The Lead Out, #002 – About epic bike rides, epic swimming and sleep

Hi there! 👋🏻

This is the second edition of The Lead Out, a weekly newsletter for subscribers. It contains a bunch of carefully curated links covering all kinds of cycling related topics, and lands in your inbox on Saturday morning.

If you’d like to receive it too, subscribe to Pédaleuse.

Enjoy!

Remember how I was talking about actionable health data last week? As it happens, a few days after I sent out the newsletter I read an article about Gentler Streak, an app that suggests workouts and recovery activities based on your health data. So I decided to give it a try. For now, I really like it: it gives me valuable and actionable insights. Maybe I‘ll write a more in-depth review later.

That said, I wanted to share a few interesting books, movies and podcasts I read, watched and listened to recently:

• Epic Bike Rides of Europe – A Lonely Planet book with 320 pages of epic bike rides. You don't even have to read the text – looking at the pictures is enough to get you excited to go outside for a ride.
• The Plant-Based Cyclist – This was the right book at the right time. I had just read Outlive and started exercising more. This book, written by a sports nutritionist, gave me some extra insight in how to do that on a plant-based diet. A must read for every vegan/plant-based/WFPB cyclist.
• NYAD (available on Netflix) – An inspiring story about Diana Nyad who, at the age of 60, commits to swimming 110 miles in the open sea, from Cuba to Florida. I had never heard of her, so I didn't know if she was going to succeed. I enjoyed the movie because it shows the grit needed to put your body through such an endurance test.
• Huberman Lab podcast series about sleep, with Matthew Walker – I'm struggling to get good sleep lately, and it's been messing up my workouts. This podcast refreshed my memory on all things sleep (it's been a few years since I read Matthew Walker's book Why we sleep) and I got great value from the conversation between these two health experts. It's a 6-part series, and part 5 was just published two days ago.

See you for the next one!