I was recently in conversation with fellow contributor here, Tootlepedal, we were talking about cycling and the fact that I didn’t do it anymore since the arrival in our lives of Max our Border Terrier. This inspired me to write this.
When I first retired i did a lot of cycling, carrying on from when I finally stopped racing about five years before. I first rode a bike when I was five and when I left school I bought myself a ‘proper’ bike and started riding and racing with Watford Roads Cycle Club. I kept it going through various branches of cycling. Road racing, time trials, and even mountain bike racing as a veteran. I finally stopped when I was around sixty years old and had a bad crash. It woke me up to the fact that I still had to work for a living and maybe it wasnt the best and safest way to continue.
When I retired in 2008 I started riding again on a regular basis two or three times a week and at weekends club riding with Milton Keynes Road Club. We had a caravan at the time and visited France often, especially the Alps and I could do some proper riding up bigger hills there. Among those ‘hills’ were cyclings holy grails, Alpe d’Huez and Mont Ventoux. Both of them had been ambitions for me to conquer most of my cycling life, watching the professionals on TV was very inspiring. It’s not as easy riding 15 miles or so up a mountain as they make it look though !
I continued riding on a reguar basis three or four times a week until October in 2018. It was then we acquired Max. I got into the habit of walking him for about an hour morning and evening. It being winter time I didnt get out on the bike so much but I was getting my exercise, so it didnt worry me.
After a few months, despite not weighing myself on a regular basis I noticed I was actually losing weight, which had been among my reasons for starting cycling more when I retired, but never seemed to succeed. I weighed about 12.5 – 13 stones when I retired and I had set myself the target of getting back down to the racing weight of 10.5 stones of my youth. I found that I was now down to under 11 stones and after another month or so of walks I finally hit my target.
Among the reasons for this are probably that when I was riding regularly my heart rate would be 125 to 160 beats per minute. When I am walking Max it maybe gets up into the 90’s. After looking into reasons for this I found out that at high heart rates you burn fat but build muscle and muscle weights more than fat. Keeping the heart rate low, a maximum of a 100 bpm burns the fat. I have noticed that my thighs are nowhere near as muscular as they used to be, and neither is the rest of me, but I am still going strong at 83..
I am thankful I chose a non impact sport because I dont think I could have kept going for so long if I had chosen running for instance. Some runners I see seem very light on their feet and have quite an elegant style, however a lot that come past me when I am walking are asking for trouble in years to come I think, very heavy and loud footed.
I still have five bikes hanging up in the garage for all the types of cycling and boxes of bike bits and that annoys my wife a lot!! I doubt I will ever use them again so I may as well get rid of them ‘soon’, so that my wife has more space for her junk I suspect.
Brian Goldsmith Photography 
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