First Blood - Does Your Body Need An Mot?

With Rambo-esque pluck, CW’s David Bradford lances a finger and spills blood in the name of journalistic enquiry — namely, do cyclists benefit from biomarker testing?

Cyclists are obsessed with output. We spend fortunes on hardware and software to monitor power, heart rate and calorie burn, to track our rides and compare ourselves with others. Meanwhile, we scarcely give a passing thought to our wetware — that is, the systems inside our bodies that make this output possible. Of the internal workings of flesh, bone and blood we seem prepared to carry on in ignorance, free from any data beyond the rudimentary “Ow, that hurts” or “Oh God, I’m so tired I need to stop”. Why do we settle for such paucity of knowledge? It’s not as though we have to, now that keeping tabs on our biology is easier and cheaper than ever.

These days, you don’t need to go via a GP to get your blood tested and analysed. You can prick a finger, take a sample of blood, send it off to a specialist company and have the results on screen in front of you (having been checked by a sports doctor) within 48 hours. It’s a level of efficiency the overstretched NHS simply cannot match. For around £100, you can have the full complement of fitness-related biomarkers tested, potentially flagging up correctable deficiencies. The question is, what’s the likelier outcome: improved performance and peace of mind, or information overload and needless worry?

To find out, I submitted myself for Forth Edge (forthedge.com) testing, and recruited two further guinea pigs, former national champions Brian Smith and Matt Bottrill. We each sent off a blood sample and then waited on tenterhooks for our biomarkers to reveal how well our bodies were functioning, hoping for revelations that would unlock new levels of fitness. Two days later, the results were in...