Can Too Much Exercise Damage Your Heart?

Introduction

I get a lot of bike-related articles in my e-mail, mostly via my bike club.  When I get an article from two separate feeds, I know it’s something big.  So it was with a recent front-page story in Velo magazine, “Cycling to Extremes.”  (I read the online version, available here.)  The subtitle:  “Are endurance athletes hurting their hearts by repeatedly pushing beyond what is normal?”

What is normal?  Alas, for American adults “normal” is almost nothing; a CDC survey found that nearly 80% of adult Americans get less than 2.5 hours of exercise a week.

But forget about averages and those who don’t exercise.  The point of this Velo article is that ageing endurance athletes—i.e., guys like me—seem now to be in danger.  The article declares, “In the case of endurance athletes who have competed for years — whose hearts have exceeded the threshold of normal heart rates for decades — going above what is normal defines them.  But it may also be killing them.”

In this post I examine the reactions of my pals to this disheartening article; indulge in some knee-jerk denial; examine some other anecdotal evidence; evaluate the article’s claims on the basis of the literature cited; and (perhaps most importantly) provide a scheme for greatly advancing the study of exercise-induced heart complications among the middle-aged.

 Reactions

My first reaction to seeing this article was, “Oh, crap.  I hope nobody forwards this to my wife.”  (She’s the designated worrier of the family, which leaves me free to pooh-pooh everything.)  But then, I’ve got people depending on me, so I thought I better take the article seriously.  First I looked at how my pals were reacting.  “Hummmm....this is a little scary,” one e-mailed.  Another replied, “Yeah very scary.  I routinely get dizzy when I get up - something that’s happened my whole life but” and here his e-mail ended abruptly.  (Had he collapsed mid-sentence?)  One guy mentioned an athletic 50-year-old pal who suffers from a heart issue like what’s described in the article.  Other responses:  “I have to admit, this article gave me pause, especially the way I like to ride bikes ... hung over, and hammering as hard as possible,” and “Alas, all along I thought I was doing something good for myself.”

Of course it’s tempting to deny the whole thing.  The article has some serious flaws—which I’ll get to in a minute—and I almost shrugged and thought, “Typical FUD, designed to sell magazines.”  But I resisted the urge.  After all, just because an article is flawed doesn’t mean its central assertion is false.  Besides, I respect the cautious position my pals have taken, and this isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the mystery of brilliant athletes suddenly dropping dead.  The article mentions two marathoners who died while running, and I also recall Matt Wilson, a local rider who died while cycling in 2011, and Steve Larsen, a guy I raced with as a junior, who died while running in 2009.

Never mind that my own heart has behaved perfectly my whole life (at least, as far as I know).  It’s possible I’m doing damage now that will only become a problem in ten years.  After all, I know guys who have smoked for years but don’t have lung cancer.  Yet.

I mulled over this article for about a week and a half, and just when it was starting to drift toward unconscious dismissal, I mentioned it to a cycling friend (my age) who said, “Oh, yeah, someone told me about that but said maybe I shouldn’t read it ‘cause it might bum me out.”  Why would it?  Turns out this guy has had a heart problem for some time now:  he’ll be riding along, just cruising, and suddenly his heart rate will go from like 140 up to over 200 and stay there for 30, 40 seconds.  Uh oh.

The “lumping” problem

My chief difficulty in deciding how much to worry, and whether or not to change my approach to cycling, is that of “lumping.”  Is it right to lump myself in with the guys cited in the article, and with the marathoners, and with Steve Larsen?  Is it right to lump runners in with cyclists?  And is it right to lump various heart problems together and treat them like one phenomenon?

