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Intermediate Bike Training News |  |
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Greetings, Well, here is your Tuesday newsletter on Thursday again. I need an Editor to hold my feet to the fire. Anyway, I'm going to devote this issue to the Midlife Cycling lifestyle. We have a steady stream of people joining our group so I feel a need to get us all on the same page periodically. This morning I read an article in Yahoo! Finance about Reinventing Retirement. It states that people are, and will continue, to work well into their senior years. The reasons may be for financial need, to stay connected to others, to work at something they enjoy, or to stay physically and mentally active. Another interesting note was that the second "key to happiness in old age" was Keeping Fit. While thoughts of retirement may be far off for a lot of us, it is becoming common knowledge that we have to start a fitness "habit" early in life if we want to be healthy in our senior years. The essence of the Midlife Cycling lifestyle is how to do this when you have so many other priorities pulling at you. It is interesting how many things go on around us that we are unaware of. After adopting my daughter from China I have been amazed at how many of my friends' first children were adopted. After starting Midlife Cycling for my own fitness needs I was surprised at how many people I know suffer from chronic medical conditions even though they are only in their 40s or 50s. My sincere hope is that I can help you prevent or alleviate these problems.  Rick Russon
Riding is what we are all about. While the physiology and nutrition concepts that I present could apply to any endurance sport, we focus on cycling because it is low-impact, convenient, and we can control our effort precisely. It is also an activity that can be enjoyed together by people with differing levels of fitness. Lack of time is the biggest challenge to establishing an effective fitness program. The Midlife Cycling program addresses this in a couple ways. First, we know that busy people don't need to add another job to their life. So formal "workouts" are just not interesting or practical. We go out to ride, first and foremost, for enjoyment and as an escape from our daily grind. However, I teach you how to ride so that you will obtain the maximum fitness benefit. Another major concept of Midlife Cycling is that ANY exercise is better than NO exercise. We have been programmed by the fitness industry that we must exercise regularly. That would be ideal but so would eating a healthy breakfast every morning, eating lunch at a regular time every day, and sitting down with the family for dinner every evening. I don't have anything in my life that is "regular" and don't expect exercise to be any different. But the performance of our cyclists shows that the lack of regular exercise is not as much of a problem as others think it is. Our bodies are amazing machines. They adapt constantly unlike anything mechanical that we can build. I learned from raising my daughter that I can't control how she eats every day. What matters is how she eats over the entire week. I've adopted that to the Midlife Cycling program. My interest is the total time of activity you have over the week. That includes not only cycling and "real" exercise, but also climbing stairs, walking to lunch, walking around the office, playing with the kids, mowing the lawn, etc. At best, "real" exercise is only 10% of our total metabolic expenditure over the week. The other 90% is how much you move during those 16-18 hours days you put in.
Good luck to those of you who are going south for the Santa Fe Century this weekend. The Saturday RMCC ride will be a giant climbing Century through Coal Creek Cyn, Nederland, Ward, and Lyons. I'll be giving the Women's Bike Maintenance Clinic on Saturday and riding the Aurora-Roggen Century on Sunday. Last year, I believe the constant climbing hurt our top end speed for those of us who cannot ride the long and flat Sunday recovery rides. So you will see that my personal schedule either substitutes in a flat ride periodically or takes the shorter route of a climbing ride. The only exception is that June is full of epic and scenic climbs that should be enjoyed at any speed.
Another reason I started Midlife Cycling is because I like to cook and eat. So much so that I actually went to culinary school for 18 months. Eventually, this little company will realize its holistic "Fitness- Food-Travel" aspirations. Dieting is a form of deprivation. You have made sacrifices to raise a family, build a career, and serve your community. Do you really want to destroy one of the most basic simple pleasures of life? I prefer to base my health and fitness on "thriving" rather than "depriving." Burning 5,000 to 10,000 calories during a weekend of riding I could eat "deep fried chocolate cakes" during the week if I wanted. Don't be afraid to eat and drink on the bike. Even if you are trying to lose weight the fatty acid needs a glucose (sugar) molecule to ride on. That is why we say that "fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate." Fatty acid utilization occurs at lower intensity levels and decreases as exercise intensity goes up. However, after about two hours (three is better) your body starts using fatty acids at an increased rate. This FA/CHO crossover point also increases as your conditioning improves. The "short, intense exercise" advocates are arguing that total calories are all that matter and that you get the same benefits from a shorter workout. All I can say is look at the people coming out of spin class and compare them to the skeleton-like roadies. Longer, less- intense riding burns fatty acid, excess glucose, and excess sodium out of the body. It also doesn't increase muscle size much (less hypertrophy) unless you are a fanatical climbing rider.
I help run an organization called Knight Flyers which is private pilots donating transportation on their private aircraft for people who need to get to distant medical care. Someone generously donated an office at 800 Lincoln Street. This will hold 50-80 people for a meeting. I have an agreement with the other members of the organization that they will allow me to hold cycling seminars there in exchange for paying the utilities. As things settle in I will be able to provide you with more seminars and more flexible scheduling. Previously I had to work with a hotel that charged me $400-500 for each meeting. I couldn't set a dozen dates and cancel the ones that we couldn't get enough people for due to the inconvenience to the hotel and/or cancellation fees involved. The plan is to start building a regular seminar series schedule. Not only would we have the Midlife Cycling information but also guest speakers with different experiences. We will try some appetizer-type seminar events and see if there is any interest in holding some full dinner meeting events. I spoke with our member, Adele, who just returned from cycling across the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas. We agreed that it would have been nice for her group to have a dinner meeting event to discuss the cycling, cultural, and culinary aspects of her trip before they went over there. (There is a Himalayan restaurant in Colorado Springs where we could have held the event). The same could be had for anyone wanting to cycle Italy, France, Vietnam or other exotic locale.
Nothing new in the store. For those of you who are new here is the story. The Midlife Cycling store is not meant to compete with REI, Performance Bike, or any other local or online stores. The primary purpose is to offer the Midlife Cycling training products that are under development. The secondary purpose is to offer those items from other manufacturers that I find are unique, have a specific purpose in our training, and are of exceptional value for their price. The final part of the store is a Bargain area where we can sell used or surplus items between ourselves. The intent is an online garage sale as an alternative to Craig's List or eBay.
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