Reading this book, you sometimes feel that Cavell doesn’t really buy into his recipe of sensibly balanced training for the midlifer. “I’m the last person you should listen to when it comes to structured training”, he says. Another subtitle says “Lord save us from moderation.” 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. As you’d expect, the committed cyclist will find lots of info here on the bike itself and biomechanics. For example, do yourselves a favour and don’t be worrying about the technicalities of the “upstroke”.

I have had six cats, including Marlee , in my life.I love Marlee and miss the other five. Each was beautiful and sweet in his/her own way.

GET IN TOUCH

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. For Mr. Cavell, the balance also includes the trade-off between the brain-building stimulus of riding and racing outdoors with the neural-induced stress it creates. I would imagine even a pro or their coach has to do a certain amount of trial and error. There is enough information out there in books for amateurs to have enough knowledge to be able to produce a good quality training programme that can be tweaked further as we gain that experience. There is also good enough software available for free to be able to monitor progress and learn to judge how to come into form, peak and avoid over training.

Phil and Julian co-founded Cyclefit in Central London over twenty years ago. It was the first company dedicated to dynamic bike-fitting in Europe. Yes, there is. Many of our clients came to cycling a bit late, from another sport they couldn't do anymore, or from being sedentary. If you are coming to cycling as a middle-aged person, and you've largely been sedentary for the last 30-40 years, this is when you should take a medically-based trajectory. On the other hand, if you're somebody who's always cycled hard or ran hard, and you're just seeking to preserve it, I do think it's a different stream. Neither one's necessarily riskier than the other. But I think the advice is different. If you've been sedentary for all these years, you don't know what your body is or how your body's going to react if you start challenging it quite hard. So rather than challenge it hard and then find out, why not find out and then challenge it hard. Depends what you mean by trial and error. Most of that's probably done as they come up through the ranks - by the time they turn pro they'll likely have amassed sufficient data that, barring a collapse in performance and deciding to take a whole new approach, it'd mostly be small adaptations and optimisation (which, in itself, is technically a form of trial and error, but not what most people would mean by it). With this in mind, the author provides a laundry list of risk-mitigating measures and reassures the reader with a thought that is very personal to me. Mr. Cavell writes,The reason pros can train for longer at a lower effort is because they aren't trying to fit in some training around their job. Sneaking a few hours or minutes here and there to train. First, the bad news. As we grow older, in addition to our declining senses (eyes, ears) we must also contend with reducing muscle fibre, hormones and bone density. Not everything goes down: our blood pressure, cholesterol levels and body weight, for example, move right on up. But our heartbeat max takes a drop and, as if all this wasn’t bad enough, our very cells just don’t work as well as they used to. Atrophy.

This subject goes in layers, so let's deal with it in layers. Overall, yes, exercise is tremendously beneficial for you – tremendously. That's the overall, overarching message. But then, within that, it's more nuanced. If you exercise moderately into middle age and beyond, even into old age, it is unquestionably good for you: the cognitive benefits or cardiovascular benefits, the feel-good benefits, everything is positive. But to exercise moderately – and by that, I mean the kind of exercise that the people we know do – there are question marks. Now, probably when all this washes after longitudinal studies and I do the revision of this book in 20 years time, it will almost certainly be the case that that was good for you. That's my opinion, and I have no evidence of that right now. So the book is taking up the evidence that we do have, looking at all the research conducted, and then on every subject, making an informed judgment. Phil Cavell: author of The Midlife Cyclist In the beginning, running helped Rachel gain mental strength and she thought she was healing fine. But her depression kept increasing, she tried to come out of it by winning races and collecting medals at Marathons. 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 4, entitled Midlife Performance – Too Late for Speed? – the author challenges the tenets of periodization, criticizing its ‘granularity’ and advocating for a reduction in training zones to three or even two.

Support us

As an example, the revelation that serious amateurs (like me) typically do more high-intensity workouts than the pros is a brain breaker. And that whole ethos around working hard, all the time, no matter what, just sort of crumbles under the simple evidence that it doesn’t work, that what it produces is deeply embedded fatigue, injury, and demotivation. If your heart rate is fluctuating or abnormal during training, or you get stiff hips or knees, it’s worth seeing your GP,” says Roberts. You talk to Nigel Stephens, a leading cardiologist and an extremely good masters racer in the book. 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. But that's something that you have to weigh up yourself. Which, I guess, is a pretty good summary of it, isn't it? physician or nutritionist, for example. We will meet all of these people in future columns. Exercise may well be the finest drug the pharmaceutical industry never invented, but can we also have too much of a good thing? Should the ideal prescription dose change as we age? And is the advice different for new and returning exercisers compared to lifelong athletes? These questions will be examined next issue. As a last word on data, I’ll leave you with this thought: we may well demand ever more accurate ways to record, slice and dice our training metrics, but every data set is just an abstract house of cards without the solid foundations provided by a deep understanding of biology and psychology, how it is changing over time and how that relates to you and your life. I find it really difficult to stay in lower heartrate zones, it just saps all the fun and purpose out of most rides and is especially difficult on the gravel bike. It's causing a bit of a dilemma because I WANT to train properly for whatever the CX season throws at us, but training effectively just seems a bit joyless, sitting spinning gently up climbs or gently trundling along gravel sections when every instinct is to get on top of a big gear and smash it, etc. etc.