hamster

Going slow means that you can keep going longer and more often. If you treat every ride as a workout where you need to push your limits, you will quickly find that you are exhausted after a couple of hours and you can't ride on consecutive days (or rather, you can but it hurts and you can't maintain the original level of performance.) If you restrain yourself, you can get used to multi-hour rides several days in a row. It means that you can maintain higher weekly volume and mileage.

Also, you'll be surprised how many calories you burn just riding at a leisurely pace. (Assuming that you're pedaling all the time and picking gears where you feel _some_ resistance.)

There's this old and very misunderstood concept of a "fat burn zone". The idea is that the best way to burn fat is to target a heart rate that is well below HRmax. Somehow lots of people misunderstand it to mean 20 minutes a day walking on a treadmill at 130 bpm. That's completely wrong and gives rise to a series of articles debunking the whole concept as a myth. In reality, fat burn zone works because it lets you go a lot longer. Cycling at high intensity, you might be burning 600 calories/hour but you will be unable to go more than 8-10 hours/week. Staying in the "fat burn zone", you might only burn 400 calories/hour, but you can do 20 hours a week or even more.

Jim Kukula

Yesterday's ride: 23 miles and 1500 feet of climbing, in 2.5 hours. That's 9.5 mph.

Looking at https://www.brianmac.co.uk/maxhr.htm - my max heart rate is maybe 165. It'll be fun to get my new monitor, but I bet I was up close to that a lot of the time!

MetalPedaler

I try and increase my riding speed, so that I can take the time to stop and enjoy things along the way.

At the turn around point on one of my rides, I end up in this tiny little town, which consists of a church; a cemetary; a defunct store and a stop sign....and a few houses. It is IMPOSSIBLE for me just to turn around and start riding back. No, I HAVE TO stop there and hang-out in that church parking lot, and enjoy the beauty and the quietness, and just take it all in for 10 minutes!

Plus I've made friends with all the dogs along my routes....so I'll often stop and pet them and give them biscuits. All the stops can really cut into my total time...so I try and ride faster....

brianogilvie 

Those formulas are based on populations and not very accurate for many individuals. I'm 45, and those formulas put my HRmax in the 170s. The last time I measured mine, which was about 13 months ago, it was actually 193.

Whiteknight

It all depends on why you are on the bike in the first place. My wife averages 8 to 10 mph. Depends on how much housework or gardening she did the day before. A short ride is 35 to 40 miles a day. A good long ride will be between 55 and 65 miles a day on long summer days. We are both 71 this year. Gets us out of a nasty and dangerous city neighborhood. We get to see all sorts of flowers and wild critters. Get to find some real good food close to the MUP.

Even slow speeds keep aging joints working better. And 8 to 10 mph on the MUP beats sitting in a senior citizens center comparing illnesses and meds with other seniors who get no exercise.
Last trip to the hospital for me after a stray cat find on the hand resulted in a serious infection. Triage nurse hooked me up. Asked if I had any health problems she should know about. I asked why. She replied that my pulse rate was low, my respiration rate was low and my blood pressure was low. I responded that I was "at rest". She asked what I meant. I told her about the amount of mileage we put on our bikes almost year round. She replied that I should keep it up as they rarely see such data in elderly patients.

Do I want to go out and keep up with the road bike crowd on the MUP? Recreation and exercise that brings pleasure rather than painful muscles is the main goal.

chasm54

The original question was whether cycling slowly will give you the same health benefits as going harder. And the answer is no. There are studies that suggest that those who exercise intensively enjoy longer lives and! just as important, better health in their later years, than those who don't.

Cycling slowly is great, I do it a lot, especially on tour. But there's slow, and there's slow. On tour I might ride 60 miles a day at around 12 mph. That'll get you pretty fit, no doubt about it. But most people don't have the time to ride five hours a day. If you want to maximise the health benefits of cycling, a few hours a week at "smelling the roses" pace isn't going to cut it. You need intensity.

And the comments about the speed merchants burning themselves out at forty couldn't be wider of the mark. The more you do, the more you are able to do, and the longer you can keep doing it. Decline in performance through age is much worse in those who don't do intense exercise than in those who do. Effectively, we decide to become older and fatter than we need to be, because we are too lazy to do enough to slow that process.

MetalPedaler

This is beautiful!

My mother is 88 and still in good health. She doesn't ride...but she's always walked a lot, throughout her entire life- she's not "old" mentally or physically. We went to visit some relatives recently- I got a kick out of how a 50 year old guy [my own age] and 40-something woman were talking like you'd expect octogenarians to- discussing their plethora of health problems, and the meds they take and the operations they've had. (They're both obese and eat junk food).

What has this world come to? My mother's sitting there feeling sorry for them; and other than myself, was the healthiest person there.

Keep up the good work!

Dilberto

Carb-load the night before your empty stomach ride, and you'll have plenty of stored Glycogen for the first 30 miles of easy spinning.

Whiteknight

But I will own up to the wife and I being "dopers".

Two years ago we started taking Co Q-10. Started with memory problems and a reduced ability to deal with the cold here in PA. Plus I had a good deal of industrial exposure to high levels of TCE which caught up with me in my "golden years". The Co Q-10 does wonders for both of us. I talked about it to some road biker riders we chat with on the MUP. Three of them recently retired. They started the Co Q-10 and found it helped them on the long and fast rides they do. Of course at we reached 70 I joked that Geritol and prune juice are performance enhancing substances at our age.

On the subject of bike speed versus benefits. What happens if you go down at a good rate of speed. One of our friends went down two weeks ago. Shoulder badly injured. Bone and soft tissue. He is 68 years old. Healing will be slow. At our ages a hard fall could basically end our biking. So we weigh the results of our speed and the possibilities in an accident. Are the speed bragging rights worth the risk? Do I want to trade my bike for crutches or a walker. Could I get time trial bars for the walker?

MetalPedaler

WhiteKnight, if I had to still deal with northeast winters [I'm originally fromn NY!] I think I'd take drugs, too!

I worry too about the effects of a high-speed crash. On some of the backroads, which are narrow and have rough pavement on the edges, I'll typically keep my speed down to 25MPH or less on descents, instead of letting it fly at 37MPH. And I'm only 50. (I would have done the same thing at 20, under the same conditions!). I'm sure at 70 or 80, I'd take such descents even slower! It's just good foresight and responsibility to think of such things- and more so when you're older, and one injury could be debilitating. I think for the most part- and especially for those of us who live where the scenery is nice- the ride is more enjoyable going slow. I like to know that I can go fast....but if I can get to where I can average 22MPH...and then just ride by choice at 15MPH.....just think how easy that 15MPH will seem.

Jim Kukula

My Nike heart rate monitor seems to have died after maybe 7 years, so I ordered a cheap Omron monitor which arrived in the mail a few days ago. I took it out on one of my easier loops, 10.23 miles with 272 feet of climbing. I made it around in 55 minutes, which is about 11 mph - plenty slow by most measures. My heart rate was mostly in the 140s. It dropped into the 130s on some descents, and was up in the 150 for the climbs. It was up around 161 and 162 at the top of the biggest hill. I don't know what my max heart rate is... at age 57 the standard stupid formula would say (220-57)=163 which is surely wrong. But anyway I was getting a plenty good workout it seems to me. And that is my easiest ride by far!

The relationship between speed and effort is so loose - there are so many factors involved! A workout needs to be at least moderately vigorous to be of much value, but that can still turn out to be relatively slow cycling!

ragtoplvr

+1000000 We both get fresh air, exercise, and companionship. If I have to have some speed, I will lap the lake as she sits in the truck listening to tunes. I have seen her wave me around twice.

Rod