Bicycling=fitness for ordinary people
Submitted by Brent Hugh on Mon, 07/16/2007 - 6:09pm
According to a New York Times article by Gina Kolata today, bicycling is an activity that ordinary people--not just young, thin people--use to maintain fitness:
“All of our trips are designed to satisfy experienced riders,” Mr. Hampsten writes on his Web site. To train, he suggests, “you should ride at least 100 miles a week for at least 6 to 10 weeks” on routes with “as many hills as you can find.”The rest of the article is a very interesting read--how people of all ages and body types are able to use bicycling as a way to stay--or become--fit and healthy.
So I had an image of what our fellow cyclists would look like when my husband, son and I arrived in Castagneto Carducci for a cycling vacation. They would look like Mr. Hampsten, who at age 45 remains boyishly thin and agile, bouncing with energy.
I was wrong. For the most part, our group consisted of ordinary-looking, mostly middle-age men and a few middle-age women.
These were serious cyclists. One of them was Bob Eastaugh, a 63-year-old justice on the Alaska Supreme Court who said he rode mostly to stay in shape for his true passion, downhill ski racing.
And our trip was challenging. The longest hill was 15 miles, the steepest had a 15 percent grade, the longest one-day ride was 90 miles, and the terrain was never, ever flat. It is hard to imagine that a group of middle-age adults could have handled an equivalently difficult 10 days of running. What, I wondered, made bicycling different?
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