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Growing up in the two-wheel desert that was Canada decades ago, Leslie Reissner discovered the joys of cycling when he and a friend rode from London to Munich one summer after high school. But in 20 years, we at Cyclefit have very rarely seen an injury from which a rider has not been able to fully recover.
I was fine – I had simply stretched my physical envelope too far and had made too good a friend of pain. Unfortunately the images were mostly decorative and an opportunity was missed to match and interplay more usefully with the text content. One of the interesting things that stuck out for me was that this generation of older athletes was in unknown territory. It combines, speed, fitness, adventure and adrenaline; but it’s also uniquely functional and practical. And to paraphrase him, he broadly says that cycling, even at a high level, will give you improved heart and lung capacity at the risk of broken bones.Cycling in the actual world relies on maintaining a couple of sq inches of rubber in contact with the round to avoid disaster. The only tourist traffic seemed to be vintage car rallies that were often even slower up the Sa Colobra climb than we were. 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. We’re not only burning the candle at both ends, we’re then taking a blow torch to it to make sure it’s dead. In plain evolutionary terms, we missed the opportunity if we hadn’t done what we needed to do by then.
Phil Cavell is a world-renowned bike fitter who, together with co-founder Julian Wall, runs Cyclefit in Covent Garden, London. The second more honest statement echoes the sentiments of many of us, and is “I train and race bicycles at this level because I enjoy it, not because I think it is necessarily good for me. A 30-year lifespan seemed to be the upper end of the age spectrum for hundreds of thousands of generations of our ancestors for a very good reason. We look in depth at the role of the autonomic nervous system, alcohol and even sleep to help you become faster, calmer and healthier.We see hundreds of midlife athletes every month and every year, and they're all trying to push their bodies even harder as they get into middle age. Now every road has been sealed and polished to within an inch of its life, as the government has realised that cyclists make exceptional tourists – we travel light, eat out a lot, don’t pollute, generally don’t get in trouble, and stop for copious amounts of strong coffee and Ensaïmada Mallorquina sweet bread. 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. Currently, there’s a quiet revolution occurring in the ranks of middle-aged and older sportsmen and women. Our most important goal as endurance athletes surely has to be to increase our oxidative or aerobic performance window, to become better at producing more power but at the same time staying oxidative/aerobic.
Once I move closer to racing, so maybe block 4 I would then take the above approach and do little or no zone 2 in a 3 zone system or Z3/4 in a 7 zone system and keep it 80/20 or 90/10 endurance / HIIT. We need to become lean, long-burn machines and the only way to achieve this is to ride at this specific level — remember that we're highly adaptable creatures and our bodies will change and improve based on specific repeated stresses.Or as Dr Nigel Stephens so eloquently frames the proposition: ‘As cyclists, we trade hugely improved cardiovascular and cognitive health for occasional orthopaedic trauma.
Exercise may well be the finest drug the pharmaceutical industry never invented, but can we also have too much of a good thing? No generation before us has sought to extract so much from their bodies so late in life, in sufficient quantities for it to be interesting or significant.Stick a pin almost anywhere on the human existence timeline and the life expectancy for most of our ancestors would be a disappointing 20 to 30 years. If you ride a bike, just as if you ride a horse, there’s always a chance that you could have a tumble. And underpinning this startling mismatch is a fundamental misunderstanding about how the human body works, and therefore improves. But the fundamentals were that I was young, fit, strong and largely conditioned for the exertions I had placed upon my body.
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