Let’s take that last question first.  The Velo article uses two case studies to make its case:  Lennard Zinn, who while bicycling suffered symptoms of “his heart [flopping] like a fish” and beating way too fast; and Mike Endicott, who collapsed and lost consciousness during a cross-country ski race.  Was Endicott’s heart also racing?  Well, not at first.  Endicott’s words:  “Something was beating inside my chest.”  The Velo writer describes it as “his heart still doing something strange inside his chest” which led, after an hour or so, to ventricular tachycardia and “an immediate, unexpected loss of heart function.”  This seems a lot different from what Zinn experienced.  Were these two suffering from the same specific heart problem?  It’s not clear.

The article states that Zinn was diagnosed with multifocal atrial tachycardia, but Endicott’s exact diagnosis isn’t given.  The article talks a lot about atrial fibrillation (AF):  is this the same as tachycardia?  Again, it’s unclear (though this FAQ suggests not).  Moreover, the main study the article cites concerns “myocardial fibrosis, a condition that involves the impairment of the heart’s muscle cells, called myocytes, through hardening or scarring of tissue.”  Does myocardial fibrosis lead to tachycardia and/or fibrillation?  Do Zinn and Endicott suffer from myocardial fibrosis?  Once again, the article doesn’t say.

It’s not just this article that’s vague about this stuff.  I did a tiny bit of research on Steve Larsen’s death, and turned up something surprising:

Google’s big-font summary makes it pretty clear this was a heart attack—but it wasn’t, according to the first article cited.  Nothing else has been written to further clarify this matter; the autopsy itself apparently ruled out heart attack.  And yet people seem to remember it as such.  Two years after Larsen’s death, when I was corresponding with a friend about Matt Wilson, my friend wrote, “Steve Larsen was the guy who had a [fatal] heart attack two years ago here in Bend.”  Meanwhile, I’d always remembered Wilson’s death as having been from a heart attack, but in researching this now (for example, here), I can find no specific cause of death.

A dearth of data

Let’s get back to that Velo article.  My temptation, when presented with such ambiguity, is to read the research articles on which the article is based.  But the article, while making lots of vague references to unnamed studies, doesn’t provide much.  For example:  “Over decades of exertion, the myocardial cells of the heart begin to simply fall apart, and you’re left with an unhealthy ticker. Or so these new studies suggest.”  And:  “Long-term endurance exercise results in a five-fold increase in the risk of developing AF.  A review of the relevant research finds many small studies that correlate long-term sports activity with AF....  While none is conclusive, collectively they indicate a pattern.”  What studies?  What relevant research?  There are no citations given here; no footnotes; no hyperlinks.

The article does cite two specific studies.  One involved rats, and I’m going to dismiss that.  (My heart is bigger than a rat’s; rats don’t live 40 or 50 or 60 years, which is the age group I’m trying to learn about; humans cannot be made to exercise as hard as rats.)  Velo also cites a study published in The Journal of Applied Physiology:  “MRI studies revealed that some 50 percent of the veteran [>50-year-old] athletes had myocardial fibrosis....  In age-matched controls — people of the same age who didn’t compete — and young athletes, there were zero cases of the disease. Furthermore, the fibrosis was significantly associated with the number of years spent training, and the number of marathons and ultra-endurance marathons they had completed.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere!  I looked at the study itself to get more information.  You can read it here.  My big issue with this study is that it only included 12 veteran athletes.  Of these, 2 had previous heart conditions (1 probable previous mycarditis, 1 probable previous silent myocardial infarction).  The Journal study is candid about its limited scope, acknowledging that “Like many studies of this type, the numbers of veteran athletes are small (largely because this is a small and unique population), and generalization is difficult.”

And yet, without the ability to generalize, what are we supposed to do with this (largely anecdotal) information?  My frustration is that I feel I ought to evaluate and possibly modify my own behavior based on these cautionary tales, but I have no solid basis for assuming that my behavior matches the profile of the overworked athlete who may be damaging his heart.

Velo addresses this problem of definition by quoting Dr. John Mandrola, a heart rhythm doctor:  “What’s too much? That’s the $64,000 question. Though I will say it’s a little like what the judge said about indecency: ‘I know it when I see it.’”  Well, this just doesn’t do me much good, because I’m not about to go to Kentucky to visit this doctor, in the absence of any symptom of any problem.

