Bemused by the extravagant anti-ageing regimen of a tech tycoon, David Bradford assesses the youth-preserving potential of the humble bicycle
Over the past few months, it has been hard to avoid media coverage about the US tech centimillionaire Bryan Johnson and his quest to defy the ageing process. Hardly a news outlet in the land – not even Auntie Beeb herself – has turned down the chance to feed Johnson’s apparently insatiable appetite for publicity. Most of the headlines allude to his $2m-a-year anti-ageing budget, or the fact he was injecting himself with the blood plasma of his 17-year-old son – a vampiric practice he has since ditched, admitting it didn’t work. Among his many audacious claims, the wealthy 46-year-old purports to have slowed his pace of ageing by 31 years – but it was his boast about having a VO2 max of 58.7ml/kg/min that raised my eyebrow highest.
In fairness to Johnson, a VO2 max in the high-50s is very respectable for a man in his mid-40s, but his claim that this measurement puts him in the “top 1.5% of 18-year-olds” says a lot more about the sedentariness of the teenagers to whom he’s comparing than it does about his own peak oxygen uptake. What’s more, I knew from experience that plenty of competitive veteran cyclists of similar age to Johnson have VO2 max numbers that would make his 58 look positively geriatric. Which sparked a hypothesis in my mind: if cycling maintains cardiovascular performance more effectively than a $2m-a-year antiageing regime, maybe a bike is the only rejuvenation tool any of us really need.
To put this hypothesis to the test, I decided to track down a super-fit veteran racer on whom to run a series of tests to analyse, as best we could on a CW budget – slightly slimmer than Johnson’s – how effectively cycling staves off the ageing process. Of course, this would not be a scientifically rigorous study, but it might just provide a vivid enough snapshot to help answer our modest question: is cycling the most powerful anti-ageing technique known to humanity?
Enter Justin McKie, a veteran racer who volunteered to be our guinea pig. Having just turned 48, Justin is almost exactly two years older than Johnson, and he is a highly successful age-group competitor, having won bronze in the scratch race at the 2017 World Masters champs and gold in the same event at that year’s European Masters champs. In track and crit racing in the UK, he is one of the best in his age-group, regularly winning vets’ events at Lee Valley, Herne Hill and Hillingdon. So his trophy cabinet is well stocked – but is all that high-octane racing keeping him young? We were about to find out.
Longevity vs fitness
Bryan Johnson’s anti-ageing ‘Blueprint�
