In modern society, we live with a conundrum: there’s no need to endure physical discomfort of any kind, but unless you embrace it via exercise, it comes for you in the form of chronic illness. Good exercise can be very painful, however. In the case of the sport of cycling, agonisingly and unnecessarily so.
Put it this way, the news today didn’t surprise me. Sales of bicycles have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years, apparently, as the pandemic boom in cycling has turned to bust. Or to put it another way, as tens of thousands of people come to their senses.
I speak, of course, as a cyclist myself. Here’s how I got the bug. When I turned 40, I had a health-check. When I look at pictures of myself from that time, I appear like a different person. Not just physically – I was soft around the edges, pallid, comfortable – but in spirit. The look in my eye was different. I was doing very little exercise at the time; a bit of squash (the sport) between beers, that was it. It turned out I had high cholesterol. After that – via a life-threatening car crash – I embarked on the insanity of going fast on two wheels.
Why on earth do we middle-aged men do this to ourselves?
And it is an insanity. Fast forward to today and, when I’m in full training mode, I’ll do a couple of indoor sessions during the week and maybe 60 or 70 miles on the road over the weekend. Once a year, my friend Jonboy and I ride in a 100-mile race. All of this on top of my job as a newspaper editor (and, impossibly, my second job as a commentator – I’m writing this on the train – and third job as an author, with an implausible deadline of the end of March to complete my current manuscript). Not to mention family life, which features a fiancée and four children. Time is, shall we say, at a premium.
Why the cycling? And why to this level of intensity? No normal person would consider it. Take a typical Sunday morning. First comes prepping the bicycle. Pumping up the tyres, greasing the chain, fitting the tech (radar-operated rear light and handlebar sat nav computer), filling four water bottles with an electrolyte-carbs-and-caffeine mixture and slotting them into their holders (two on the frame, two behind the saddle), piling flapjack squares into a bag strapped to the top of the frame.
Then comes eggs on toast and a coffee; greasing the balls with chamois cream to prevent chafing; securing the heart monitor around the chest; pulling on the padded shorts, lycra jersey (sorry) and socks; clip-on shoes; cycling cap to absorb sweat; helmet; gloves; glasses. Oh, and four cola-flavoured, caffeine-spiked energy gels in the little pocket in the small of my back, plus one extra for emergencies (oh, there have been plenty of those). Finally, it’s out into the bright Hampshire morning. A lonely Power Ranger, psyched up for exhilaration and pain. Over the next four hours, I will suck up one disgusting gel every hour, which can only be described as very, very, very sweet snot. I will have a mouthful of flapjack every 15 minutes. I will drink four litres of the horrible energy concoction I made earlier. I will monitor my average speed on my onboard computer, trying to keep it above 17mph, ideally towards 19mph. (If it drops, I will berate myself and push harder.)
I will constantly assess my exertion, trying to match my remaining energy reserves to the number of miles to come. (But how does anyone know the true depth of their energy reserves? How do you distinguish between your physical, mental and emotional capacity? Does it matter if you didn’t have enough sleep? What about a hangover? Is this laziness in disguise? And so on.)
I will control the cadence of my pedals, keeping the rotation above 90 rotations per minute. I will exploit the descents by crouching over the dropped handlebars. I will manage the climbs by slipping my gears downwards (in anticipation of the ascent, as it’s bad to change gear when your chain is under strain) and whipping myself on; but I will be careful not to use the six gears in the middle of the range, as that can be bad for the bike (technical, sorry). And I’ll be careful to time the moment I stand on the pedals so that I’m not forced to sit down again before reaching the peak.
The final 20 miles will be sheer endurance, fighting through the lactate, hoping for a burst of energy and adrenaline, pushing it to the max. All the while, I’ll be watching out for cars, lorries and tractors, especially when descending at 42mph down narrow and winding country lanes.
Strangely, while I’m preoccupied with all these things, I’ll be thinking freely beneath it. Often I get ideas. Four hours is a long time alone and sometimes I sing songs from my childhood or find myself unearthing long-forgotten memories.
Then it’s over. I stagger into the house, peel on my compression tights and lie on my back with my legs elevated while I gasp for breath and check my stats on my phone (speed, calories burned, average heart rate, elevation). I’ll chug a chocolate recovery shake, have a meal and a hot bath, from which I emerge dizzy and disorientated and…ready for the rest of the day.
Why on earth do we middle-aged men do this to ourselves? Cycling is primordial: competitive, demanding, conducted in the hunting position of a medieval knight on a charger or a Neanderthal riding a mammoth (OK so maybe metaphorically). For that reason, perhaps, it is predominantly male, with three times as many men taking to the sport as women. It channels that bestial impulse to murder, to battle and to conquer. Which is why so many fortysomething men in unhappy, unsatisfying or sexually impoverished marriages take it up: as an outlet.
Without going into too much detail, there was something of that in my case (I got divorced last year). Although my marriage was not unhappy in toto, there was enough unhappiness to lead to a split. But it was a crisis of a different kind that led me to serve the Lycra god. In 2019, shortly after my health-check, while I was on my way to Syria on a reporting assignment, I was almost killed in a car crash not far from my home. I was off work for four months and gentle cycling was part of my rehabilitation.
When the physios left, the hobby stuck. Before long I found that I was getting lean. I shaved my head. I think I went a bit mad. As the months rolled by, I ended up with soaring energy levels and the fitness of a 20-year-old. I needed less sleep. I was addicted. My life seemed to change around me, with a new job, a new house and a new relationship arising out of nowhere. I had become a different person. (And yes, my cholesterol went down to normal levels.) As irrational as it sounds, I put down all of this to cycling.
But it is insane. No normal person would do it. And that is why the pleasure is so large and the rewards so great.
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