THE MIDLIFE CYCLIST
Train smarter, ride faster and be healthier over 40
In his new book Cyclefit co-founder Phil Cavell takes a look under the bonnet of the 40 and over cyclist to understand the upsides – and pitfalls – of choosing a life of high-performance cycling through middle age and beyond
It won’t be published for another week after we’ve finished speaking, but Phil Cavell still can’t quite bring himself to look at the book he’s just finished writing, let alone field the long list of questions we’ve got for him. Many answers are prefaced with defensive disclaimers – “maybe I came across a bit too anti-this” or “perhaps I was a bit preachy about that” – the typical self-doubt of the first-time author. But as anyone will know who’s ever committed anything to print, let alone a 100,000-word book, is that there comes a period in the process where you’d rather it’d simply disappear into the ether, never to be clapped eyes on by anyone ever again. “I’m at that fatal stage where I can’t even look at it,” Cavell says. “I’ve got very ambivalent feelings about it. I want to love it, but it’s a problem child for me.”
We try to assure him that this stage will surely pass because his book, The Midlife Cyclist, is a triumph, telling a potentially dry and labyrinthine story with wit and a deft touch, combining current research into the active lives of midlife cyclists and sprinkled with personal anecdotes from his own history in the sport.
For a bit of background, Phil is the cofounder of Cyclefit, the Covent Gardenbased bike-fitting specialist, and has spent a big chunk of his professional life immersed in the biomechanics of bike riders of all levels, from four-time world time trial champion Fabian Cancellara to Category 4 racers up and down the UK. As something of a professional memoir, it’s less a look into the world of his day job (though it does feature) and more an allencompassing exploration into the everexpanding – and unprecedented – trend of 40-plus cyclists throwing themselves into high-level performance.
To put this into in some perspective, he writes in the book, for almost the whole of human existence, we were lucky to even make it to 40 years of age, with nature deciding we were surplus to requirements once we’d been born and had bred. From being 40 and out, to being 40+ and heading out for a stage race in the Alps, is a light-speed leap in a matter of decades. Even the exercise booms of the 1980s were practised by a relatively small percentage of our population. Now, in 2021, never have so many people from middle age and beyond trained and performed to as high a level as they’re doing currently.
And the consequences of that, for physical and mental health, for better or worse, are still largely unknown, he writes, as so little research has been done within this demographic into their reaction to such intensive exercise.
Using his own curiosity for subjects that he himself as a life-long rider has crashed into – misdiagnosed injuries and heart problems to name but two – Phil recruited the help of a variety of professionals, including GPs, cardiologists, psychologists and pro team doctors, as well as cycling coaches and ex-professional racers, to create both a practical guide to getting stronger and faster with age, and a checklist for the potential health risks in doing so.
As it becomes clear in the book, many of the experts are, as well as bike riders,
" YOU'RE CYCLING BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT, NOW IT'S ABOUT GETTING YOURSELF EDUCATED ON THE RISKS AND MITIGATING THAT "
friends or professional acquaintances of Phil – no coincidence, he says. “All
I can say on that is that I’m accidentprone with a medical history that’s too long not to hug these people close. Sheer pragmatism. They’re all cyclists. Even my dentist’s a cyclist…”
Live long and prosper
The book, he says, has been gestating in his head for years, but it was after having spinal surgery in 2017 – necessary because of a cycling crash years ago that had been misdiagnosed – when he started getting words on the page. But it was like painting the Forth Bridge, in that by the time the job’s done it’s time to start again; new research was being done faster than he could put words on the page. “I wish I could revise it every week,” he says now.
He wrote the bulk of the book during the first lockdown from March 2020. “I think the key takeaway is to try and not write a book when you’ve got anything else going on in your life. However manageable you think a book is, you almost need to be without distraction and I wasn’t – I had my day job [at Cyclefit, which during the first lockdown shifted its focus on bikefitting to servicing key workers’ bikes]. Luckily for me, I lived that book – it’s my life, and my daily work and passion, warts and all.”
As an example of the never-ending stream of new research Phil refers to, a few days before we talked a new study from the University of She eld showed links between hard exercise – “immoderate” is the term Phil uses in his book – and people already predisposed to motor neurone disease (MND). It’s a subject that would likely have made it into the book, as a sort of a laying-the-cardson-the-table exercise of the health issues that could be associated with immoderate exercise in middle to older age.
“I don’t view [this research] negatively at all,” argues Phil. “The cohort is small, it’s a single gene defect, more research will be done. This book is about making you cognisant of the risks should you decide to [exercise immoderately].
“I do think that exercising immoderately in middle age and beyond is a choice – not because it’s necessarily good for you, though it of course might be, but because you like doing it. At one point in the book, Dr Nigel Stephens, a cardiologist and European masters track pursuit champion, says: “I don’t do this because it’s good for me, I do it because I enjoy it.’”
When he rides onto that track, he says, he is 100 per cent cyclist – none of the cardiologist remains. “That really is the jumping-on point of the book – you’re cycling because you love it, now it’s about getting yourself educated on the risks and mitigating that risk.”
FTP: FTW or WTF?
While the book relies on the expertise of medical professionals, Phil isn’t afraid to express his opinions on certain subjects. One issue that gets him particularly pumped up is that of FTP – functional threshold power, the ubiquitous metric that is defined as the power you can sustain for an hour. It’s used as a base figure to define cyclists’ training zones, and has become fundamental. Every narrative needs a suitably irksome
antagonist and in The Midlife Cyclist, we suggest that FTP is surely it.
