Originally Posted by
goldfinch
I have come to the conclusion that starting to ride in your late 50s after being sedentary, with no fitness and little muscle mass, that it takes a long time to build up and as Jethro said, "aspire to mediocrity."
This part is so hard for many of us, especially us older folks who are coming to cycling later in life. Even if we were never athletes, a lot of us have been pretty successful academically, in our careers, etc. We didn't get that way by aspiring to mediocrity. But this is a whole new ballgame. For many of us, for the first time in our lives we're attempting something that we were never particularly good at and have almost no hope of excelling at.
And one of the things that makes it so hard for us as a group is that this whole process of going from "obese" or "morbidly obese" to "normal" requires a lot of sacrifice and discipline, commitment - even a measure of suffering. A lot of us motivate ourselves by holding a mental picture of what we'll be like when we've reached our weight goal. And often, that picture is completely unrealistic. The danger is that, once we realize that losing 50, 75, 100 lbs is NOT going to make us 20 year old Olympic stars, we decide the whole thing was a rip-off and go back to what we were doing before we started.
I was reasonably fast 15 years ago - not racing fast, but I used to average a solid 17-18 mph on my 52 mile round trip commute to work, which involved crossing some of the ridges that comb Northern NJ. I also used to lift weights, and while not a bodybuilder by any stretch, I was pretty decent for a middle aged guy with a very demanding job and a family.
So, when I went back to lifting weights last summer, I HAD to get back to where I was quickly, and kept adding weights to the bar as soon as I could force myself to lift them. Result: torn rotator cuff that is just starting to be healed enough to even think about lifting again. But hopefully I've learned my lesson: this time I will take it slow, and "aspire to mediocrity".
Ditto for cycling. I have no speed goals. I even stopped using a bike computer. I don't calculate my average speed, don't track anything but my mileage (and I even wonder if that's productive). The point is to get out there and ride, do some good exercise, enjoy the process as much as possible. The rest will take care of itself as well as it will - which may not be fantasy level, but will be infinitely better than where we started.