We have decades of experience about our own health and performance, and that’s invaluable and should never be underestimated. The only tourist traffic seemed to be vintage car rallies that were often even slower up the Sa Colobra climb than we were.

If the answer is ‘no’, then where is the line that I will not cross and what is its intellectual underpinning? Nature did not anticipate that the human being would need to live past, shall we say, the age of 30, and therefore there was no reason to prepare, or worse, select against it. His opposition derives from the unnaturalness of being fixed in one spot with a trainer and not being able to develop the skills you get out on the road from descending or climbing or turning. And to paraphrase him, he broadly says that cycling, even at a high level, will give you improved heart and lung capacity at the risk of broken bones. Two conclusions arise immediately: we are highly evolved to suit our ancestral environment, where lightweight carbon bicycles don’t feature heavily and FTP is irrelevant; and in that ancestral environment we would combat disease and malnutrition every single day, endeavouring to last into our third decade of life, which would hopefully correspond with our offspring’s emerging independence.If you assume your real (not inflated) FTP is 250, then your hard sessions using the Dr Baker algorithm will be 250 x 105-110% x 4-6 (8-10 minute) reps. And then in a handful of years, few things happened that lit a bonfire under midlife performance - power-meters, Strava and Zwift. Unfortunately the images were mostly decorative and an opportunity was missed to match and interplay more usefully with the text content.

If you’re working at this level, then you’re the recipient of a cascade of positive physiological responses, including increasing the mitochondria in your muscles. We had wonderful, warm and generous speakers who contributed for free in the spirit of joint exploration and education – many are featured elsewhere in this book.But still a cocktail of pride and stubbornness prevailed over my body’s pain and inclination to stop. Phil Cavell cofounder of Cyclefit the bike fitting and custom bike company explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance. I think even Eddy Merckx agreed with that sentiment after racing there in 1977 (he lost to Sid Barrass). The book came out of Cavell’s experience, not just as a world-class bike fitter, but from his experience with a serious, long-term back injury that nearly took him off the bike permanently. So, while there’s certainly evolutionary pressure for Homo sapiens to survive to 30 years old, that still leaves me very unlikely to win an all-out sprint against my 29-year-old self, whether on a bicycle at Eastway or running away from a hungry leopard.

If a problem is tackled early, or during its acute phase, removal of the underlying cause is enough to instantly deal with the pain, and the problem goes away. Now through the pages of this blog, combining the two and holding it together with a curiosity for the influential usage of the written word. It’s true that the process of evolution is continual, but it’s also true that there has been simply too little time and too few generations for substantive changes to the human genome. Coach Fox’s thoughts on the subject of sensible restraint are these: “The important aspect (and the part that amateur athletes have enormous difficulty in executing well) is that only about 10-20 per cent maximum of training time needs to be here. Can we achieve real performance into and beyond middle-age and if so what is the best way to go about it?

Currently, there’s a quiet revolution occurring in the ranks of middle-aged and older sportsmen and women. This isn’t going bonkers and sending your systems haywire — it’s a controlled elevation of training stimulus. There is a short section on nutrition, suggestion alcohol may not actually be that good for us, in spite of the popular press.