I'm 63. What am I achieving? WTF? The highest level of fitness I can, going as fast as I can and having a metric **** ton of fun. And a silver medal at the Ohio Senior Olympic Games road race. Yeah, I'll brag a little!
For ***** sake! I had a Colnago fail! I've had team mates and friends break high end Kellogg's, Quintana Roo, Basso, Motobecane, Gitane, Paramount, Gios, Raleigh...Jeezus. I'm loosing it...exactly 'what' does a guy have to buy to get steel not fail?
So...using that thing called the intarwebz...
I can type in almost any manufacture's name and the words crack or failure or split or...whatever and come up with pages of data and pictures of 'good' steel lugged frames that were silver solders and ended up in the trash pile.
No. You're right. It's not a war. It's a slaughter. Guess 'who' the lamb is. Really, Tom... maybe there's more carbon frames busted because...oh...that's about all that gets sold these days. and for the last 15 years or more. OK...there are some aluminum and Ti stuff going out the doors, but the numbers for steel? Statistically insignificant?
Good for you for still riding at 72!
531 lugged (investment cast BB shell) touring frame popped up on one search...first image. LOL!
http://pardo.net/bike/pic/fail-001/frame-trek-1985ish-seat-tube-at-bb-IMAG0079.jpg
Yeah...steel is real...about that...
Bob - exactly why are you going ballistic over this if it doesn't hit a sensitive spot?
And again - CF commonly has catastrophic failures whereas those steel failures you've seen suddenly show handling peculiarities.
Now granted that was not a catastrophic error of my Colnago fork and if I hadn't been in exactly the wrong sort of turn I could easily have saved it, but having the head tube simply falling off or the entire rear triangle falling off is hardly something that you can save yourself from.
And having worked on the first practical heart/lung machine I can tell you that having the highest heart rate is not having the highest physical conditioning. Working on ultimate power is more likely to reduce your health.
So I'll assume that you are not working on your "conditioning" for health's sake but because that is what you like to do. That's fine as long as you remember that you are a tiny minority of cyclists and that your goals are probably more those of a 20 year old than the average over 30 cyclist.
And it's probably not a good idea to propagandize other cyclists that the only object of cycling is the fastest you could go. Or else you sound like those knucklehead touring magazine editorials that glorify self contained touring across Mongolia.
Look, regardless of what you do you'll lose between 5 and 9% of your lung power for every decade over 50. Your max heart rate SHOULD be reduced between 20 and 30% in a healthy person by 65. Forcing your heart rate above that has dire effects because your blood vessels are hardening with time and with that loss of elasticity the pumping action is absorbed by your heart and aorta. Damage in these areas lead to heart failure.
Physical exercise does not lengthen your maximum age. That is set by heredity. What it does is lengthen your maximum healthy age before the onset of age related diseases. Unless you hurry those along.