I'm living proof that life begins at 50: Why it’s never too late to be the fittest you’ve ever been

As a young lad I loved cycling. Not just your standard riding to the park to feed the ducks type of deal, but a true bona fide enthusiasm for slinging a leg over my bike (a Raleigh Grifter in this case) and making the damn thing dance.

For this I blame Jean Francois Bernard, a cyclist who in the late 1980s - along with Laurent Fignon - had a fair go at replacing Bernard Hinault as the darling of French cycling. I can still recall his Mont Ventoux time trial at the Tour de France in 1987 – a race against the clock he won in searing heat with spectators half a dozen deep urging him to the summit.

Fortunately we had our own Mont Ventoux just down the end of the road. It was at least 100 metres long and the gradient maxed out at a heady 1.8%, but for us it was equal in stature to the Giant of Provence, handily tucked away in a leafy corner of Surrey.

My brother on his Dawes, my neighbours on their Raleigh Burner and Peugeot City Express, we all had designs on becoming the next Sean Yates or Malcolm Elliott - and given the speeds we thundered up this incline a career in pro cycling surely beckoned.

*Record scratch*.....

20 years on the booze

Then my 12th birthday rolled around, and as is customary for a pubescent chap, I seamlessly morphed into a spotty, snarling oik, who couldn’t careless about cycling, or anything other than staying in bed with the curtains drawn feeling perpetually pissed off.

Cycling? Who cared about cycling. It was a daft sport anyway. And look at the clothing they wear. You’d have to be some sort of weirdo to knock about in those threads. I was despondent, bored, angry, and listening to Nirvana at full volume.

And so began a 20-year period during which I became heavily embroiled in the cigarette and alcohol scene. Yes, a dogged campaign to rid myself of as many brain cells as possible was embarked upon, perhaps while invoking a little cardio respiratory disease to boot. You know, just to add the finishing touches to my die-as-young-as-humanly-possible project.

I alighted from my twenties in woeful shape - my stomach had its own time zone and I was in possession of a pair of lungs that were as useful as boobs on a boar. Operation death was moving along swiftly.

Operation 'get fit'

Then my children arrived and it was a bit like waking from a two-decade long fever dream. For the first time since those halcyon days on our own private Mont Ventoux, I was struck by clarity of thought. I looked at my newborns and decided the best way to approach the future was to not be dead. Operation fitness began.

While I had been enjoying my extended sabbatical from reality, James, my brother, had continued cycling, having negotiated his teenage years in a slightly less idiotic fashion.

I knocked on his door, cap in hand, and asked if I could borrow one of his myriad bicycles. After assuring him I wasn’t going to sell it, he wheeled out a Gary Fisher mountain bike and off I rode. And rode and rode and rode.

Things got very Forest Gump - I could not stop riding that bike. I wasn’t going fast, not by any stretch, but I was riding it consistently and I was riding it far. My legs, even on the merest suggestion of a rise in the road, quivered under the pressure – I had no real leg muscle to call upon – and my lungs were still reeling from the gargantuan walloping they’d received by Messrs Benson and Hedges. Yet, I kept riding. I found it hugely therapeutic, incomparably satisfying

A few months after I began cycling, my wife took the children to see her family, meaning I had a week or so to really break in the Genesis cyclo-cross bike I’d recently bought.

I decided to use this opportunity to ride from Land’s End to John o’ Groats… in a pair of trainers and a tracksuit. A few months on from this I rode from the bottom of France to the top, along the mostly flat Avenue Vert.

The seed had officially been sown. My love of riding a bike had been rekindled. I rode without purpose – purely for the love of it – for the following few years. I never really considered my level of physical fitness, this was for my mental health only.

Next however, followed a sequence of events that conspired to make me not only the fittest I’d ever been, but, from an objective point of view, in a pretty high percentile of nationwide fitness levels. Bear with me, I shall explain.

Watt's up

My daughters were around five and six years old at this stage and my wife had gone back to work, meaning daddy day care was front and centre. No long distance cycling sojourns for me then.

But it wasn’t long before I came across what I now consider a sacred pairing – namely, the Wattbike Atom and Zwift. Getting my indoor set-up nailed allowed me to ‘look after the kids’ and ride at the same time, it was perfect. Training with power, though, introduced a level of competition - not necessarily with other people, but as a number to try and beat.

Of course I’d take note of average speeds during outings on the road, but there’s a host of factors at play that make this a highly subjective barometer of how well you're going. Watts however are watts. A pure measure that, on a smart bike, is down to you and you alone. They became a fixation.

To date I have cycled 32,000km on Zwift via races and interval sessions and the all-important power reading at the top of the screen has kept rising. I’m now breathing some pretty rare air, with a 400 plus watt FTP.

It's never too late

For a feature I’ve been researching for the magazine I recently had to undergo a series of fitness tests, ascertaining lung function, VO2 max, bone density and body fat percentages. Had I done this 18 years ago I would’ve been told to go straight to A&E, don’t pass go - you’re falling apart, mate. Seek immediate help.

Now however, the physician was able to reveal a much rosier picture. My bone density was as it should be for a 48 year old and my body fat was 17%. So far, so normal. It was only when I’d pushed myself to the point of absolute exhaustion during the Vo2 Max test that the full extent of my fitness regime was unearthed.

A relative VO2 Max of 60 was recorded with an absolute VO2 Max of 5.2 ml/min - the former putting me in the superior category for my age group with the latter bordering on elite.

Far from trying to blow smoke up my own backside here - although if I don’t do it, nobody else will– this heavily potted version of my road back to a fairly well functioning member of society pays testament to the resilience of the human body.

Regardless of your current situation, whether you’re obese, suffering with ill health or injury or indeed battling a substance addiction, I suspect it’s very rarely too late to flip your lifestyle and take control of your destiny again no matter what your age is. After all, age really is just a number and becoming the best possible version of yourself is just a couple of habit changes away.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a date with Mont Ventoux… not the real one of course, there’s another one at the end of my road. And you’re never too old to pretend to be Jean Franccois Bernard.