I see four possible ways to respond to this information. 

1. I could completely ignore it—but I think that’s irresponsible. 
2. I could simply err on the side of caution, and ride less often and less hard than I currently do—but isn’t this completely arbitrary, since somebody who rides twice as much as I could similarly tone it down “a bit” and still be riding way more than I? 
3. I could continue riding exactly how I currently do, while adding myocardial fibrosis to the pile of things I regularly worry about (which will increase my cortisol levels to the detriment of my health) while feeling guilty for being such a poor custodian of my body.  No thanks. 
4. I can try to get more information about this, with a whole lot more data, so I can more reasonably evaluate and (if necessary) modify my behavior.

Number four wins, and that’s where my proposed solution comes in.

The solution

We need more information!  We need more than two anecdotes and a lot of vague references to “these new studies” and “the relevant research.”  We need more than studies on rats, and we need studies of more than 10 veteran athletes.  By “we” I mean “society,” and actually society is already really, really good at harnessing massive amounts of data and crunching them to derive useful judgments.  Think of how effectively Amazon predicts what we’ll want, and how well the advertising industry can anticipate, and create, our desires.  What if we could find a ready source of “big data” for studying the effect of gonzo endurance athleticism on heart health?

But we have it already!  It’s called Strava!  This social network has 8 million registered users, of which 1.2 million are active and something like 190,000 have premium accounts.  (These are estimations since the company doesn’t reveal these numbers; click here for details.  Suffice to say, this is a lot deeper pool of data than 10 test subjects.)

 The number of Strava users isn’t even the best part.  It’s the quality of the data set.  Consider the type of athlete who goes so hard, and so long, and so often, that he or she is actually at risk of causing heart damage.  How many of this type wouldn’t be on Strava?  The gung-ho Strava cyclist is exactly the kind of person who might overdo his or her training.  In other words, Strava members comprise the perfect group for studying this stuff. 

I’m envisioning a splash screen that pops up when the Strava user logs in.  It asks, “Are you willing to participate in an anonymous study about heart function and rigorous aerobic exercise?”  I’d guess most users wouldn’t have a problem with this.  And anybody who’s having heart trouble would probably be eager to participate, to better understand it all, and could indicate the nature and frequency of his or her problem.  Such a study could quite feasibly have millions of workouts per day to crunch (the average workouts logged per day being around 6 million last year, as detailed here).  You’ve got your control group and your heart-oddity group both covered, right off the bat.

And what great data there’d be to crunch!  You get exercise frequency; exercise duration; heart rate; and history (e.g., how much a rider’s performance is improving or deteriorating).  You could start to develop very precise profiles of those whose hearts are misbehaving.  Is there an age threshold beyond which these symptoms most commonly present?  Are there frequency, duration, and/or intensity thresholds below which no errant heart behaviors are observed?  What is the rate of heart trouble for riders exactly my age, who ride (on average) just as often, and in exactly the same heart rate zones I work out in?  Of those who work out like I do but who are 10 years older, how many have developed heart trouble?  Five years from now, when we see an even more comprehensive integration of “big data” into our lives, we’d probably have even more ways to correlate the data.  (We might know, for example, whether frequent purchases at Starbucks or BevMo factor in to the cardio health equation.)

Conclusion

For now, I’m going to assume that the hectic pace of my life, my many familial obligations, my relative sloth, and my unaggressive riding style will keep my heart in good shape.  I’m not going to bother shopping my Strava idea around, because I’m confident  that the Strava folks themselves, looking for a way to actually make some money, are bound to get the attention of the insurance people, who I assume are always looking for ways to avoid open-ended batteries of complicated tests.  I envision all of this happening without any effort from me, probably years before I start getting into the dangerous years where my heart starts “doing something strange inside [my] chest.”  And if you want to forward this link around to speed up the process, please be my guest!

