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This is where power meters and heart rate monitors can help — if we make them truly our servants and not our masters. They can help us become more honest with ourselves about our own performance and how we feel. We start the book with rather humbling first principles – that reaching middle age at all is a formidable achievement, as we’ve seen already. In a quarter of a million years we have wandered and now cycled the planet, but it is only in the last century that getting past 40 years of age has been a real possibility. And as a possible consequence, how the veteran human form reacts to being physically pushed to the extreme is still fairly poorly understood. Bluntly, in evolutionary terms we are not really meant to be alive at all, and almost certainly would not be at any other time in history. The experts and doctors in part hypothesise, speculate and theorise about how the ageing body reacts to high performance. Their frustration at not having all the answers at their fingertips is palpableand provides the impetus for much of their current research and thinking. The author also points to the truism that the challenges we face are primarily caused by “information and moderation deficit.” Mr. Cavell, a lifelong competitive cyclist himself, risks being seen as biased when he asserts that cycling can be “used as a panacea for solving the worst physical and cognitive effects of ageing as an athlete.”
This book also looks at whether research and guidance is different for midlife women and midlife men (spoiler alert – it is), and how that may be differently expressed in our training and racing instincts. Do men have a lot to learn from women in this regard? (Second spoiler alert – they probably do.) We want to help both sexes to ride fast and live long. I know you shouldn't rely on anecdotes, but I'm sure you know, and many people I know who do bike racing at a more senior age – a significant number have problems with their heart or something develops with their heart. And that may be connected, or it may not be, but that is a worry, isn't it for a lot of people? 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?” 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.Mr. Cavell asks himself and the reader as he lays the groundwork for the cerebral cornucopia to come, I am not sure this is different between indoor/outdoor cycling. I suspect that off-road riding is more challenging because you are moving around so much. I remember that my upper body used to be in agony after a cyclo-x race or MTB race! The three most liberating words in my profession are ‘I don’t know.’ It helps if you can immediately follow them with ‘but I will find ou It is also in this chapter that Mr. Cavell makes his first mention of virtual cycling when he writes,
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.g. that 10 minute long gravel secteur or that signature climb etc. 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. The positive change in my view on racing, and the sport-related anxiety I once suffered, has made me a better person and athlete.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. Both coach Fox and Dr Baker agree that the majority of riding should be steady-state to increase our oxidative capacity — as much as 80-90 per cent of our training load. We have to learn to be efficient before we can learn to be fast. But even as midlife cyclists we can gain a huge amount of benefit from the correct dose of intense interval training. As an aside, it’s assumed that us lifelong exercisers do know our bodies exceptionally well. We monitor function and performance on an almost daily basis. We have decades of experience about our own health and performance, and that’s invaluable and should never be underestimated. We know how our bodies should feel when they are functioning well and conversely when they aren’t.” Phil's book can help you be as good today as you always said you were ― Carlton Kirby, Eurosport commentator
I understand that now. I am old but I am no longer bold. But I still love the great outdoors, and cycling is an escape for me into nature and the wilderness. In a sense, cycling has become a means to an end, as well as a means within itself. 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. Yes, saddle choice and position. When you ride a bike in the real world the bike is moving with you in three dimensions. In the virtual world, it is immobile and static.Hip surgeons and physios love cycling and always prescribe it because it's not traumatic on your body if your bike is set up properly. But actually, your body needs a bit of trauma. It needs a bit of micro tear to try and generate it to heal stronger. So cycling, in some senses, when you get to my age, is too kind. You need to do your base with cycling and then challenge your body a little bit differently. 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. Thursday January 17th 2019 - 18:30 - Lecture Three - Dr David Hulse - Consultant in Sport and Exercise Medicine A vacuum of definitive science requires a forensic trawl through existing studies, as well as a conversation with someone who will likely be shining a light in the right direction, be they a cardiologist, endocrinologist, pro team
You could use a heart rate monitor and use a percentage of your highest recent recorded heart rate or you could use the RPE/Borg Scale and the ‘sing-a-verse’ methodology (which I prefer, incidentally). It’s important to note that riding in an oxidative state involves metabolising fatty acids as a fuel source, which could be important if you’re also trying to manage weight as well as gain fitness. 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 road to becoming a great cyclist in middle age and beyond may well involve doing less cycling in favour of other activities.” 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. Cycling has seen a participation uplift unprecedented in any sport, especially in the 40, 50 and 60-year-old age groups. These athletes are the first statistically significant cohort to maintain, or even begin, genuine athletic performance beyond middle-age. But, just because we can continue to tune the engine into old age, does that mean that we should? And, what do these training efforts do to the aging human chassis? This book answers those questions and offers a guide to those elongating their performance window.A true renaissance man of modern cycling, Mr. Cavell utilizes a holistic approach to bike fit, harnessing the entropic variability of athlete vs. machine and making the analytic an art. The ‘butterfly effect,’ known as ‘path dependence,’ is when decisions are made for social or political reasons and have long-term effects upon subsequent generations. I am blown away by the level of detail Phil Cavell brings to his work― Elinor Barker MBE, multiple world champion and Olympic gold medallist
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