Art of Mountain Biking by Hurst Robert

Author:Hurst, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762775576
Publisher: Falcon Guides (R&L)

TOO MUCH

Trail riding can be so strenuous, so exhausting—so painful—there is definitely an element of masochism involved. Self-torture. As cross-country fiends we are disappointed if the ride brings no pain, or insufficient amounts. More than once I have heard (and used myself) the darker language of Judeo-Christian religious traditions to describe the pain of a long climb, and our relationship to it: We go into the mountains to “suffer for our sins.” This is more than a devotion to exercise. What are we looking for out there? Perhaps the better question is, what are we running from?

In addition to being a little creepy, the trail rider’s quest for pain can cause long-term health issues. It’s simply not true that all pain turns to gain. We tend to assume that the harder we ride, the better we will become—stronger, faster, healthier. But at some point, it’s just too much. Though it may be difficult for longtime cyclists to accept, raging up a climb with the heart beating out of the chest is not necessarily an activity that is conducive to a long, healthy life.

Consider the pattern of mortality among old bike racers. Anecdotally, a disturbing number of former top-level riders seem to die with heart issues in their fifties and sixties. It’s tempting to ascribe this to the frenzied ingestion of performance-enhancing drugs that has been going on since the early days of the sport, and many insiders do, but researchers suspect that the hyperexertion alone can damage the heart in some nasty ways. 38

Although their results do not prove a causal relationship between endurance sports and RV [right ventricular] involvement or allow conclusions about the risk of sudden death in this population, “this risk is definitely higher than expected from data in general athlete populations,” Heidbüchel et al write. Due to the high prevalence of RV involvement in the study group, they suspect not only that endurance training triggers arrhythmias in athletes with preexisting arrhythmogenic RV dysplasia but also that “endurance sport by itself may have contributed to the RV structural and electrical modifications.” Mont and Brugada agree, suggesting that high-performance endurance sports may lead to structural RV changes, which can cause a “kind of ‘acquired right ventricular dysplasia’ that may finally produce ventricular arrhythmias and sudden death,” adding, “excessive endurance training may have deleterious consequences for the heart,” a relationship that needs to be confirmed by larger, case-control studies. Doping agents, which recently have been detected in routine doping tests in a number of top-level cyclists, are known to increase the risk of cardiac mortality and may also play a role in the development of arrhythmias.39

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