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! This seems to be suggesting a polarised training approach although he doesn't name it as such, which generally works on a 3 zone model rather than the more regular 7 zone model but whichever is used I agree with much of what is said with the odd caveat. 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. 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 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.

I have had more crashes and injuries than I would have liked in my life. One of them very seriously. I really don’t want anymore either. So I totally understand the sentiments and motivations behind the statement. I ride more defensively and take less risks now. I have a young daughter, wife, and dog that need me. Phil's book can help you be as good today as you always said you were ― Carlton Kirby, Eurosport commentatorTo be honest, I would answer, “Absolutely. Better.” I am able to race with family members and friends watching the entire event on Livestream or standing beside me. Feeling everything I feel. I can let them know what I am thinking, feeling, my passion. Mindfulness is almost certainly where the gold is buried in terms of harmonising future performance and longevity for any athlete, but most especially midlife cyclists. Our contention is that professional teams will spend ever more resources and time in this arena, as a way of achieving and preserving athlete performance. There are breaks in virtual cycling. I’ve been in many. The chess game is still there. To take it a step further, I am able to discuss my next move with my mates in real-time as it is unfolding. 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? Interesting, although with perhaps too much of the medico-technical for my slender intellect to absorb. Angus, a fellow cyclist with strong interest in sport and training mentioned it. The book has lots of discussion and exploration of performance athletes, which is interesting, as much as anything because I have never, ever considered myself to be one and I take no interest in spectator sports. But such humans are undoubtedly extraordinary in their combination of mental attitudes and physiological adaptation. But he does also deal with non-athletes. With a longstanding partner, he runs Cycle Fit, a consultancy in Covent Garden. They have helped many people recover from injuries and have improved the bike setup and performance of many more.

Time's arrow traditionally plots an incremental path into declining strength and speed for all of us. But we are different to every other generation of cyclists in human history. An ever-growing number of us are determined to scale the highest peaks of elite physical fitness into middle-age and beyond. Can the emerging medical and scientific research help us achieve the holy triumvirate of speed and health with age? 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 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. You talk to Nigel Stephens, a leading cardiologist and an extremely good masters racer in the book. And to paraphrase him, he broadly says that cycling, even at a high level, will give you improved heart and lung capacity at the risk of broken bones. But that's something that you have to weigh up yourself. Which, I guess, is a pretty good summary of it, isn't it?They opened Cyclefit bike-fitting classes in 2009 and went on to work with Trek Bicycles a little while later to help create their worldwide bike-fitting educational program. Cyclefit’s educational DNA is in almost every fitting studio in the UK and many around the world. They worked with Trek’s professional racing teams for many years. 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.