I hope you continually look for ways to enhance your health. I hope that one of those ways, albeit indoors or out, is by riding a bicycle.

But make no bones about it. My first hope’s about 10 times stronger than the latter.

And I’m also very sure about something else: most readers only bike ride occasionally and some never do at all.

That said, even though there’s little chance you’ll ever complete the so-called course work (or should I say leg work?) to earn a degree in “cycology,” I know it will help your health to think like a “cycologist.” I also know that if I’m going to coin words, I better define them.

I invented cycologist and cycology, you see, because bicycling and cycling are not quite the same to me.

Bicycling provides excellent exercise, inexpensive transportation, and a whole lot more. Cycling’s all that and includes lifestyle, a lifestyle that’s easy to love.

That love leads to a certain mentality, and you become a cycologist.

A psychologist studies the human mind, its functions, and how it affects behavior. Same’s true of a cycologist.

Except many of the latter’s studies take place at a good speed rather than a great university - and are performed on oneself instead of others.

Case in point: Chris Horner. While I’m sure he had earned his first cycology degree sometime before he turned pro, Horner kept accruing them while he rode as one for a mind-blowing 23 years.

Guess what he said about that fact on a recent Chris Horner’s Corner podcast? That because he never enjoyed them, being forced to do intervals - i.e. following a predetermined and timed pattern of high- and low-intensity cycling as a way to improve speed and endurance- would’ve probably kept him from racing at the highest level. Instead, he did “big efforts” during fast group rides and solitary climbs.

That cycology helped Chris Horner win 14 major races throughout his career, including Spain’s version of the Tour de France, the Vuelta a España. A race he won at the age of 41, making him the oldest Grand Tour winner ever.

A large part of cycology can be encapsulated in a cliché that provokes the PETA people to no end: “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Now whether use of the phrase offends you or not, the fact is a cycologist applies that idea to his cycling circumstances constantly.

It’s why - as a result of my advancing age more so than a distaste for intervals - I now do something similar to Horner’s “big efforts” in lieu of intervals. Such an example is why I lay claim to a bachelor’s degree in cycology.

While my degree is no match for Horner’s multiple PhDs, it’s certainly done right by me. It’s kept me from ever getting bored with cycling, healthy, and my mind from being blown when I read today’s featured study about late-night eating.

Yet that’s what the study published in the June 2023 issue of Nature Metabolism did to the mind of its lead researcher, Dr. Min-Dian Li. In an interview for Medical News Today, the professor of internal medicine and cell biology, and director of the Center for Circadian Metabolism and Cardiovascular Disease at Army Medical University in China called the results “absolutely surprising and mind-blowing.”

But I was not surprised, nor was my mind blown. That’s because I have gotten - and am still getting - positive results in a similar experiment of one.

As you may know, recent studies with mice and humans have shown significant health benefits resulting from a pattern of eating that’s usually called Intermittent Fasting. The diet has many forms; the one that appears to be most popular has you consume food for 8 hours during the day and follow that with a 16-hour fast.

To simulate an antithetical diet, Li’s team fed a group of mice during their typical resting period for 3 weeks. Mice are nocturnal by nature but you’re not, so while the feeding occurred during the day, it’d be during the time you’d be fasting if on an IF diet.

What blew Li’s mind was how the change in eating time affected the mice’s ability to exercise.

When compared to other mice fed during the time mice are normally up and about, the mice fed when they should’ve been in bed ran on the exercise wheel twice as far and twice as long. And because Li’s mind was blown, he had his team recheck the results using every imaginable cohort, but the results held firm.

The mind-blowing discovery, in Li’s words, was “robust and reproducible.”

The reason why mind wasn’t blown away, though, is because when I was initially pursuing my degree in cycology - riding 10,000 miles or so a year in my quest to win road races and time trials, while working about 60 hours a week teaching and writing - I did (had to do, really) most of my eating at night. More than half and sometimes closer to two-thirds of my daily calories were consumed during supper, an after-supper snack, and - here comes the really weird part - two snacks I’d have after sleeping a bit.

Even weirder, I’m still eating this way at 63, and it’s still working for me.

Yes, I know that eating much at night as well as fasting for no more than 8 hours each day flies in the face of the general medical consensus today. But hey, how many MDs also have degrees in cycology?