Healthy Ageing - Thirteen Years Unbeaten, and Starting Again
- Gary Moller
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Healthy Ageing:
From Protecting the Body to Trusting It Again
It is an interesting experience to watch yourself racing from seven years ago. This photo and video were captured at Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada, in August 2019, when I went there to defend the UCI Masters Mountain Bike World Championship title I had first won the previous year in Andorra. I was 66 years old and racing in the 65–69 age category.
At the time, of course, I had no idea what the following seven years would bring. That is one of the pleasures of looking back at old photographs and videos. You remember the nerves and little dramas that seemed so important on the day, but you also see yourself through the rather different eyes of the person you have since become.
In sporting terms, those years have been extraordinarily kind to me. I have remained unbeaten at the UCI Masters Mountain Bike World Championships since that first victory in 2018 and, rather than the winning margins becoming narrower with age, they have generally been getting larger.
Cyclo-cross has followed a similar course closer to home. I have been unbeaten in my Masters age category at the New Zealand Cyclo-cross Championships since 2013. That is now a 13-year run. I never imagined that one of the greatest threats to that record would come not from another cyclist, but from an accident on a mountainside in Chile.
Then Chile happened
Earlier this year, while training in Chile, I had a terrible crash. In a few seconds, the strong
and highly conditioned body I had spent decades building was reduced to something that could barely function. I spent the best part of a month lying on my back. From there began the slow, sometimes frustrating and often painful business of putting myself back together.
Recovery from a serious injury is an interesting exercise in humility. Progress is seldom linear. One day you discover that something which had been impossible a
week earlier has suddenly returned. On another, you are reminded quite forcefully that healing proceeds according to its own timetable rather than yours. I have spent more than 50 years working in rehabilitation, but there is nothing quite like becoming the patient yourself.
Six months on, I am running freely again. The neurological damage appears to be perhaps 90 per cent recovered, although there is still work to do. My spine is not yet as straight, mobile or strong as I would like it to be, and rebuilding the strength that once seemed so dependable remains very much a work in progress. The bicycle has been the last major piece to return.
This experience has reinforced something I have believed throughout my professional life: the body has a remarkable capacity to heal and adapt when we give it the right conditions, but adaptation requires both appropriate challenge and adequate recovery.
Getting back on the bicycle
It is only during the past month that I have begun riding again with any seriousness, and even then I have approached it cautiously. I have entered two easy cyclo-cross races, deliberately starting from the back of the field and allowing everybody else to disappear up the road.
There was no heroic charge through the bunch, no diving into gaps and no desperate late braking. I simply cruised around, enjoyed being on a bicycle again and concentrated on getting myself and the bike safely to the finish. Both times I succeeded.
That may not sound like much of an athletic achievement, but after the past six months it felt remarkably good. Rehabilitation is like that. The milestones that matter most are not necessarily the ones anybody else notices.
And so, perhaps inevitably, another idea began forming. This Sunday I am going to Taupo to defend my New Zealand Masters Cyclo-cross Championship.
I can already hear some friends and family asking whether this is sensible. I think it is.
Cyclo-cross is arguably one of the safer forms of cycle racing. The speeds are relatively low, the courses are generally on grass and softer ground, and I have no intention whatsoever of taking foolish risks. If somebody wants a piece of track badly enough, they can have it. I have invested far too much effort in this rehabilitation to throw it away for a bicycle race.
But neither do I want fear to become the final stage of rehabilitation.
In cyclo-cross, it is often claimed that the biggest threat is to your ego as you plunge into the mud in front of an appreciative crowd.
From protecting the body to trusting it again
At some point, recovery has to progress from protecting the body to trusting it again. That does not mean being reckless. It means progressively exposing ourselves to the things we once did naturally and discovering what remains possible.
This is one of the central principles of rehabilitation. Muscles strengthen when they are appropriately stressed. Bones respond to loading. The nervous system relearns through use. Confidence returns through experience. The trick is applying enough challenge to stimulate adaptation without applying so much that we overwhelm the body's present capacity to recover. That principle applies whether we are rehabilitating from a serious accident, rebuilding an ageing body, or simply trying to remain capable as the years pass. My own writing on healthy ageing has increasingly emphasised strength, independence, resilience and continued engagement with life rather than attempting to resist ageing itself.
Sunday is simply another step in that process.
There is also a rather appealing sporting challenge involved. I will arrive in Taupō with only a few weeks of cycling in my legs and put a 13-year unbeaten Masters cyclo-cross record on the line. I find that prospect rather exciting.
That record began in 2013. Through changing age groups, changing bicycles and the inevitable passing of the years, I have not been beaten in my Masters age category at the New Zealand Cyclo-cross Championships since.
This time I am under no illusions. I am certainly not the athlete who appears in this 2018 video, when I contested the UCI Masters Cyclo-cross World Championships in Belgium. Not yet, anyway. As the video demonstrates, my technical skills back then were impressive, to say the least.
Sunday will be different
Previously, the challenge was to defend a rainbow jersey against the best Masters mountain bikers in the world. On Sunday, the challenge is rather simpler. I want to stand on a start line again, hear the countdown, put my foot on the pedal and see what happens.
If I am beaten, I will be the first to shake the winner's hand. A 13-year unbeaten record has to end sometime, and after what has happened this year I have acquired a rather different perspective on winning and losing. Of course, once the gun goes off, I know myself well enough to realise that the competitive juices will start flowing. The sensible rehabilitation patient may suddenly discover that the old bicycle racer is still lurking somewhere underneath. I will just have to keep him under reasonable control.
Considering where I was six months ago, simply finishing may prove to be one of my more satisfying sporting accomplishments.
There is a broader lesson in this for me as I get older. Healthy ageing is not about wrapping ourselves in cotton wool and progressively removing challenge from our lives. We need appropriate challenge because resilience itself is an adaptation to challenge. The objective is not reckless risk, but neither is it endless protection.
So, when the gun goes off on Sunday, I will give it a go.
Whatever happens after that, happens.
And I am rather looking forward to finding out.
As the video below illustrates, I take myself and my sport very, very seriously
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