Evel Knievel was jumping motorcycles over buses. Everything seemed possible. From that moment, the die was cast (iacta alia est). There is nothing like competing with your support system within inches. In addition, with technological advances in the virtual cycling game, I communicate with my teammates via Discord. Much the same applies. In Series II we delve deeper into the risks, costs, benefits, compromises, and realistic aims and goals of midlife performance beyond fitness.

Is there a difference between those who've exercised their whole life and those who come to retirement to take up cycling? Are there different challenges and different problems? We start the book with rather humbling first principles – that reaching middle age at all is a formidable achievement, as we’ve seen already. In a quarter of a million years we have wandered and now cycled the planet, but it is only in the last century that getting past 40 years of age has been a real possibility. And as a possible consequence, how the veteran human form reacts to being physically pushed to the extreme is still fairly poorly understood. Bluntly, in evolutionary terms we are not really meant to be alive at all, and almost certainly would not be at any other time in history. The experts and doctors in part hypothesise, speculate and theorise about how the ageing body reacts to high performance. Their frustration at not having all the answers at their fingertips is palpableand provides the impetus for much of their current research and thinking. Renowned cycling biomechanics pioneer, Phil Cavell, explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance. Using contributions from leading coaches, ex-professionals and pro-team doctors, he produces the ultimate manifesto for mature riders who want to stay healthy, avoid injury – and maximise their achievement levels. Simply riding your bike and undertaking no other exercise is probably a poor strategy, especially if most of your riding is inside rather than outside – the former could encourage dehydration, overexertion and limited cognitive engagement in terms of terrain change and machine control. Riding indoors will almost certainly not positively contribute to maintaining your fluid intelligence.” The complex and highly interactive relationship between age, health and athletic fitness is the holy triumvirate – there are many out there who feel that only two can increase significantly at any one time – age and fitness or age and health.