The shop patriarch was 61 when I joined up. He still rode the streets, albeit the quiet ones. Once the local rail trail started evolving, he would ride from his house to the trail. As he continued to age, he then put his bike on a rack and drove to the trail. This was partly motivated by his increasing fear of traffic and partly by the fact that he lived at the bottom of a nasty little wall of a hill. That would be the first thing he faced at the beginning of a ride.
I knew I would get old if I lived long enough. I thought about how moto-centric culture treats cyclists in general, and slower riders in particular when they dare to assert their legal right to travel on the roadways. I've always tried to project an aura of confidence and control out there. I may not be going very fast right now, but you don't want to piss me off. Inside, I settle into fatalistic resignation. Whatever the color of my clothing, my affect is gray. I don't know how well it works, but at least one person has said that it does. Average speed diminishes. Cadence remains.
Average speed diminishes, but this year saw a rebound. I have no explanation for it. I got no more sleep. Still eat too many baked goods and drink too much coffee. But for some reason my average speed improved compared to the previous year or two. Here in the postseason, it has sagged again pretty rapidly as I lose that regular shot of 30 miles a day.
Strength fluctuates in the course of any normal riding season for a rider of any age. You build a base and then manage the peaks and valleys to line up with your competitive objectives. A 30-mile day is nothing to a fit cyclist under 50 years of age. It was easy to rack up 50 miles just in casual darting about, back when I had time for casual darting about.
Athletes live in a world of pain. So do old people. Older athletes and generally physically active people deal with the routine pains of training on top of the unpredictable rate of personal degeneration. On the way up in youth you explore your limits in your time of building strength. On the way down, you patrol the boundaries of diminishing territory, holding what you can for as long as you can. You don't avoid pain at all costs. You assess each pain for what it indicates: risk of injury that can be controlled, or just the new normal that you have to learn to tolerate.
The route and terrain of my commute turn it into a short road race. Short is relative. Far better athletes than I am have ridden much longer commutes. I used to extend this one on a day or two each week, to make the basic route seem shorter. It's a simple element of the training cycle. Vary distance and intensity to build reserves of the different types of fitness you will need: endurance, power, strength, aerobic capacity and anaerobic threshold. That ate a lot of time. That kind of commitment strains relationships with people who might admire your dedication but do not begin to identify with it.
Racing against motor traffic I don't have to worry about beating vehicles against which I have no chance. By taking a criterium mentality into the streets, a rider can use all of the trained elements of fitness and the situational awareness of riding in a crowded field to enhance safety and effectiveness in traffic. This includes not taking every opportunity to go faster than impeded motorists who could still hurt you with car doors, impulsive turns, or sudden acceleration when the blockage breaks and they see clear running room for even a few car lengths.
Before I get to the little taste of urban crit, I have to ride the moderately hilly highway. It's a good warmup. Terrain and wind define the challenge. The hills are hard. Passing vehicles only bother me in the narrow confines of the first three miles from home. Out on the highway, sight lines are better and motorists are more focused on their own smooth passage to waste time on me. The exceptions are almost exclusively young men who have at various times swerved, honked, yelled, thrown things, passed closely, and attempted to "roll coal" with laughable ineffectiveness. One kid tried to fishtail into me, only his timing and mastery of his vehicle was so bad that his swerve was late and the rebound almost sent him into a glancing collision with an oncoming car. Somebody needed clean underwear after that, but it wasn't me. Generally, riding is much more mentally relaxing than driving, while definitely more physically demanding.
In the shop, I deal with aging riders who evolve more and more upright riding positions. My riding position is less down and forward than when I was in my attempted racing years, but I never had the handlebar stem buried anyway. Sitting with a back angle closer to vertical than 45 degrees feels horribly slow and inefficient to me. Not to say that my road riding position is completely comfortable. It's just that it's the best balance of bearable efficiency when propelling the bike. Any riding position is going to hurt in some way at some point. I want the pain to be worth it. You have to decide what works for you.
Recovery takes longer. Also, any rider over 40 has experienced the increasing lag between effort and consequences. You'll do a hard workout and feel surprisingly good until 18 to 24 hours later, when you feel like you got beaten up and dumped in a ditch. I haven't noticed the lag as much as late sixties turned into seventy, because things tend to hurt right away and then keep hurting. Pushing through that is essential so you don't seize up. This means easy movements, not continued high intensity. Just don't sit and wait for it to get better. Sitting feels good, but getting up is hell. You don't recover that way. You rust.
We had a customer a few years ago, a retired physician age 78, who wanted to replace his beloved old Windsor touring bike from the 1970s. He had logged tens of thousands of miles on it around the desert southwest of the United States when he was based in New Mexico. He ended up buying three Surly bikes: a Cross Check, a Long Haul Trucker, and a Troll, all custom spec'd. He was also an active member of the cross country ski association, and an avid dancer. When he mounted a bike he could have been a teenager, he moved with such practiced grace. I never got to see him dismount after a long ride, though.
I can attest that getting on the bike feels much the same as it always has. It's a bit harder to swing the leg over the saddle, but you can work around that in various ways. Unfolding from it afterward is a different story. I might zip through town competently enough, but if I don't pay attention dismounting at the shop door it could get embarrassing. Switching from riding to walking isn't the fluid landing of a cyclocross ace. Not that it ever was, for me, but I could at least get off the bike without looking like an albatross having a bad day.
For my first two decades or more of dedicated human-powered travel on bike, on foot, and on skis, a forced layoff meant a little loss of fitness, but that was easily regained when activity resumed. Even for the next couple of decades regaining fitness was only a little slower. After that, though, more than a week off the bike led to noticeable deterioration. I'm sure that my use of caffeine as an antidepressant doesn't help with the hollow feeling in my heartbeat. Your results may vary. The first objective of winter is surviving the winter.
Exercise is an antidepressant as well, but I need very high doses to feel it was worth the effort. Indoor exercise is so boring that I either take forever to get through a trivial workout or slam myself into too-high intensity too fast, to squeeze as much as I can into a tiny window of willingness. More likely these days I get distracted by household chores and internet trivia and then it's time to go to bed too late, get up too early, and drag myself through another work day.
Bike commuting season is a mixed blessing. It provides a reliable workout and considerable savings in fuel costs, but the schedule is inflexible and the distance is fixed. Even if life doesn't change in a cataclysmic instant, it still changes by the day. Days add up. You have to visit your pain threshold regularly in the off season to know where to expect it when it matters.
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