Roof Rack Fracas

Introduction

A friend of mine up in Bend told me about this trust fund guy he sees around who not only has the ultimate bike rack for his (cool 4WD) car, with attachments for every kind of recreational toy (bike, kayak, skis), but carries all the equipment around full time, like a rolling trophy case for his outdoorsy lifestyle.  The dude is clearly not alone in seeing his rack as an outward manifestation of social worth; rack manufacturer Yakima has printed the slogan “Overcome rack envy” on their catalogs and other promotional items.

At the other extreme you have:  me.  I never even wanted a car, much less a rack to put on it.  I don’t like cars.  I don’t like stuff.  While most people enjoy the retail experience, to me most purchases feel like a defeat of some kind.  And yet, I get by.  My lifelong refusal to buy a TV has resulted in four used-TV donations from concerned friends and family.  In college, my bike traveled to races on a badly oxidized piece of crap rear-mount Hollywood rack that my friend found at the beach.  On our way home from our final race of the collegiate season in 1990 we didn’t even bother with the rack—we just threw our bikes, and the rack, into the back of the car.

And yet, retail activity cannot be held off forever, and recently I decided to bite the bullet and buy a roof rack, so I could bring everybody’s bikes on a family vacation.  (Until now, I’ve used the two-bike Rhode Gear Super Shuttle rear rack I bought back in ’91 when I worked at a bike shop.)  This post chronicles my recent bike rack purchase and how it threw me into conflict with friends, family, and a salesman.  I also offer a few handy tips about saving money and frustration when you do buy a rack.

Build or buy?

Cheapness was a core value in my family.  When my dad decided we could bring our bikes on a family vacation, he built a rack for our weird two-door Saab station wagon.  (This was a family of six.)  The bikes went on the rack with both wheels attached and were held in place by custom-lathed wood pieces, a lot of rope, and the sheer force of my dad’s intellect.  Putting the bikes on the car took something like forty-five minutes and only my dad knew how to do it.  Removing the front wheel to improve aerodynamics was probably never considered:  gas was well under a dollar a gallon and the Kyoto Protocol was two decades away.  I don’t have a photo of that racks, but here’s a photo of a similar one my dad built five years later (and which he mounted to the original Saab roof rack he’d moved over to his Subaru).

In high school, when my brothers and friends and I were going to bike races every weekend, we made a giant roof rack for my friend’s late-‘70s Volvo wagon.  My brother Geoff had learned how to weld in shop class; he scrounged up a loaner welding rig somewhere and made wheel trays out of these giant pieces of iron fence material.  He welded struts to these, apparently made of scrap pig-iron, to cradle the wheels.  There were swinging aluminum struts that terminated in these crazy clamps that looked like the beak of a bird of prey.  I think we used sections of old inner tube to keep from scratching the bikes.  (I say “we” but upon reflection I doubt I actually helped, other than maybe to  sing and clap.)  Here’s a photo of that rack.  (Also shown is the Yakima rack we bought to supplement it, so we could carry eight or nine bikes at once.  To pay for that Yakima, we all worked for a week scrubbing a drained swimming pool with hydrochloric acid.)

So did I consider building my own rack this time around?  Not seriously.  I did take a quick look at ehow.com to see how they recommended building a rack.  What a joke.  Check it out here.  They have very cryptic instructions involving PVC and suction cups (!).  There are no diagrams or photos of any kind, other than a stock Getty Images photo of a sporty-looking dude standing in front of a car which has what appears to be a commercial bike rack on its roof.  The instructions say, “If you are a visual person, consider buying a bike rack and using it as model to make your own.  Then return it within the allowed time frame and with proper documentation for little to no charge.”  As you can see, whoever wrote those ehow instructions is going to burn in Hell.

