If you've cycled for many years, you’ll likely have been through different phases of your two-wheeled adventures, where your goals, aspirations and interests shift up and down, and side to side – and may eventually change out of all recognition.
What you did as a teenager on the bike – had fun, rode fast and dreamed of the endless possibilities of where this machine might take you – will be very different from where you might find yourself in your 70s, still riding for the sheer pleasure of it and the memories it evokes from a life on the bike.
Because of the possibilities that this simple contraption promotes, your relationship with your bike constantly shifts. Not to mention how your life, the responsibilities it brings and the time it eats up, affects your time in the saddle.
Few cyclists experience this gearshift quite like a professional when the time comes to retire and hang up their cleats.
Many will have been on the pro pathway from an age that they can barely remember. Some may have had all the talent but had the enjoyment for the sport squeezed out of them, as their childhood hobby turned into a pressurised job, one that the livelihoods of many others depended on.
For others, their life as a professional becomes such a part of their identity that life on the other side of retirement is impossible to fathom.
Would they ever be able to relocate the simple pleasures of riding a bike again, after years of compromising it through fame and fortune?
Retired British three-time Olympic team pursuit champion Ed Clancy is a poster boy for how bikes can remain as the fulcrum of a life through changing times.
Enduring love
“My love for cycling is as alive today as it was when I was three or four years old, scuttling about on balance bikes,” he tells me over the phone from the office of one of his new day jobs, which you can probably guess is tied up with cycling (he’s South Yorkshire’s active travel commissioner).
We’re chatting because he’s got a new book to promote, which he’s written with flexibility expert Lexie Williamson.
Full Gas Forever: A 40+ Cyclist’s Guide to Riding Further and Faster is a practical manual that capitalises on the trend for midlife cyclists to push themselves harder than at any time in history.
Clancy just about qualifies to write such a book, having turned 40 in March. It's filled with hard-won advice from the pair on the training, nutrition, recovery and off-bike conditioning required for a long life on – and off – the bike.
Clancy and Williamson complement each other well, bringing their own expertise from very different backgrounds. “Bloomsbury, the publishers, approached me about it and with turning 40 this year I thought it sounded like a great idea," Clancy adds.
“But I was honest with them about the things I was interested in – the technical side of bikes and the technique of riding them – and the things I didn’t have the first clue about.
“Things like stretching and nutrition – things that I managed to miraculously avoid as a pro rider. And why it made an awful lot of sense to partner up with someone [Lexie] who was better and smarter than me in every regard.”
The last time I rode with Clancy was on a Club Med press trip last summer in Alpe d’Huez, where he was bounding up and down the high mountains of the French Alps with the enthusiasm of a newborn foal.
Three years post-retirement, he was in fabulous shape. Not any better or worse than when he was propelling himself around a 4,000m track race. Just different. Lighter, less muscled and better prepared for this new chapter of his life.
The particular physicality of his old job on the track left him with worn-out discs in his back that required surgery. These days, the ability to simply ride, as opposed to train, frees up his body and soul.
“We’re all going to get older – that’s a given. But it’s also a given that cycling is the absolute best thing for us," he says.
“Who wants to be trying to play stop-start sports like football in your 50s, 60s or 70s when there’s the option of riding a bike.
“I’m clearly very biassed but cycling is the best sport, leisure activity and means of transport – add all that together and it’s the best way to age gracefully.”
Life begins at 40
While hitting 40 might be a time when some cyclists decide it’s time to start racing at master’s level, for an ex-pro such as Clancy, who’s been riding bikes at full throttle from a very young age, organised racing is low on his agenda from this point onwards.
He wants to experience new things on a bike – which at times has overlapped with his old career.
“I ‘won’ the Fred Whitton this year,” he says to explain how his love for cycling has never been stronger.
Won is a strong word, he clarifies, because the event is a sportive (albeit the most competitive of its kind in the UK), but he got a thrill out of it nonetheless.
“2,500 riders do that event, whippersnappers in long-sleeve skin suits who take it dead seriously," says Clancy.
“I haven’t touched a power crank or heart rate monitor since the day I got off the track in Tokyo [2021] but I still love riding bikes.
“I commute – I’ve cycled into the office in Sheffield today. Sometimes I ride to British Cycling in Manchester to do some work there.
"If I have a free Saturday, I’ll get on my electric mountain bike and head into the hills with people who have nothing in common except enjoying the fun and freedom of doing that.
“I have no desire to hit a certain weight, or coefficient of drag – I just love riding my bike."
But let’s hear more about that Fred Whitton ride…
“I do some ambassadorial work for a company called CAMS [Cycling Accident Management Services, who help cyclists through the process of making a claim after a crash on the road]. One of their managers is Ian Bibby, a friend who I used to race with.
“We went up for the Fred, had a couple of beers the night before, and as is often the case, rumours start circulating around the village that the fast group is going to set off at 8.45 in the morning.
“So me and Ian sat on the back of the 8.45 train. Our tactics went out of the window after 30 minutes and we just went flat-out through and off for the rest of it. And we had a thoroughly enjoyable day out.
“The lad that really should have won it, I sat on him for about 90km, he was so strong that I couldn’t give him a turn. And then the poor lad got heat stroke on the final climb and I never saw him again.
“If I was a better man, I would have waited for him…”
That competitive instinct is clearly harder to shift than the legs sometimes.
“It’s just good fun," says Clancy. "I’ve done a few of the big sportives. The Majorca 312 and I'm doing the Contador one [Gran Fondo Alberto Contador, in Valencia] later this year."
Contador rode the 312 the same year as Clancy, in fact.
“And if you look at the results, guess who finished one place ahead of him. He did puncture, mind you…”
Build back better
For now, back to the book. Although Clancy and Williamson each contributed their own expertise – sometimes independently in different chapters – one in which they both added their two cents was the section on strength training.
Off-the-bike strength exercises are under-utilised by so many cyclists, no matter their age or ability.
The home or gym-based location can seem boring and less stimulating than the great outdoors, and it requires more planning, knowledge and often motivation than riding a bike.
But it unquestionably reinforces our bodies for the one-dimensional activity of cycling, as well as reducking the risk of osteoporosis and boosting our testosterone production, which tails off in men with age without taking steps to remedy it.
“The book isn’t about me giving it the big Olympian – it’s about things I didn’t always get right," says Clancy.
“I could have carried on my career if I’d been a bit smarter about things, and gym work was something I avoided.
“My asset as a team pursuit rider was that I was very fast and had good peak power. I took that as ‘great, I don’t need to do anything in the gym.’
“I can’t help but think I might have avoided those back operations and be in a better position to rehabilitate to the highest level if I was a bit more rounded.
“I am a classic example of someone who’s spent their whole life in a flexed position in one direction and probably suffered the consequences.
Balancing act
If there’s one thing Clancy took from writing the book – and hopes that readers take from it too – it's that finding a balance, an equilibrium, is crucial to your enjoyment and achievement of cycling in midlife and beyond.
As an athlete, he says, you get more debriefs than you know what to do with, picking apart the minutiae of performance forensically.
“But one thing you never really did was helicopter out of the situation, step back and take a long-term, overarching look at how your training is going.
“In this book, we’re not necessarily talking about tiny marginal gains, like how to extract the nth degree of aerodynamics in a wind tunnel – it’s more about good solid, grounded advice.
“And I haven’t even been holding myself accountable to these standards, so it’s still possible to do alright on a bike!”
- Full Gas Forever by Ed Clancy and Lexie Williamson is out now (Bloomsbury Sport, £18.99)
