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

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To become a truly mindful cyclist is to achieve emotional equilibrium. To eliminate the external factors that illicit our hardwired fight-or-flight mechanism and mitigate the inflammatory burden upon our health, training, and performance.

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 am not a pro and I get the greatest enjoyment from sharing the experience, sacrificing for myself and those I race with, and setting a positive example. 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? Make sure your room is not only well ventilated but temperature controlled. You do not want to overheat or dehydrate. 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.Phil Cavell is co-founder at Cyclefit in London. His book The Midlife Cyclist is published by Bloomsbury I think it was Sean Kelly who said "The difference between amateurs and Professionals is that when an amateur isn't going well he will train harder whereas a pro will rest."

We are a society in love with data. For any modern cyclist – even midlife ones – concepts such as FTP, watts, watts per kilo, weight, BPM, metres climbed, Strava segments and how long it has taken us to traverse them today instead of yesterday have become part of our everyday thinking about riding a bike. Every pedal stroke and ride is metricated, recorded and presented like a PowerPoint for eventual cross-analysis. In Chapter Three, entitled Will I die? – the author lays it all on the line in a way that he admits “can be a mountain.” The reader will consider this an understatement when faced with the depth of research defining the effects of cycling at a performance level on the cardiovascular system of the veteran athlete. In stark contrast, data was intrinsically dull when I was growing up. It was stored on mainframe computers in bunkers and sat in abstract to the real, vivid and actual world. ‘Data’ is even drab as a word. Many amateurs perpetually train and ride in what Dr Baker calls a ‘whirlwind of doom’ where an overestimation and obsession with an FTP (functional threshold power – the highest average power output you can sustain for an hour) means that we tend to set our training levels too high and, as a consequence, are training the wrong systems and incrementally embedding fatigue that we then struggle to shake off if we're older, because our hormonal responses are less responsive and dynamic — is this ringing any bells? 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.One of those being why midlife female athletes seem to be better protected against heart disease. Why is that? I hypothecate with the help of cardiologists, but it is still not fully known.