By Alex Dowsett
In my previous blog, I wrote about retiring well — on my own terms, content with my career, and how I left professional sport. This has had an influence on my relationship with cycling and exercise post-career, and I want to talk about that today.
I say it was a massive privilege that health and a high level of fitness was a focal point and fundamental part of my job, but now it isn’t. So naturally at home after the kids, work and my wife, exercise very easily slips down the priority list into fourth position. The transition I’ve had to make is prioritising it for different reasons now; for myself, for my health, as an example to my kids and from a place of personal motivation rather than career ambition.
The hangover from the pro years
Over the last three years, it’s been a mixed journey. The hangover from my professional career has left me with still a very high level of aerobic fitness. I regularly ran 18 and 19-minute 5k parkruns with very little training. But now it’s started to slip, and I need to do something about it. Not just for my parkrun time! But for a couple more reasons.
One is the example I set to my kids — so they see that health should be high up the priority list. And actually for my own health with an added motivation, my Haemophilia has been much more manageable than expected because of my fitness so I need to keep things that way.
It’s interesting witnessing a lot of my friends of a similar age who have not prioritised health for the last 15 years like I have now really focusing on theirs. Maybe it’s because their bodies have told them to in one way or another, whereas mine hasn’t. But I think soon it could.
I’ve never seen the mental health benefits before
The other aspect to this is that I’ve never really seen the mental health benefits to exercise up until this point in my life. Exercise has always been work, and something that has fatigued me to a point where I am sofa-bound for the rest of the day. It literally was the job.
Now I understand the benefits of activity. Or more importantly, I understand how inactivity can make me feel in a negative way, and I don’t much like it. So I try and do something on as many days as I can, and I keep it varied.
Swimming: technique over fitness
Swimming twice a week with a swimming club. I enjoy this because it’s something I’m progressing with, and it’s almost more about technique than it is fitness. So it’s something I can work on without necessarily having to do more of it — I enjoy that process.
It’s also a swimming club, so it’s highly unsociable hours which work really well around the kids’ bedtime. Getting up early to go to the Chelmsford swimming club Saturday morning session has become something I don’t necessarily look forward to because of the alarm clock, but I like it once it’s done!
Running: wildly mediocre but trying hard
I run as much as I can. I have a haemophilia-impacted ankle that gives me some jip at times, so I have to manage it, and I’m quite particular around shoes. I enjoy the technology around running shoes as well and how much that’s progressed.
But again, it’s something that I’ve enjoyed stepping into being wildly mediocre at but trying hard and getting better.
Cycling: the social side matters most
There is still a very strong place for cycling, but mainly on a social level. I’ve done some sportives, but obviously none of them really hold a candle to what I did in a past life, which is fine. I did enjoy the Velo29 Coast to Coast last year — a point-to-point from West Coast to East Coast is pretty satisfying when you look at it on a map afterwards.
But I like the social side of cycling more than anything else. So if there are friends to go out with, I’ll happily go out for two or three hours and enjoy the benefits of that and getting that nostalgic feeling of sofa bound fatigue afterwards…. I feel like what used to take me two or three days of 4 to 6 hours of training in terms of fatigue now takes two or three hours in just one day!
Incorporating cycling into family life
I’m trying to include my kids in this new way of life as much as I can and I’m trying to incorporate exercise around my day as much as possible. Simply riding my daughter to school on an e-bike is night and day better for us both than driving her there in a car, and I love the example it sets.
Juliette will always pick a bike over a car to go to school, and I’m proud of the example that my wife and I are setting there. It embodies two separate benefits: one is health and one is the environment. And actually, also economically — it shows that different modes of transport can be cool and financially better alternatives.
How I motivate myself now
I do find I just feel better about myself after I’ve exercised. It really throws me back to my mentality when I was a bike racer. I never viewed training as being optional, but ultimately it was. Even though we had coaches and the teams were watching what we were doing, we were the people that had to do the work, to do the training, to do the hours.
So I used to think to myself if motivation levels were low: if I don’t do this training, how am I going to feel at the end of the day? And the answer is usually pretty shitty about myself.
I also used this mentality thinking forwards to a bike race or an event I was specifically targeting. I thought to myself; I don’t want to look back on today as an excuse as to why I didn’t do as well I know I’m capable of.
I don’t have that event to target now. But I do have the end of the day, and how I know I will feel if I do or if I don’t do some exercise or some training. And that helps me get out and do the exercise today — whether it’s a 30-minute run, a three-hour bike ride with some friends, an hour doing my routine in the gym, or getting up early to go to the Chelmsford swimming club Saturday morning session, I try and think about bedtime and being happy about the slightly sore muscle feeling, knowing it’d done me some good. And if that doesn’t work I remind myself of what my Screen time can often be and suddenly a 30minute run seems very do-able!
Exercise is medicine
So in terms of the health benefits, they are there. It’s clear and I don’t need to tell you this. However from the point of view of mental health, I’m starting to discover this, and exercise is starting to move back up my priority ladder.
The weird thing is, I spent 20 years as a professional athlete and never really understood the mental health benefits of exercise. I only saw it as work. As fatigue. As something that left me wrecked on the sofa.
Now, three years into retirement, I’m finally getting it. I’m understanding how movement makes me feel better. How it makes me a better dad, a better husband, a better version of myself.
And that’s why I keep showing up — whether it’s a 30-minute run or a three-hour bike ride — because at the end of the day, I know how I’ll feel if I do. And I know how I’ll feel if I don’t.
That’s the medicine I’m talking about. Not the aerobic fitness. Not the weight management or the cardiovascular benefits. The mental stuff. The knowing that I showed up for myself. That I did the work. That I’m still in the game, even if I’m playing a different game now.