This is one of the points which Phil is wondering whether he made a mistake in going in two-footed, though that doesn’t stop him taking it on with both barrels in our chat. Fundamentally, he believes that when a lot of amateur cyclists reach the supposed figure they’re trying to measure, they’ve gone beyond their FTP – and there’s nothing sustainable or functional about that. “It’s become the god we all worship,” he says.
There’s a passage in the book that cites data from Dr Jon Baker, who has 10 million accumulated kilometres of data from his coaching of pro and amateur clients. It shows that while WorldTour riders ride at 62-65 per cent of their maximum power over a whole season, the amateur riders are riding at 80 per cent. “Us older and less fit midlife cyclists,” Phil writes in the book, “are, as a group, riding harder and faster, relative to our maximum, than the top-ranked professionals in the world” – and doing it all while trying to hold down jobs and being great parents and partners. “Many amateurs perpetually train,” he continues, “in what Dr Baker calls a ‘whirlwind of doom’, where an overestimation and obsession with FTP means that we tend to set our training levels too high and train the wrong systems.”
By now in our interview, Phil is well into his stride in his criticisms of FTP. “FTP isn’t going to get you through. That fact that you can limp over the line during a 20-minute test and get 290 watts – it doesn’t tell you as much about your broad basket of performance as you think it does. It tells you one thing: that you incapacitated yourself for the rest of the day. There’s a clue in the title – it needs to be functional. For a lot of people it’s a dysfunctional threshold… I wish I’d come up with that line for the book. It’s too bloody late, John. Every day I rewrite this book better in my mind.”
Gluteus minimus
It’ll be no surprise that, for a man who’s spent much of his working life fitting people to bikes, the bicycle gets significant coverage in The Midlife Cyclist. It’s not always positive, however, and it’s amusing to clock the number of di erent ways Phil refers to this “Victorian contraption”. In his reading, it’s a device that’s been extraordinarily fortunate to make it to 2021 relatively untouched in terms of its shape.
“The thing about the bike is, it’s good enough. They got it right enough so that when it was preserved in aspic it was good enough to get us home, physically and literally. It’s since taken on so much romantic heritage, and it’s enshrined now, and it is what it is – good enough. But from our biomechanical perspective, it’s not great. A perfect design would take the body out of flexion and maximise gluteal contraction. On the bicycle as we know it, you’ve got a flexed spine and hip, which makes it di!cult to contract the glutes, so cyclists build up these strong quadriceps muscles with weak glutes. No shit! – we’re riding around on this Victorian vignette.” There he goes again…
Phil’s sporting life in 2021 involves as much activity as possible that keeps the spine out of flexion. With his spinal injury putting a stop to his racing career, he has a new focus to keep fit without being “cycling match fit”. “Cycling is still my passion and primary sport,” he continues, “but I supplement it with walking, a bit of running. Anything where you’re standing up. I’m always looking for the antidote to cycling – just riding a bike isn’t enough for us midlife cyclists. We need to seek things out that compensate for where cycling is not good.”
It’s not just a matter of biomechanics and the prevention of muscle and joint problems that multi-sport activity seeks to address, but the consequences of traumatic injuries when falling o" a bike and your body’s ability to recover. Bone density, or lack of, is a problem that faces all cyclists who only cycle for activity, as density is built up through impact, of which cycling has none.
Building resilience goes far beyond bone density, however; Phil believes that the increase in indoor training on smart trainers is hurting our preparedness for the road and all the stimuli that involves. “Many of my clients love indoor training, so I need to be careful I’m not too preachy. But I just think that they’re missing out on a lot, in a hot, sweaty environment, possibly working too hard, with poor biomechanics, not having to control the bike in this abstract environment… Yes, you’re not going to fall o" and break an arm but you’re also not going to get all the benefits of being outside. I have clients who train 90 per cent indoors – I think you’re missing out on a lot here.” Coming back to the point of overworking at FTP intensities, we point out that this can’t be good for the body. “It’s not, because you’re not working on your key energy systems. Everybody I spoke to was absolutely clear: the cyclist’s lifeblood is the aerobic system, to ride on the oxygen and fats in our bodies. Working hard on the turbo does nothing for that, it bypasses that system. It’s not paying your dues. The guys back in my day, on the long club runs in winter, controlling their heart rate – that’s where they were right. That’s the one thing they were right about.”
If these are gripes as he sees it – and useful talking points that we put to him for this conversation – that shouldn’t detract, he says, from the great strides cyclists in the UK have made since he and his Cyclefit partner Julian Wall established the firm in 2002. “If I ride with my clients now, I lead from the back; 25 years ago I was like a sheepdog, trying to keep them all together, handing out advice. I do it now and it’s like I’m irrelevant to them, it’s like I’m not there. They’re so much fitter and faster, the whole thing has changed. And that’s great to see. I’m like a proud parent.”
The Midlife Cyclist: The Road Map for the +40 Rider Who Wants to Train Hard, Ride Fast and Stay Healthy (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by Phil Cavell is out now
" THE GUYS BACK IN MY DAY, ON THE LOING CLUB RUNS IN WINTER CONTROLLING THEIR HEART RATE - THAT'S THE ONE THING THEY WERE RIGHT ABOUT "