Road cycling can become a lifelong passion: Once you're in the saddle, the feeling of speed, freedom and progress often won't let you go. And that's exactly why now is the ideal time to get started - here are ten powerful reasons why.
Feeling like you're 30 at 40 and 50 at 60
Hardly anything has been better investigated by science and medicine than the effect of endurance sports on the human body. There is therefore no doubt about the findings: endurance sports such as road cycling significantly slow down biological ageing. Cell ageing processes are slowed down, the heart and circulation are strengthened and maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) is improved. Muscles are strengthened and break down more slowly at an advanced age. The immune system also benefits from regular physical activity and endurance training in particular. Cycling is also easy on the joints and regular endurance training can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. According to a study by Hannover Medical School, regular exercise can reduce biological age by up to 15 years, depending on the initial situation. Experts estimate the physiological effectiveness of sport to be five hours of moderate endurance training per week.
Road cycling is local history
If you really want to get to know every nook and cranny of your home region, you have the perfect exploration tool at your disposal as a racing cyclist. Because road cycling is most fun on small, low-traffic and winding roads and paths. The search for it and life on and with the road bike is a never-ending journey of discovery in the local area. What's more, as you get fitter, your radius increases so that you can travel further and further and discover new routes. If you are exploring your home region on two wheels, even on a gravel track-proof all-road or gravel racer, you can add a dense network of forest, meadow and supply routes to your circles and explore even the most remote corners of your home region. This is almost more fun without the ubiquitous electronic navigation aids. It trains your sense of direction better than following pre-made GPS tracks and not knowing where you actually went afterwards.
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Slimming made easy
Nothing helps you lose weight as reliably and efficiently as endurance training. Physical exertion burns more calories and stimulates the metabolism. However, anyone who goes full throttle through the woods for three hours after the festive season and thinks that the Christmas feast has been cancelled out is mistaken. As with almost everything, losing weight with sport and keeping it off permanently requires moderation and balance. It is important that the calorie balance throughout the day is always negative, so you must always consume more than you take in. This works best with moderate endurance training, supplemented by sensibly timed, more intensive units, although the effect of sport should not be overestimated.
When training on a bike in the aerobic zone (clue: you can talk in full sets during training and don't have to gasp for air), you burn around 500 kilocalories per hour. So if you eat two energy bars during a 60-kilometre lap, you may have consumed more calories than you burnt. And if you're ravenously hungry after exercising and shovel in a plate of pasta, your calorie balance may be skewed towards weight gain. However, if you combine regular endurance training with the right diet, you can lose two to three kilograms in six to twelve months in a healthy and sustainable way.
Experience speed
Speed kicks - and there is no other machine that allows you to travel as fast under your own power as a racing bike. Modern race bikes are aerodynamically optimised and convert muscle power into speed even more efficiently than bikes of previous generations. With average training, it is not too much trouble to ride a racing bike on a flat road at speeds of around 30 km/h or more - silently and without emissions. In the slipstream of larger groups, even 35 to 40 km/h is not rocket science. Well-trained cyclists can reach speeds of around and over 40 km/h, at least for a while - and there's no stopping downhill anyway. Professional cyclists in the Tour de France often reach speeds of around 100 km/h on mountain passes in the Alps.
Experience nature
The scent of pine resin in a light, sun-drenched mountain forest, birdsong, the buzzing of bees: Cycling in nature is a feast for the senses. The combination of perception, experience and speed is fantastic and in some ways unique. You are slow enough on the bike to be able to take in a variety of impressions along the route and at the same time you are travelling so quickly that, unlike walking or hiking, you can cross and experience changing landscapes, altitude regions and entire climate zones in just a few hours or a day.
The fascination of racing bike technology
The racing bike has always been fascinating - light, trimmed for efficiency, transparent. Admittedly: In previous decades, the consistently modular technology was even easier to understand and the purpose of each individual part was clear and transparent. More or less every part on the bike could be exchanged for another manufacturer's part, each one replaced when worn or repaired when defective. This made the racing bike a highly efficient and inexpensive riding machine. Nowadays, things are different to some extent, technical development has turned the racing bike into a dynamic piece of sports equipment with a high degree of system integration, hydraulics (in the disc brakes) and electronics (in the gears) have found their way in, sophisticated aerodynamics have become a defining feature - but the fascination that emanates from a modern racing bike is unbroken.
Get to know like-minded people
Shared sport brings people together, especially when it can be characterised by shared suffering, as is the case on a road bike. The road cycling community is a community of knowledgeable people (training, nutrition, technology, equipment, clothing) - and one in which great sayings can be quickly checked for their truthfulness, or to put it another way: "The decisive factor is on the bike." In hardly any other sport do you meet as many friendly, modest and helpful people as in road cycling - which doesn't mean that you don't still try to outdo each other on the bike. But because everyone is sometimes first at the town sign and last at the mountain pass, it always evens out. At cycling events up and down the country and in the most beautiful places and on the most challenging mountain routes all over Europe, you can meet like-minded people by the hundreds or even thousands.
Practised environmental protection
Cycling is good for the environment. Full stop. Of course, a modern racing bike doesn't grow on a tree. The carbon frame, paintwork, rubber tyres, plastic components, electronic parts and their batteries - much of this comes from scarce resources, the manufacturing processes require energy and waste is produced. But the result is a vehicle weighing between seven and eight kilograms that can transport a person around ten times its weight, as far as the muscles can carry it. Without further energy consumption, without noise. No other means of transport offers this ratio of effort and return.
Mobility turnaround
Regardless of whether cars run on fossil fuels or green electricity, they require (more and more) horrendously expensive infrastructure such as roads, parking spaces and car parks. They clog up city centres and get in the way. Bicycles generally don't do that. They make you independent of delayed or cancelled trains. (Racing) cycling is the most efficient, cheapest, healthiest and sportiest contribution to environmentally friendly transport on a human scale.
The best time-out of all
Is your job getting on your nerves, is your boss grumbling, are the kids whingeing? The best therapy for peace of mind, new courage and fresh confidence is an hour (or more) in the saddle of a racing bike. The carousel of thoughts stops, your head and lungs are aired out, your legs and body are pleasantly kneaded and recharge your batteries with a relaxed pedal stroke. When you hang your bike on the hook in the garage afterwards and put your cycling shoes on the rack, there are actually no more problems. Just tasks.
Thomas Musch
Publisher
