Hi Lucillle,

You have already received healthy encouragement and advice. Cycling is great fun and great exercise. Progressing from not-been-on-a-bike to faster-and-further-than-when-I-was-young has been my experience. Cycling brings out the best in many people. The low-impact and mile-after-mile of fresh air has provided a new and ongoing interest in fitness.

I’ll add two items of general advice;

Let the body rest and recover. I do my best when I ride every other day. The body builds muscle and burns calories while in recovery mode. However, try to keep riding three days a week, week after week. Extended breaks tend to reverse progress.

Find a good bike shop that is expert at fitting bikes. Making the leap from 10 mile rides to 50 mile rides requires comfortable shoes, saddle and handlebars on a bike that is the right size and adjusted properly.

I made slow-but-steady progress during my first two years. My body has reversed itself, age-wise. I now can ride further and faster than when I was 16 years old.

All through childhood, up to age 19, I rode a bike - it was the only way for a kid to get around. My parents buy me a car?! that's just crazy talk. Then I married, had kids etc. etc. I don't think I rode a bike again until maybe my late 30's.

The first ride I distinctly remember was when we went away for a fall weekend with friends. We rented mountain bikes and took them out onto the forest roads of Sugarloaf Mt. It was both wonderful and *incredibly* painful. Wonderful because I found out I just loved being out in the woods, swooping down the hills, and because a couple of deer and their fawns come out of the trees about 30' ahead of us as we were stopped, catching our breath.

Incredibly painful because I was 30 lbs heavier than I am now, and because I was wearing blue jeans. After an hour, the seat felt like I was sitting on the narrow side of a rough 2 x 4. I ended up taking off my sweatshirt and wrapping it around the seat in an effort to make the seat softer.

I've been biking ever since. I didn't set out with any goals in mind, it was just fun to ride, but I lost the 30 lbs along the way, found some great friends, and seen wonderful sights.

Welcome back Lucillle & have fun.

[QUOTE=Barrettscv;12118505]
Let the body rest and recover. I do my best when I ride every other day. The body builds muscle and burns calories while in recovery mode. However, try to keep riding three days a week, week after week. Extended breaks tend to reverse progress.

Couldn't agree more with the advice to make time for recovery. Last year I started biking for the first time since I was 9. It wasn't long before I was pushing it every weekend, doing spin classes during the weekdays when I couldn't bike and throwing in a couple of other days of weights and interval training. After some initial improvement, I just couldn't seem to get faster or ride further and it was quite discouraging. Thankfully, a fellow cyclist told me to put some recovery time in my schedule. I did and a miracle happened. Like Barrett, I am much better when I ride after a day's break. Keeping at that pace has led to steady and encouraging improvements.

Restarted riding in 2003 when 48. At first I could manage about 6 miles over a 45 min ride, but my legs felt like lead after I got home. And sweated like a pig. The rides slowly got longer week by week, but mostly I was learning what I and the bike can and cannot do. I also wore out the Wallymart bike after 350 miles and replaced it with a name brand bike. Total miles was about 1800.

By the end of the next summer I was able to manage the hills to get to the park 3 miles away where there is an excellent and long MUT. I was very proud the first time I made it to the north end of the MUT for a 38 miles round trip. I also wore out the low end Trek I had bought (hubs couldnt stand up to the miles and my weight), so traded it in for a higher end bike. By year's end I had managed my first 50 mile ride (in one day). Total miles 4389.

By 2006 and 51yrs, I had discovered that I would loose conditioning fast over the winter and started some cool weather riding (down to 41F) so as not to have to wait until May or June to be back in shape. I also bought bike shoes. 5580 miles in 2006, with the average ride being about 30.

Those miles are all on a MTB. For me it was less about miles than work effort or calories burned. To get the same work out on a road bike or hybrid I'd have to ride much, much faster and/or much, much further. In 2007 I bought a hybrid for days I was "feeling my age" or not fully recharged from the previous day. The hybrid allowed me to log my first century (100.52). I also lowered my cool weather threshold to 35F, got some lights for later riding. Owing partly to a warm Feb, I managed 6400 miles (30% on the hybrid).

