GOOD HEALTH MAGAZINE : FITNESS : 10 SPEEDS TO BETTER HEALTH : BICYCLING IS ONE OF THE HEALTHIEST FORMS OF EXERCISE, ONE FOR WHICH THE ADAGE, ‘NO PAIN, NO GAIN,’ IS UTTERLY FALSE

Persevere, Persevere,” the college students yell from the microbus as I inch towards the pass, 12,094 feet high, on Trail Ridge Road in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. I’m no Olympian athlete, pedaling up here among the clouds. In fact, I have two bad knees that I wouldn’t run on to save my life. But this amazing 15-speed bike, with gear ratios low enough to climb trees, has made cycling up past the timberline easy for me.

In fact, a good quality lightweight bicycle with gear ratios that allow me to haul 20 pounds of equipment over the Continental Divide would make it possible for grandmothers and grandfathers to climb the hills overlooking Topanga Canyon without straining. And even without straining, cycling remains one of the healthiest forms of exercise, one for which the adage, “no pain, no gain,” is utterly false.

A neighbor of my parents--a plumpish, middle-aged British woman--used to go everywhere on an old English 3-speed, refusing out of principle to drive. One Christmas, her husband gave her a new 10-speed. “It just whizzes along!” she exclaims.

At 10 m.p.h., an easy cruising speed for a nonathlete, the miles accumulate quickly; 50 in five hours, or enough to cross the country in two months and have plenty of time left over for sight-seeing.

I ride nearly 4,000 miles a year, or an average of a little more than 10 miles a day. Half is city commuting, 10% is extended touring, and the rest is recreation. One of the beauties of bicycling is that I can combine exercise and transportation, thereby saving the time and money that I might otherwise spend on a health club.

The value of exercise has been well-documented. A variety of recent studies confirm that people who exercise regularly, if only for as little as 20 minutes a day, three times a week, suffer fewer heart attacks than those who do not. Exercise also helps keep the bones and joints healthy.

Exercise prevents heart attacks by reducing the load on the heart. The heart of a normal white-collar nonathlete beats 75 to 80 times a minute, but training can drive the resting rate of the best athletes down to a lazy 40 beats a minute, saving nearly 60,000 beats a day.

Exercise accomplishes this by building up every element of the cardiovascular system. The lungs of a well-trained athlete have greater volume, the blood vessels are more extensive and each heartbeat pumps more blood than in the nonathlete.

But not all exercise improves cardiovascular efficiency. Only exercise that leaves you huffing and puffing, so-called aerobic exercise, does the job. The heart has little to gain from weight lifting and Nautilus machines.

The amount of energy you use during exercise provides a measure of aerobics. A typical American adult uses up between 2,000 and 3,000 kilocalories daily. Even a sedentary person uses energy just maintaining body temperature and other physiological functions. Doonesbury’s Zonker Harris burns about 100 kilocalories per hour just vegging out. A volleyball player uses up about 350 an hour. A 4-mile walk requires a little more than 300 kilocalories; a 13 m.p.h. cycling jaunt takes 660 in the same amount of time. Running is one of the few activities that is usually more intensive than cycling; the runner burns 900 kilocalories an hour at 10 m.p.h.

There is no question that running is great exercise, if your back and knees can take the pounding. But my knees began to give me trouble when I was in my mid-20s. In fact, an orthopedist told me not only to stop running but to quit riding my bicycle after he diagnosed chondromalacia, a chronic inflammation of the cartilage that forms the bearing surface of the knee-cap.

I did so, for two years, and during that period, I sometimes had trouble even walking more than a mile or so. But the itch to get back into action was so strong that one day I set out on the District of Columbia’s towpath, one of the flattest, arrow-straight and most scenic hiking and biking trails in the country. I proceeded gingerly, letting the weight of my legs push the pedals. After 4 miles up and 4 miles back, my knees felt OK. And my flouting of the orthopedist’s advice led to the discovery that--for me--cycling is harmless in moderation.

The towpath ride became a ritual, several times a week, and as I upped my distance, I discovered that when I bicycled 10 miles or more, my knees seemed to improve slightly. Over the next few weeks, my feet began to push on the pedals as if of their own accord. Then one day, I raced through Rock Creek Park, visions of pedaling over mountains once again dancing through my head. When I got home, instead of having aches to dampen my spirits, my knees felt better than ever. Later that summer, on a car trip around Colorado, I drove Trail Ridge Road, and at the pass I encountered three cyclists who had traveled all the way from Oregon. Oh, didn’t I wish I was cycling up there myself? And four years later, my dreams of mountain climbing would come true.

To be sure, my knees are far from perfect, and I cannot afford to forget it. The right one has stopped me in my tracks on occasion (although timely application of ice has kept such instances to a minimum.) The left knee merely slows me down from time to time. To cope with bad knees, you must face your limitations squarely. Only then are you ready to learn, through a tedious process of trial and error, to listen to your knees tell you how much you can do. A knee’s signals that it has had enough can be amazingly subtle. All this does not keep me from touring, however, and last year I completed a 500-mile ride through southern France. As always, my knees are at their best at the end of a tour.

