Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
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”. Throughout my early cycling history, I fell victim to the ‘butterfly effect’ of the cycling norm. It wasn’t until I accepted the honesty of introspection and negotiation that my cycling self changed for the better. I am an ‘indoor specialist’ and proud of it. There’s useful stuff about getting comfortable on the bike. People like me don’t adjust their positions to take account of aging, and newbies might be tempted to follow the fashion for slamming their stems or simply need some guidance and the book is pretty good for that. But fitting you to a bike needs to be done in person and no book can substitute for that. For me, there was a lot of good news in the book. I’m not just a cyclist. I do resistance training. I run regularly. And I couldn’t help but feel this didn’t need to be a book just for cyclists. Yes, there was a lot of bike-related content, but there is a running book here too, and a book for anyone who is trying to maximize their remaining time above ground. Are you middle-aged? Are you slower than you used to be, more tired? Read this book. It will help you.
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.
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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. Cyclefit continues to work with male and female pro-tour athletes, helping them control the process of building resilience to training and racing in their bike set-up. But as we age our tolerance for error or injury inevitably reduces – throwing youth at any physical problem is normally the most successful strategy. But when you no longer have access to the elixir of youth, the next best strategy is being well informed about every aspect of your riding practice. Renowned cycling biomechanics pioneer, Phil Cavell, explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance. Using contributions from leading coaches, ex-professionals and pro-team doctors, he produces the ultimate manifesto for mature riders who want to stay healthy, avoid injury – and maximise their achievement levels.
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.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?” I think the answer is counterintuitive. The better cyclist you want to be past 50, the more you probably have to drop cycling sessions out and put something else in to compensate. So you probably need to drop a cycling session now and put in a gym session, or a running session, or some other sport to work on bone density and muscle fibre loss. So it's a counterintuitive thing. The more you cycle and the more you seek cycling performance, the more you probably need to cast your net a bit wider in terms of activity base. Have to say I’m a little all over the place rating wise. Part of the book were a slug and other parts were a slam dunk and made me want to read more and more. He makes the point that people like me (65 y+ triathletes) are the first large cohort of oldies doing excessive exercise and that over the next couple of decades, we will learn more about the benefits and disadvantages and consequently be able to design better strategies to avoid the latter and optimise the former. Let's hope so!
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