The last post

In his final column, Phil Cavell distils his into a life plan for Midlife Cyclists learnings

When I first started writing this column I made a pledge to myself not to simply re-write my book, The Midlife Cyclist, in serialised form. Mainly because I get bored easily but partly because it didn’t feel fair. This frequently necessitated putting the old band back on the road – Dr Jon Baker, Dr Nigel Stephens, Dr David Hulse, Dr Nicky Keay. And it also meant reaching out to new experts for new and unique perspectives, such as sleep expert Dr Charles Samuel and cycling psychiatrist Dr Craig Paul Stewart.

The insights of Samuel and Stewart, which featured in the ‘sleep’ two-parter (issues 124/ 125), were invaluable and facilitated a deeper understanding of the role of sleep in recovery than I was able to cover in my book. To the point that if you only take one message away from the sum of all my columns, I think it would be this: get the entirety of sleep you actually require to properly recover from all of the life and exercise stressors you subject yourself to. Get this piece honestly right and most of your life and cycling frustrations may magically disappear. The key operative term in that last sentence is of course ‘honestly’.

A design for life