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

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Substitute ‘exercise’ for ‘therapeutic’ and that could be my ethos captured in one very short sentence. Change the terms of engagement by continuing to train into middle age and beyond – lean in on exercise as the panacea to adaptively change my body for the better; to load the dice in favour of better, not necessarily more. One of the slightly depressing things about the book is that you detail exactly what goes wrong with your body and what stops working as you get older. And there's a sense that it's almost inevitable, isn't it?. You know, bits are going to stop working or slow down or not be as good. 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? 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.

I understand that now. I am old but I am no longer bold. But I still love the great outdoors, and cycling is an escape for me into nature and the wilderness. In a sense, cycling has become a means to an end, as well as a means within itself.Phil's book can help you be as good today as you always said you were ― Carlton Kirby, Eurosport commentator Interesting, although with perhaps too much of the medico-technical for my slender intellect to absorb. Angus, a fellow cyclist with strong interest in sport and training mentioned it. The book has lots of discussion and exploration of performance athletes, which is interesting, as much as anything because I have never, ever considered myself to be one and I take no interest in spectator sports. But such humans are undoubtedly extraordinary in their combination of mental attitudes and physiological adaptation. But he does also deal with non-athletes. With a longstanding partner, he runs Cycle Fit, a consultancy in Covent Garden. They have helped many people recover from injuries and have improved the bike setup and performance of many more. I may start racing again, but then again I may try and not enjoy it or find that it is not for me anymore. My dad was a glider pilot and used to voice this old pilots law, Every time you go above this level, you’re having to use enzymes to break down the excess lactate. Dr Baker's coach’s eye view: ‘If you feel good on an endurance ride, go longer, not harder. Going harder is risky. Going longer is safe. It’s the same with intervals — if you feel good, do an extra rep or two, but don’t increase the power.’ I am not sure this is different between indoor/outdoor cycling. I suspect that off-road riding is more challenging because you are moving around so much. I remember that my upper body used to be in agony after a cyclo-x race or MTB race!

I was surprised how much is still not known medically about the midlife athletic body. Longitudinal studies are being conducted. I wanted binary answers to binary questions much of the time, and sometimes this was not possible. I'm determined to grow old gracefully in lycra, and Phil Cavell has been helping me to do it successfully for years ― Gary KempCyclefit continues to work with male and female pro-tour athletes, helping them control the process of building resilience to training and racing in their bike set-up. boomers are perhaps the first generation to be physically active so late in life with as yet unknown outcomes;

Currently, there’s a quiet revolution occurring in the ranks of middle-aged and older sportsmen and women. Virtually nothing happened in several hundred thousand generations, in terms of mass participation of veteran athletes in structured training, and now for the first time, in the space of just two generations, we are seeing a fitness surge at scale. Most of our parents and grandparents wouldn’t have participated in hard training post-marriage and certainly not after the birth of their first child, as soccer and netball were inevitably replaced with fondue parties and trips to the pub. At the very most, our parents may just have embraced (probably way too late) the ’70s and ’80s keep-fit crazes – jogging or aerobics. As our middle-aged generation ages, we’ve decided to plant our flag on the more distant but brighter star of elite performance, achieved through the application of quasi-professional sports science and technology. 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?We also consider the big questions surrounding cycling as a fitness tool – is it fundamentally different to other forms of exercise? And, just as importantly, is cycling all you should do to stay fit and healthy or should you be supplementing cycling with doses of other exercise? (Another spoiler – you should.) It would say try and look at a broader basket of metrics other than just FTP, (functional threshold power). I would say enjoy your cycling, enjoy how you increase your performance: how you climb, how you descend, how pleased you feel on the bike, how much you enjoy cycling. I’ll finish with my usual caveat. I don’t know the author (although I did have a shoe fitting at his company many years ago) and bought The Midlife Cyclist myself. Neither the publisher nor the author know I’ve written this, but maybe I’ll tell them now it’s done. This book has helped me visualise a rounded training programme that I think I should be able to implement, hopefully into my impending 60s.

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