Seeking advice

Some people love the process of selecting consumer goods:  the reviews, the consumer testimonials, the price comparisons, etc.  Not me.  I’m a pretty good price shopper once I know what I want, but I don’t kid myself that I can sort out what’s really the best product.  Fortunately, I’m on a bike club, EBVC, that’s chock full of bona-fide bike gear mavens.  I sent out a note asking for recommendations, little realizing—though I should have—how much dissent there would be.

One guy, a club veteran who raced the Red Zinger back in the ‘70s, wrote, “I know someone who took some thrashed old high-flange front hubs, cut the flanges to roughly match the contour of his cross bar, and clamped it down to the cross bar with a couple hose clamps.  We went to many races with that setup which cost about $1.25/bike.” 

Seems like a perfect idea, except that a) I don’t have crossbars to begin with ( the “towers” that fix them to the car’s room are the expensive part of the rack), and b) others on the club are convinced that any rack that holds the bike by the tips of the fork is dangerous to the health of the bike.  One guy wrote, “Fork bends side to side, and is not designed to do that...  I think this could be a real problem when it comes to carbon forks, where the weave is laid in accordance to the expected forces/stresses.”  Another agreed:  “I used a Yakima fork mount … and at the end of the season I found multiple stress fractures behind the head tube.”  This elicited a pointed response from yet another guy:  “I think the damage to the bike may well be attributed to the stresses incurred by ‘bubble butt.’”

Soon we had a full-on e-mail debate.  One friend cited a report from Lennard Zinn, who checked with several bike companies, all of whom said the fork-mount racks were fine.  Not that the industry shouldn’t capitalize on any fear the consumer base might have, my friend went on to say:  “Yakima does make a sorbothane-backed flannel bike wrap filled with goose down for its carbon outfitted clients.”   He concluded by pointing out, “EBVC should have a discussion group page on its website called ‘Sorry I Asked...’”

Others piled on with their points of view.  A couple guys recommended a rear-mount trailer-hitch rack that will hold four bikes.  Somebody else countered that  there are two types of people who use trailer-hitch racks:  those who have been rear-ended (and thus had their bikes wrecked), and those who are going to.  Needless to say somebody immediately pointed out that there are also two kinds of people who use roof racks:  those who have driven into the garage with the bike on top and those who are going to.  Oddly, nobody outwardly recommended the kind of roof rack where you leave both wheels on the bike.

I did consider that kind of rack, because it’s what the Cutters had on Mike’s car in “Breaking Away.”  That (apparently home-made) rack looked really cool, especially when Mike was “hot-rodding around campus.”  It didn’t seem to take Dave that long to put the bike on the car, though long enough that when Moocher smashed the time-clock’s face at the car wash (“Don’t forget to punch the clock, Shorty!”), thus quitting his job on his first day, the car was still there to take him away.  What if Mike’s car had a Yakima or Thule rack, and Mike had driven off before the offensive “Shorty” comment?  Maybe Moocher would have acted differently, and continued working at the car wash, and maybe Nancy would never have agreed to marry him.

With this cinematic moment swirling in my head along with all the conflicting bits of advice, suddenly the decision seemed bigger than just choosing a bike rack.  The problem with asking advice is that you may find yourself in the position of ignoring it, which means incurring a certain degree of social peril.  When my advisors disagree with one another, I can’t please all of them. 

It’s one thing when you’re ignoring the advice of friends—who can blow off the slight by saying, “Your bike sucks anyway, who cares if you wreck it”—but of course it’s worse with family, which is why I regret what I did next, which was to ask my dad what he thought.  I thought he might approve of the fork-mount rack on the basis of fuel efficiency, but he wrote back, “As to the stress of holding a bike by the dropouts:  I would not do it.  The riding stresses on a bike are never that kind of stress.  The center of gravity is always on the plane of symmetry of the bike, even when you are leaning way over in a hard turn, so the stresses are always symmetrical.  But when a car is going around a corner, the bike is not leaning, and one dropout gets hundreds of pounds of tension, which it was not designed for.   Also, I would worry about the fork top, which will have the same tension.” 

