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

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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. Accessibility - the cover and marketing makes it appear tailored to midlife cyclist MAMILs like me who are just trying to live their best life. But the text itself was tailored to the tiny minority who are actually trying to win races. A 30-year lifespan seemed to be the upper end of the age spectrum for hundreds of thousands of generations of our ancestors for a very good reason. It allowed the individual to mature, breed and parent offspring to maturity. So, while there’s certainly evolutionary pressure for Homo sapiens to survive to 30 years old, that still leaves me very unlikely to win an all-out sprint against my 29-year-old self, whether on a bicycle at Eastway or running away from a hungry leopard. I’ll almost certainly lose because there’s plainly no selective imperative for me to win. Indeed, if you take a strictly gene-centric view, there’s actually a selective advantage to me losing a sprint for survival against a younger close family member, so they can survive and propagate shared genes through their offspring. Which leads us onto the most important question of all in ‘Will I Die?’ Will doing more of what you love, kill you or make you better? The press loves to run poorly researched, sensational articles about how intense exercise could hurt or even kill you, should you exercise hard into middle age. They are cynically exploiting a temporary knowledge gap to sell their newspapers and magazines. We consult with world-leading cardiologists and cyclists, and review the latest research for a calmer, deeper assessment of the likely outcome of riding as hard as you like as you get older. And whether outcomes may differ for men and women.

Phil's book can help you be as good today as you always said you were ― Carlton Kirby, Eurosport commentator 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 It’s an interesting read by an author who really, really likes the word “ameliorate” and who might have spent a bit more time off his bike proof-reading the text – there are a few too many sloppy errors throughout. But this shouldn’t lead us to think that we’re redundant just because our genomes didn’t evolve to last past our late 20s. Paleoanthropologist Rachel Caspari points to an exponential boost in art, culture and civic activity in the Upper Paleolithic era 30,000 years ago, at the same time as a demographic deflection or a shift in lifespan took place, resulting in our ancestors actually living long enough to become invested and contributing grandparents. Initially, Caspari was unsure whether the lifespan uplift in adult survivorship was due to biological/genetic factors or behavioural shifts. After screening our older ancestors from the Middle Paleolithic era – between 140,000 and 40,000 years ago – it became clear that a cultural shift had helped Stone Age grandparents make their offsprings’ lives markedly less Hobbesian – i.e. ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Performance pioneers 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 book then takes you on a magical biological tour of your ageing body, to understand what’s happening at a cellular level as we all get older. It looks at how exercise (especially cycling) can be used as a panacea for solving the worst physical and cognitive effects of ageing as an athlete. It’s something I’ve heard time and again from the medical community (people not normally given to hyperbole) – no drug or medical intervention has ever been devised that has the efficacy and power of simple movement, at any age. Ageing is scientifically one of the least understood areas of human health. Is that possibly because scientists are also human and therefore have a cognitive bias towards the holy grail of arresting, or even reversing, ageing instead of explaining the mechanisms at work? I'm determined to grow old gracefully in lycra, and Phil Cavell has been helping me to do it successfully for years ― Gary Kemp 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 Phil is eminently qualified to write the Midlife Cyclist. Well, he is certainly old enough ― Fabian Cancellara, Tour de France rider and two-time Olympic champion

boomers are perhaps the first generation to be physically active so late in life with as yet unknown outcomes; We’re almost certainly the first cohort, in a great enough number, to be statistically relevant, to push our bodies into and beyond middle age, towards peak performance. We’re the virtual crash-test dummies for future generations who refuse to succumb to evolutionary stereotyping. How many of our parents were interested in structured training for the sake of pure performance, past the age of 40 or 50? So, nobody really knows for sure what happens if you try to tune your engine to racing performance, at an age when at any other time in history you would have been dead for years if not decades. This is a critical time and we’re the pathfinder generation for those that follow us.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. 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. How important is stress/inflammation as we age and train? Is this burden different for men and women?

If you’ve read this far, let me tell you, before I get into the weeds, this is a brilliant book. I am a skeptical person, a cynic, but I can tell you honestly that The MidLife Cyclist changed my behavior on the bike (and off), and even improved my relationship with cycling (read: less burn out efforts, more fun). What I want after all is fun. I want health too, and I want longevity. I want to be able to do the things I enjoy doing as long as I possibly can. 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. Not just cycling? Yes. A balanced training programme for the cyclist might also include a couple of weekly weights sessions, or “resistance training”, which will combat sarcopenia (that’s muscle-loss to you and me) and maybe the occasional run if your joints can stand it (good for sarcopenia but also bone density).An amazing accomplishment... a simple-to-understand précis of your midlife as a cyclist - you won't want to put it down. ― Phil Liggett, TV cycling commentator I think The Midlife Cyclist is an important book. One of the curses of our age is that people live for a long time but endure poor health for a large chunk of those years. Phil Cavell is trying to do something about that by showing that you can remain fit and healthy through exercise for far longer than most people think possible. The cover pitches it at racing cyclists, but I found it equally relevant to me as someone who rides a lot but doesn’t race. Much of what it contains is relevant to anyone getting older who wants to maintain good health, regardless of their sport, or even if they do no exercise at all (because this might persuade them that they should!).