Since 2007, I have started doing more small errands on the bike or on the way home from a ride. The average ride is now about 42 and annual miles around 5000, (25-27% on the hybrid) and I have dropped about 35lbs. I try to do 1 century each year, in 2010 I managed a semi century - 89.98 on the MTB (much harder than 100+ on the hybrid!)

When I turned 55 AARP kept sending me stuff. Last year I was on the MTB and passing some 30-somethings on hybrids while going uphill. I recall thinking I should get a plate to hang from my seat bag that says "You've Just Been Passed by a 55 yr old" - but none of the AARP brochures had such a thing.

All in all it took 2 full summers to get into reasonable shape and learn what not to do to crash.

When I started back I was way over weight and very out of shape. Woodworking was my hobby after retirement and after 10 years of standing in my shop the result in my form was not pretty. When I got back on the bike I barely made it to the corner before going anaerobic. But I kept at it and quit woodworking mostly and became mostly addicted to cycling. Not a bad trade off.

I was slow

Mine started due to financies, we lost our car and had to have someway to get, FOOD and larger items, that we couldn't carry on the city bus. So I bought a Wal-Mart Roadmaster Mnt. Sport sudo MTB. Found a cheap, used childs trailer and converted to a utility trailer. After taking the Roadmaster to the LBS to be adjusted correctly (cost almost as much as the bicycle!!!), I rode and hauled that POS for 8 months. The great thing is that riding it reminded me how MUCH I missed bicycling. So we saved up cash and bought 2 entry level Jamis MTB's, put skinny road tires on them and started to "ride" longer rides. It's 4 miles to the local Wal-Mart and back home to the Apt. with a load of food for the week, it was "tough" but I did it, it was so much easier going, when we got the Jamis MTB's with lower gearing.

We finally joined the local Cycling Club and started riding the "social" rides and from there we just started putting on a little more miles each time. By July 2009, we did our first "multi-day" tour (motel'd), avg. 40+ miles a day for 4 days. So start slow and just keep adding "miles", each time, it will come to you, ENJOY!!

Will not recount my story of retuning to cycling after a (stupid) 14 year lay off.

Two bits of advice: Having participated in many sports over the years, your gains in cycling will be much slower than you expect. But that is not a bad thing. If you were active in competitive sports you will not be able to get to the level you had in your youth. You could train 23 hours a day and it just isn't going to happen.

Good luck, stick with it no matter how discouraged you get. Rest and recover when you need it.

I was at my uncle's funeral, and talking to my long-lost cousin when he poked me in the tummy and says, "Looks like you're putting on some weight there!" I thought to myself, "Hmpf!" but didn't say anything. But he went on, "You should do what I did. I bought a bike and ride it every day and have lost about 60 lbs."

So when I got back home, I went to Academy and bought the $100 mountain bike, put a new seat on it, and started riding. There was one little rise on the greenbelt trail, and I had to downshift and huff and puff to make it up that. But it got easier, and after a while, I was able to ride up the same spot without downshifting, and then without even slowing down. And it's just been slow and gradual improvements since then.

I never started back. I started. I had to teach myself to ride as an adult. Me and my first bike, about four months after I took my first ride and crashed into a mailbox.



I made up for lost time......

Was that a Navigator 3.0 in the first photo?

Yes, my first bike, which I named Excelsior.

I have a Navigator 2.0 (21" frame), which I've not named... other than "bike". It's great for roaming aronund on a variety of surfaces, but I suspect that at some point I might like something a bit more roadie in nature. It'll be a little while, though.

I've ridden metric centuries on Excelsior, and an overnight tour. It's not the bike, it's the motor.

That said, he's not been out for a couple of years. My other bikes, Roark and Nothung, get more use.

Wow, great stories everyone,

Great reading! My time away from cylcing was (relative to some others above) super short: Stopped riding when I got my driver's license when I was 16, started up again when I was 18 and haven't stopped since.

Might as well face it, I'm addicted to bikes (and cycling)!

Rick / OCRR