One reason that cycling should improve bad knees has to do with the fact that unlike most other body parts, cartilage--the surfaces that allow the bones in a joint to slide smoothly against one another--contains no blood vessels. Nutrients and waste products have no way to enter and leave cartilage, except by passive diffusion from the joint fluid, sort of like water in and out of a sponge. The sedentary life style does nothing to aid that diffusion, and a violent sport such as running would risk aggravating the inflammation. But the gentle flexion of cycling is the elixir of the kneecap.

Another reason is that cycling strengthens the quadriceps. Bad knees often result because the kneecap fails to stay in its groove properly. Stronger muscles help keep it there. (Doctors often prescribe leg weightlifting for bad knees.)

Although cycling can be good for bad knees, poor technique can cause or aggravate bad knees. The no-pain, no-gain philosophy of exercise is probably what makes many novices pedal in the highest, hardest gear that they can manage. Slow pedaling in hard gears builds brute strength but not stamina. It also puts a huge strain on cartilage. Fast pedaling in gears that turn with ease is what builds stamina, and stamina is what it takes to climb mountains or to pedal for several hours without feeling tired.

It makes sense if you think of using gears on a bicycle the way you use gears in a car. Low gears are for hill climbing and quick starts, since you get the most power at high revolutions per minute. But cyclists don’t have to shift into high to save gas, so it makes sense to pedal in the lowest, instead of the highest gear you can handle. (It also makes cycling more of an aerobic exercise.) The correct pedaling speed is 60 to 120 revolutions of the crank a minute, preferably 90-plus. You can time your pedaling speed with a second hand, and there are bicycle computers available that give instant readouts of cadence.

Learning proper pedaling technique made a huge difference for me. The first day of my tour through New England, in 1974, before I’d heard the word on spinning--what cyclists call fast pedaling--my Peugeot felt like a ton of bricks. I conked out after 50 miles and had trouble climbing into the loft at a youth hostel where I spent the afternoon sleeping. One year later, that day was uppermost in my mind as I prepared to depart Seattle for Boston, just after my graduation from Berkeley. By this time, I had internalized fast pedaling so that I was no longer conscious of doing it. I was worrying about how heavy the Peugeot was going to feel again, with 20 pounds of gear strapped to the rack. Tomorrow I would face Stevens Pass in the Cascades, a several-thousand-foot climb. Would I make it?

I mounted the bike in the morning drizzle. The sun would ultimately pierce the persistent overcast of the Pacific Northwest. I pushed hard on the pedals to move those bricks, but to my surprise, the bicycle took off like a sports car. Is this really happening, I wondered as I slowed down to accelerate again, to test what I thought might be the illusion of my new-found power. That day, the hills became friends of mine, and the next day, the views of the peaks and valleys of the Cascades unfolded like an aurora borealis as I effortlessly ascended the switchbacks.

The novice spinner quickly gets winded. That changes in time, as the leg muscles develop a high concentration of mitochondria, those metabolic machinery-containing cells within cells that turn food into power.

One obstacle to proper pedaling technique is that most road bikes (as opposed to mountain bikes) lack gear ratios low enough to make steep hill-climbing easy, despite 10, 12, or even 14 speeds. Too many people think that low gears are for wimps, or else that they are unimportant since you can always walk a bike up a hill. Don’t believe them: There is nothing more awkward than walking a fully-loaded bicycle up a steep hill.

Fortunately, it is so easy to change gear ratios that many bicycle stores will do it free when you buy a new bicycle. (For a more complete explanation of gearing, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Bicycling magazine, Rodale Press, Emmaus, Pa. 18049 and request a reprint of the March, 1981, issue on gears.)

Proper gear ratios are only part of what goes into a high quality bicycle. Other qualities that make a difference:

Stiff frame. When you pedal hard, some of the energy goes to twisting the frame instead of turning the rear wheel. Quality bicycles have stiff frames to prevent most of this energy from going down the tubes.

Weight. Cyclists measure weight the way the Post Office does, in ounces. My 29-pound Peugeot was light enough for me to pedal across the country when I was 22. Now the thing mostly sits idle in my basement while I tool around on my 22-pound Klein.

Weight on the wheels counts double what it counts anywhere else on the bike. The reason is that to move this weight, one must overcome the inertia of gaining circular motion as the wheel spins, as well as forward motion. For that reason, mountain bikes with their fat tires are slower than road bikes.

Friction-- Inferior bearings eat up pedal power, as do low-pressure tires. Most good bicycles come with tires that take at least 90 pounds of pressure. Always keep them fully inflated.

Cost-- A decent bicycle costs at least $250 to $300 and can easily exceed $500. (Don’t even think about getting a cut-rate brand.)

