Originally Posted by
gthomson
Cycling in your 80's is a massive achievement, huge KUDOs to you! I can only wish I will be doing the same.
On that topic, is there any good books on continuing to cycle as you age? I find there's a real lack of resources out there for how to train/exercise safely as we age, yet tons of content for the younger generations. That surprises me because we are a very large demographic as the boomers are now post retirement stage and us gen Xr's are approaching it.
BF has been more help to me than any other resource. It's real time and the science of aging is still very young. Books are histories. OTOH, if you're young, like in your 50s, there are the Friel books: Fast after 50, and Cycling Past 50. Things will continue to change as one's ability to recover decreases. I had a doctor who told me, "After you're dead there'll be lots of research published about how you did what you did. You're the first generation, the point of the spear." Not dead yet.
As far as "safely" goes, the only thing to be careful about is: don't keep hitting the high end as hard and long as you could when you were younger. If you keep that up, you'll get Afib in your late 60s or early 70s. That seems to be a constant issue with a simple fix: decrease high end volume as you age. Everything else seems random. Other than that, carefully directed hard work can fix almost everything that goes wrong with your body. You need to become your own PT. The youtube "knees over toes guy" is a good example of analyze/fix. Not his specifics particularly, just his method. It's constant - notice weakness/problem, fix same, revising training to suit.