He also addressed my concern about fuel efficiency:  “Needless to say, I don't much care about extra gas costs ... what matters is extra CO2 and its effect on the future.”  His recommendation was to build a special both-wheels-on type of rack:  “drill holes in the roof and bolt the for-and-aft wheel troughs and other fittings directly to the roof, avoiding cross-wise bars which have lots of drag.”  Drill holes in my car?  I’d rather just leave my bike—or better yet, my car—at home.

The final bit of advice came from the REI salesman.  By the time I went there I was pretty sure I didn’t want the both-wheels-on type of rack (too expensive, not aerodynamic, and not recommended for carbon frames, which I may own one day), but still I asked him about rack types and wind drag.  He promptly replied, “If you care about wind drag” (Berkeley subtext:  “if you care about the planet”), “then you have to get the Thule.  It has been proven that the square crossbars of the Thule are more aerodynamic than the round crossbars of the Yakima.”  He delivered this statement almost triumphantly, seeming to expect that this rationale would carry the day.  Thus, he was visibly disappointed and seemed almost offended when I proceeded to buy the Yakima.  Frankly, I’d done more research on the Yakima’s compatibility with my car (not that I really doubted a Thule would fit fine) and was running out of time.  Plus, the Yakima bike mounts were cheaper. 

I suppose many a consumer would walk triumphantly out to his car, shouldering his cool new toy, whistling, pleased to have bought his way that much closer to a perfected life.  Not me.  I felt exhausted at the ordeal of ignoring good, solid advice, while possibly affronting friends, family, and the REI guy.  Plus I was out like $600 for a product whose very use would get me a hefty dose of liberal guilt, not to mention possibly damage my bike.  (During my road trip I put the cheaper, heavier bikes on the roof, while continuing to carry “my precious” on the rear-mount rack.)

Advice – Part 1

Okay, I promised in my introduction to give you some advice about bike racks.  The good thing about a blog is you can ignore my advice, or even privately ridicule it, without offending me.  (Or, if you’re a confrontational sort, you can comment below or e-mail me.)  

My first suggestion is this:  if you’re shopping for a rack and have factory-mounted rails on your car (i.e., that the bike rack mounts to), then skip buying the optional lock cores for your rack.  But wait, you protest.  Locks make so much sense!  After all, with one Allen wrench and about five minutes a thief could make off with the $600 rack.  And if the thief had an accomplice he could take the rack and all the bikes with it—a several thousand dollar haul.  Why wouldn’t you want to lock it up?

Well, I didn’t say not to lock it.  I said to skip the lock cores you can buy from the manufacturer.  First of all, they’re expensive:  $55 for a set of four Yakima cores, $60 for Thule.  I must admit, they’re pretty cool; though the Yakima website doesn’t explain this very well, these cores can be installed in the fork-holding mechanism so the bike is locked to the rack, and the same kind of core goes in the rack tower to lock the rack to the car.  One key does all the locks.  This amounts to what one person (trying to convince me to buy them) called the “clean, yuppie feeling” of buying something really slick, whatever the cost.  Well, I can do without that clean, yuppie feeling, especially if it costs me $55 (and was made in China for $0.45).

Second, these locks don’t secure the wheels of the bike.  The front wheels, if you choose to mount them to the rack (using the optional wheel holders), can be swiped in about thirty seconds.  If a thief didn’t mind climbing up on the car, he could steal the rear wheels too, in about a minute.  Sure, you could thread a cable and padlock through the wheels, but then you’ve just undone the essential slickness of the lock core system.

Meanwhile, at least in the case of Yakima racks, this system doesn’t look all that theft-proof.  All the lock core does to secure the rack to the car is to lock down the plastic housing over the inner workings of the rack tower.  You’ve got metal going into plastic.  Probably a good blow with the hammer would knock the cover clean off, and then you’ve got the rack off in minutes.