All in all, the bicycle is the most efficient form of transportation for human beings. At 10 m.p.h., a cyclist is getting the energy equivalent of 1,000 m.p.g. With such economy, small wonder that the basic bicycle has remained unchanged since it became a commercial success in 1885.

Part of the secret of the bicycle’s longevity is its basic geometry, which is nothing but a front and a rear triangle. The triangle is the most stable polygon, so the double-triangle design allows the bicycle to be about as light and as strong as possible. Back in college days, a friend and I spent a few hours over coffee, trying to come up with a better design. We couldn’t.

Unbeknown to us, others had invented another bicycle design. The rider of the so-called recumbent bicycle sits in an actual chair that is mounted to the frame legs out in front, in the position of lounging in an easy chair. Needless to say, the comfort of a recumbent is luxurious. But that is not its only advantage. The laid- back posture reduces wind drag, and one recumbent owner told me that his average cruising speed on flat terrain had increased from 12 m.p.h. on a conventional bike to 17 m.p.h. with the recumbent. That is not surprising. On a conventional bike, wind resistance accounts for more than 80% of total drag at speeds of about 18 m.p.h.

Another advantage of the recumbent has to do with safety. It is virtually impossible to fly off the bicycle head first, and in the event of a crash, the rider would land on his feet instead of his head, says David Gordon Wilson, a MIT mechanical engineering professor and a long-time proponent of the recumbent.

Finally, the hunched-over position on a conventional bike creates a feeling of tunnel vision. The recumbent cyclist feels like he has traded the view out the rear window of an old Volkswagen for a seat in a convertible.

Still, the 104-year-old safety bicycle, so named because it was much safer than the high-wheelers it replaced, retains many advantages over the recumbent. The recumbent frame, which is often a flattened and stretched out version of the safety-bicycle frame, is neither as light nor as strong as the latter. With an extra 5 or 6 pounds, the quicker-in-the-flats recumbents lose their speed advantage when hill climbing. The matter of relative safety remains controversial, because the low-slung recumbents are less visible in traffic. On a conventional bike, you can avoid road shock by lifting your rear slightly out of the saddle and letting your bent knees absorb the shock. On a recumbent, your body has to take the bumps. The long wheelbases of most recumbents make them handle like busses. The only well-designed short-wheelbase recumbent in commercial production, the Lightning, costs more than $1,300. And the configuration of the recumbent makes walking your bike next to impossible.

All of these shortcomings do not dampen the enthusiasm of recumbent owners. The real reason recumbents have not caught on, in my opinion, is price. No really good recumbents retail for less than about $700.

Besides the recumbent, a variety of recent innovations in bicycle technology are making the conventional safety bicycle smoother and more responsive. Of these, only bicycles of oversized aluminum tubing are in large-scale production at competitive, everyday prices.

These aluminum bicycles are lighter and stiffer than their steel counterparts, which gives them something of a leg up in races. What is surprising is that by many accounts, including my own, they ride smoother and hold the road better than steel models. Why that is so (or if it is so) is a matter of controversy. Gary Klein, who helped develop and commercialize the technology, says that aluminum rides better because there is less weight to bounce up and down over bumps. Others suggest that the material absorbs shock better, noting that no one makes bells out of aluminum.

Out on the cutting edge are carbon-fiber bicycles. It is hard to generalize about the handling characteristics of that technology, says Ted Constantino, editor of Bicycle Guide magazine, because the frames are so diverse. Some carbon-fiber bikes have conventional triangular frames composed of tubing, but carbon-fiber technology makes possible the so-called monocoque , single-member frames of various strange shapes that are often designed by computer to maximize strength and lightness. Carbon-fiber technology shaves off half a pound to a pound compared to the weight of the better steel frames, and “the shock-dampening qualities are excellent,” Constantino says. “Over the course of an 80-mile ride, you find you are not bracing for the bumps.”

For years, carbon-fiber bikes sold at very high prices and had durability problems. But prices have declined to about $1,000 for some models, and a few manufacturers are even offering lifetime warranties.

But the nirvana of bicycle frames are those of titanium, Constantino says. “It’s incredibly light, it has really good shock dampening, it’s fabulously strong and it won’t corrode.” Unfortunately, the metal is so hard to work that the frames cost a fortune. It is hard to get a fully equipped titanium bicycle for much less than $2,000.

The titanium is tempting, but for the near future, anyway, I’ll be riding my aluminum Klein. On the last day of last spring’s bicycle trip through southern France, the Klein had 10,000 miles on it. In the three years that I have owned it, I have toured Colorado, the Canadian Rockies and France’s Brittany Coast. My daily forays through Washington frequently take me past the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy Center and on up through Rock Creek Park. I see an awful lot of beauty from the saddle, and riding keeps my resting pulse down around 60 beats a minute.

With that and decent heredity, as well as healthy though not-fanatical eating habits, I expect to be around 50 years from now. And if I am, I am sure I’ll be riding my bicycle in the year 2040.