For any modern cyclist – even midlife ones – concepts such as FTP, watts, watts per kilo, weight, BPM, metres climbed, Strava segments and how long it has taken us to traverse them today instead of yesterday have become part of our everyday thinking about riding a bike.

In spite of owning 11 bicycles and a cool sports car, Leslie still stays indoors for six months of the year due to the lousy weather and terrible roads in Ottawa but at least he has time to listen to classical music and read a lot of cycling books. If I didn’t know Phil, if we weren’t friends, if I didn’t know what a great story teller he is, I would have been very reticent about reading The MidLife Cyclist. That’s not to say I’m anti-data – my job as a thoroughly modern bikefitter requires fluency in its language and application – but technology is something that we at Cyclefit have adapted and bent to our will, rather than something that we inherently venerate or rely upon.

A climb that feels relatively trivial one day can be made vastly more challenging on another day because of a headwind, for example. Phil Cavell is a bike fitter by profession and has had years of experience working with both amateur and professional level athletes. 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. It’s usual during a long breakaway for weaker riders to miss a pull at the front, or at least try to soft-pedal through their turn. Phil is most at home working in a collegiate, multi-disciplinary team, to help clients resolve intricate issues.

As a retired Marine with combat experience in Vietnam and a life of pushing the personal and professional envelope, his idea of life was always to be 11 on the 0-10 scale. 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.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. The next element of the book takes us to Cavell’s particular area as he looks at this combination of our Ice Age bodies with the bicycle, a gift to us from Victorian gentlemen inventors.

Is this where old school training, my chaotic school (my basic philosophy was to ride my bike enough in the winter for adventure, fun and relaxation, to be able to race myself match fit-ish in the spring), and the new-data school intersect? Renowned cycling biomechanics pioneer, Phil Cavell, explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance. 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. 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. But still a cocktail of pride and stubbornness prevailed over my body’s pain and inclination to stop.We may not be super-sprinters compared to other big mammals (I can’t think of a single one we can beat in a short burst), but we can go seriously long, which meant that we could subsistence hunt much larger prey than ourselves over multiple days. It is also a very safe activity - once you get the technique down, you have more points of contact with the groundless likely to turn your ankle or fall.

My passion for cycling and competition pervades my every thought and is a prism through which I view the world. Their natural inquisitiveness is ameliorated by the fact that it tends to happen around them to fragile animals and elderly relatives. Cavell, if he had to choose one way for a midlife cyclist to add more “chaos” to their exercise routine, what modality, practice, or suggestion would you make? I’m not even sure that I’m trying to avoid getting old and dying, as much as meeting it on my own terms.Because up until relatively recently in human history terms, human beings haven't exercised past the age of 40. The popular press is happy to run stories about the hazards of exercise, or age-group marathoners dropping dead at events, recounting the tale of runner Jim Fixx, who got America running yet died at only 52 (while running). We see hundreds of midlife athletes every month and every year, and they're all trying to push their bodies even harder as they get into middle age. To use a term that would infuriate evolutionary biologists – we’re existing outside of our ‘design life’.