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

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If there was one piece of advice you would give someone who wants to advance their cycling past the age of 40 or 50, what would it be? The weapon of choice for this new genus of veteran athlete is often the bicycle. There are many reasons for this (which we will explore in this book) – cycling is generally gentle on ageing joints, every ride carries a sense of adventure, it’s innately sociable and there are lots of measurable metrics. The preferred playgrounds are very varied, too – anywhere from epic Tour de France stages and days in the Serra de Tramuntana mountain ranges in Mallorca, to the now iconic Box Hill in Surrey or even Zwift(ing) in your own spare room. The race was 50 miles – 50 one-mile laps. Fifty times up Oxo Hill, 50 times around Claries Hairpin – leaning over so far that it felt like your knee would brush the tarmac (I still have the scars from the times that became a reality) – and 50 times up the false flat, eastwards into a headwind, past the start–finish line, clubhouse and spectators. 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.

If you're going to exercise immoderately after certain ages, is cycling worse or better for you than something like running or swimming, or are there different advantages? As David Rebellin had a doping ban from the 2008 Olympics I have never taken him as a role model. I am not sure he is a 'fine example'. The Midlife Cyclist offers a gold standard road-map for the mature cyclist who aims to train, perform and even race at the highest possible level. Controversially, I’m going to suggest a few midlife amendments to current training orthodoxy. The first is that we drop all the other strata of training, other than low intensity (LIT) and high intensity (HIT) training. We'll define LIT as anything below aerobic threshold, which coach Fox recommends could be as high as 70-80 per cent of maximum heart rate, but thinks is actually better executed at around 60-70 per cent of maximum. Dr Baker agrees with this and adds the context that ‘it's almost impossible to go too low’ for LIT or oxidative training, meaning that the most important principle to observe is that you must actually be oxidative, which you won't be if you go too high. And it goes downhill even faster in your sixties and seventies. I'm 72 and like Andystow says below, I have two intensity levels. If I push harder it is only a matter of seconds before my puls hits the limit and I have to sit down/ease off.

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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. 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.

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. 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.

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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.

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. 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. Mr. Cavell asks himself and the reader as he lays the groundwork for the cerebral cornucopia to come,Very useful article for people of any age. Unfortunately the images were mostly decorative and an opportunity was missed to match and interplay more usefully with the text content. Would I push myself to that brink of physical shutdown, either in training or competition, at my current age of 58? 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?”