Cycling UK Forum

Interesting article on Afib in Cycling Weekly: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/fitness/m ... about-afib

What stands out for me is that above ten hours a week of exercise you might be starting to put yourself at greater risk of Afib.

My first thought on the OPs question was not easy for me!

Seriously though, it doesn't take much when it's your time to go if you have an unknown heart condition. My parents neighbours had a few go quickly. One guy was found sat upright in bed reading a book. Another person I knew died after finishing her lunch break on the side of a mountain she was fell running on. Really fit but well into her 60s perhaps 70s halfway through a 25 mile run over the hills.

I think the thing is to feel or listen to your body as much as you can and get health checked if you're entitled to it. Don't ignore things too.

Tangled Metal wrote: ↑11 May 2023, 6:47am My first thought on the OPs question was not easy for me!

Seriously though, it doesn't take much when it's your time to go if you have an unknown heart condition. My parents neighbours had a few go quickly. One guy was found sat upright in bed reading a book. Another person I knew died after finishing her lunch break on the side of a mountain she was fell running on. Really fit but well into her 60s perhaps 70s halfway through a 25 mile run over the hills.

I think the thing is to feel or listen to your body as much as you can and get health checked if you're entitled to it. Don't ignore things too.

My original post and the thread tittle were changed for me, best I don’t say more about what I think about the interference. Whatever, some good has still come out of the altered thread and I can be pleased about that.

Sudden death was part of my original post but it’s surprising easy to suffer in other ways too. Though I try to listen to my body pulling muscles seems pretty easy to me, mental health can - as one poster volunteered - be easily damaged, and then there are unintended consequences in ordinary life eg. liver damage and skin cancer. There isn’t quite, around every corner, a banana skin waiting to catch out the unwary but life has many ways on flattening us and they typically catch us by surprise.

Of course, though I was originally considering health, misadventure and getting injured can come in many forms. A few weeks back I rode through a shallow ford that has never given bother before, this time I had a muddy tyre and the front wheel momentarily slipped. Fortunately it didn’t slip far, I wasn’t going fast and I didn’t end up with my face in the tarmac, but it could all have ended rather badly. Similarly I was walking in the woods when a small and random root caught on my boot and caused me to measure my length, fortunately my head didn’t hit anything hard and I wasn’t far from a well used path … again a random even could have turned out much worse. Health and safety care - including risk management - comes on many different forms, the hazards to be protected against are numerous and it’s easy to both either unwittingly push your luck or to worry unnecessarily.

No doubt this thread was started with the best of intentions, but somehow it's got a lot of diversions. I suppose if you start with the premise that for the average person, even with various ailments, moderate exercise is a Good Thing, you can't go far wrong. If you've got some hitherto undiagnosed ailment it seems likely that you might keel over whether you are exercising or not, reading a book, eating a sandwich, pumping up a tyre. People who die suddenly tend to be doing something at the time, even if it's sleeping. Does that mean that we should all refrain from doing these things? The fact that you are riding a bike up a hill when it happens might not mean that you're overdoing it in terms of your base fitness level, but that whatever undetected aneurism or physiological condition there might be has reached the point when it gives way, regardless of what you're doing. Even in a perfect world where our healthcare system detected and treated everything, we are still going to die of something, probably while doing some mundane thing.

Of course we should listen to our bodies, but most of us aren't the sort of driven athletes where we ignore physical symptoms in the search for another 0.1 second off the time dictated by whatever electronic gizmo that is currently ruling our lives. Are we? When you consider the general population who consider it remarkable that someone could cycle 5 miles then in relative terms, perhaps we are more inclined in that direction than the majority. As has been said before, you're more far likely to die from too much sitting on the couch than too much exercise. Perhaps this thread has potential for merging with the thread Base Level Fitness for an Unfit Non Cyclist to bring us down to earth a bit.