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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. This book has helped me visualise a rounded training programme that I think I should be able to implement, hopefully into my impending 60s. oxidative (sorry, aerobic) training to build endurance where the heart beats below 80% of its capacity - as hunter gatherers we evolved for many thousands of years as an endurance species, and
Remember, Dr Baker is going out of his way to point out that if you feel good, you should not increase the intensity, meaning no more watts or a higher heart rate, but instead add in a rep or two. Going too deep or too hard will increase the required recovery time and may lead to fatigue. If you assume your real (not inflated) FTP is 250, then your hard sessions using the Dr Baker algorithm will be 250 x 105-110% x 4-6 (8-10 minute) reps. This means that you'll be working at between 262 and 275 watts during those 8-10 minute reps. This isn’t going bonkers and sending your systems haywire — it’s a controlled elevation of training stimulus.
Chapter 5 is perhaps the most technical and possibly the most disappointing. The focus is on bike fit, the author's specialism, but offers little in advice how to set up a bike correctly. I guess go for a professional fitting is the advice but I feel the author could have offered more. This chapter does provide a useful catalogue of possible causes of a range of pain that one might encounter, but I can't comment on how well these work, not having an injury myself.
Remember that we’re genetically almost identical to our modern human ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago. It’s true that the process of evolution is continual, but it’s also true that there has been simply too little time and too few generations for substantive changes to the human genome. The Midlife Cyclist has, in truth, been in gestation for many years, but was substantially written during the Covid-19 pandemic, which will hopefully seem less devastating and frightening at the time of reading than it was at the time of writing. There will be many dire consequences of this destructive disease, but one of the positive outcomes may well be that more people are choosing bikes for both fitness and transport. Covid-19 has also bought into focus two potential fault lines that fall within the scope of this book. The first is that the potentially more deleterious outcomes of the disease appear to fall disproportionally on older age groups, which seems to suggest that middle-aged people and older aren’t just young people who grew up and got old, but are fundamentally changed because of the ageing process. Which isn’t at all how living with advancing age feels, since when we look in the mirror every morning, we feel largely the same as we did yesterday, last week or even last year. Covid-19 has shown us that this is a misguided and simplistic supposition, and that we’re actually profoundly and structurally different at 55 than we were at 25, and as a consequence, the risk from Covid-19 seems to increase exponentially as we age. Secondly, the incidence of Covid-19 appears to have demonstrated that higher levels of aerobic fitness can protect against the damaging effects of the disease in older age groups, possibly by strengthening the immune system and mediating its response to the disease.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. There's a slightly philosophical almost New-Age final chapter about 'mindfulness' which also didn't quite work for me.
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. The MidLife Cyclist‘s discussion of heart health was particularly timely for me. I had a serious dehydration experience about a month ago, literally while I was reading the chapter on heart conditions. Getting some depth of understanding about what might be going on in my chest helped me feel more at ease. It also motivated me to make a doctor’s appointment. Why worry, when you can get answers and move on with your life?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. 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 Persuasively, Cavell argues for the abolition of “medium” intensity training which is (I think) what I’ve come to know as threshold training. All you need is: 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? I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As a mid life cyclist myself, it is a subject of interest, but it is delivered in a readable and enjoyable manner by an author who exudes a love of cycling and does so with good humour.
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