Peter Cole wrote:
|| "Roger Zoul" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
|| news:[email hidden]...
||| Peter Cole wrote:
||||| "the black rose" <[email hidden]> wrote
||||||
|||||| BTW, Amazon recommends The Complete Book of Long-Distance
|||||| Cycling by Edmund R. Burke to go with it -- I've seen the title
|||||| before and was curious about it. Have you seen this book or
|||||| know anything about
|||||| it?
|||||
||||| I read Burke's book on heart rate training. It was ironic and
||||| shocking to hear that he died from a heart attack (while riding) a
||||| couple of years ago. It increased my skepticism of "expert"
||||| advice.
|||||
||||| From:
||||| http://www.reddirtpedalers.com/WheelIssues/DisplayReprint.asp?id=147
|||||
||||| "How could a relatively young and apparently fit person suddenly
||||| collapse and die during a ride? Should the rest of us in his age
||||| range be worried, too? We think that Ed, who wrote extensively
||||| about training and fitness, would want you to have some answers.
|||||
||||| Here’s what we know:
|||||
||||| --Ed was physically inactive for at least 20 years after racing in
||||| college.
|||||
||||| --In 1997 he decided to get back on the bike. Overweight and
||||| nearing
||||| age 50, he admitted concern about his family’s history of heart
||||| disease and his own high cholesterol and blood pressure. "
|||
||| This says nothing about his knowledge of bicycling, training, and
||| fitness. It does suggest that perhaps he got busy with his career
||| and that his family had a history of heart problems.
||
|| My point is that he was a self-proclaimed expert on fitness,
|| particularly cardio-vascular fitness.
From reading that page you linked, I'd say that others thought him an
expert, and he does/did have a degree in something related to health/fitness
as I recall. So I'd say he's more than self-proclaimed. I think your
characterization is unfair.
||Apparently, despite known
|| genetic factors and a sketchy history of personal fitness, he did
|| not have himself tested. He also ignored symptoms that should have
|| been obvious to someone with heart awareness.
I agree. However, people are imperfect and even an expert may not do what
he/his knows ought to be done. Fear of the unknown is one simple reason for
this. He probably meant to do it, but instead kept putting it off until it
was too late. That's human imperfection and it doesn't negate the other
contributions he may have made during his lifetime. While I'm not in a
position to judge his body of work, I think others who are in a better
position to do so thought highly of his contributions.
||
||| Your post increased my skepticism of "nonexpert" advice.
||
|| I don't think I was giving any advice, but I'll give some now: don't
|| overlook the commonly published general medical guidelines for
|| health and fitness. Exercise has a known powerful protective effect
|| against c-v disease, but, by itself, it won't prevent this kind of
|| tragedy. Too many cyclists I know think that because they exercise
|| regularly and strenuously they can ignore things like body weight,
|| diet, hypertension, and serum cholesterol. Survival issues aside
|| (and that's a pretty big aside), clogged blood vessels limit the
|| bodies performance in many ways, even before they get to the point
|| where they're killing heart tissue. My criticism of such experts is
|| that they view things too narrowly, there's much more going on than
|| what a HRM will tell you. Fitness and health requires a much more
|| holistic approach than you find in these books. I think the emphasis
|| should be on health first, cycling performance second. These books
|| end to encourage the reversal of those priorities. That may be OK if
|| you're a young person only interested in racing, but not otherwise.
Well, I get your point and it is a good one in general. However, the man
was writing about cycling performance, so that forces him to narrow his
point of view. It very likely would have been out of his area of expertise
to write about worrying about clogged blood vessels, killing heart tissue,
and etc. There are other sources of information on those topics and this
author would definitely have been outside (based what little i know of this
background, mind you) his expertise to write about those matters. As I see
things, his books were definitely not about health, and they are not even
about fitness in general, but they are about cycling fitness and related
matters. IMO, in that area his contributions are worthy.