Instead, I suggest you do as I did and drill a hole through one of the bike trays.  (I’m sure I just nullified the warranty on my rack, but life will go on.)  Now, thread one end of a nice fat cable through one bike (getting the rear wheel and frame), then through itself (i.e., one cable end loop passes through the other), then through both the front wheels, through the other bike, and around the car’s factory rail.  Then use a padlock to lock the cable to the rack.  Look:

The lock’s shackle goes through a) the hole you drilled and b) the end loop on the cable.  Here are a couple of close-ups:

It’s not perfect—the padlock can be broken—but it’s a deterrent, and costs you very little (after all, what cyclist doesn’t own the cable already?).  For extra security, thread a U-lock (e.g., Kryptonite) through the cable and around the factory rail.

Note:  please don’t sue me because you followed this advice and had something stolen.  Any reasonably educated reader would immediately realize that, whatever utility he may happen to gain from the preceding advice, it was all meant to be completely facetious, even the photo.  (Nelson—do you think, with this paragraph, I’m covered?)

Advice – Part 2

The following pertains to the Yakima rack with its environment-destroying, life-ruining round crossbars.  If you have a Thule rack, you can read this bit anyway, just for that delicious smug feeling.

The round Yakima crossbars enable you to easily rotate the front wheel fork mount so it lies flat when not in use, improving aerodynamics.  The problem is, it rotates too easily.  No matter how hard I tighten the wing nuts, the fork won’t stay put.  As has been noted by three of the five customer reviews on the Yakima website, this results in the wheel rocking back until it hits the roof of the car.  Yakima suggests putting the wheel at a 60-degree angle to “prevent the build up of inertia.”  Well, this is a start, but I doubt it’s enough.

What worked really well for me was to install one wheel fork to each crossbar, one right behind the other (which is the most aerodynamic arrangement anyway, as one wheel drafts the other).  The fork that’s mounted to the front crossbar should be rotated toward the back.  The fork that’s mounted to the rear crossbar should be rotated forward.  Do this with each wheel installed in its fork, and rotate them until they meet in the middle.  Now secure them (i.e., fasten them to each other) with a zip-tie or a kid’s hair band or a toe strap.  This will make it physically impossible for the forks to rotate on the crossbar.  (Look at that last photo … you can see the zip-tie there.)

Advice – Part 3

I don’t need to advise you not to drive into the garage with your bike on the roof—I mean, that’s obvious—but since this has happened to so many of my friends, I’m going to give you two foolproof ways to avoid doing it.  But first, just in case you’ve never seen the results of this mistake, look at this (a recent photo from a friend).  Talk about a rack being hard on your bike’s fork!

One way to avoid this fate is to buy a house built in 1929 with a garage sized to  a Model T Ford.  That way, it’s physically impossible to drive your modern car into the garage, with your bike on the rack or not.  If, however, you’re one of those lucky people with a large garage you can actually use, then I suggest you remove the rack from your car when you’re not using it.  The added advantage is that you’ll get better gas mileage without that rack on your car.  (Plus, you’ve lowered the theft risk to near-zero.) 

I’m not suggesting you constantly install and deinstall your rack.  I’m suggesting that unless you’re a die-hard racer with a real flair for carpooling, you probably don’t need the rack on your car most of the time.  If you’re only toting one bike around, just throw it in the back of the car.  If you’re toting two bikes, use a rear-mount bike rack.  If you’re driving to a stage race and really need the convenience of a roof rack, then throw the rack back on the car for your trip.  Once the rack has been set up, it’s quick and easy to take it on and off the car.

Conclusion

Chances are you already have a rack, already have the lock cores, will never buy a rear-mount rack, and don’t agonize so much over such simple things.  If so, I guess I envy you that.  But at least now I can look at my kickass Yakima rack, leaning against the wall of the garage waiting to be remounted someday, and think “Ohhhh yeahhhh.”