The blood test came back. Total testosterone: 410. The doctor glanced at the page and said you were within range. Cleared to leave. Carry on.
You did not feel within range.
The Tuesday session that should have been a 4x8 at threshold collapsed at the second interval. The Saturday club ride, you were dropped on the second climb. Your sleep is fragmented. The motivation that used to drag you out the door at six in the morning is now a quiet argument you lose more often than you win.
You are forty-five. You have been racing twenty years. You have crashed more times than you can count.
The doctor said you were normal. The bike says otherwise.
If you have lived inside that contradiction — and a serious chunk of the masters cycling audience has — Dr Mark Gordon's conversation on the podcast is the one to listen to next. Gordon is a neuroendocrinologist. He has spent thirty years on the relationship between hormones, brain inflammation, and the kind of cumulative trauma that cyclists collect over a career. He has worked with NFL athletes, US military veterans, and a quietly growing list of cyclists who finally went looking for the answer that "you're within range" did not give them.
The answer is uncomfortable. And it is fixable.
Listen to the full conversation on the Roadman Cycling Podcast →
"Within Range" Is the Problem
Here is the line that should make every masters cyclist sit up.
Most blood panels measure total testosterone. Gordon's view, blunt as it gets: that number is junk. Only around two percent of total testosterone is the free, biologically active fraction your body actually uses. The rest is bound up. Inert. Padding the number on the page without doing the work in the cell.
The metric you want is free testosterone. And the threshold you want is not "within range." It is the fiftieth to seventy-fifth percentile of your lab's reference window.
Gordon uses an analogy on the podcast that lands. You have a hundred pounds in your pocket. The person beside you has a million. Both of you have money. The question is not whether the number is technically positive. The question is which one of you can actually pay for the day in front of you.
Translate that to your training. The masters cyclist sitting at the bottom of the testosterone reference range is technically not deficient. Technically not depressed. Technically not symptomatic. But the body that is meant to recover from a 4x8 at threshold, sleep deeply, hold composition through winter, and back up Tuesday's interval block with Saturday's long ride is on a hundred-pound budget when the work in front of it costs a thousand. You are not weak. You are underfunded.
The math Gordon walks through is straightforward enough to do at home. Pull the reference range on your lab report. Add the bottom and the top numbers. Divide by two. Where you sit relative to that midpoint tells you whether you are first quartile (low normal), second (working), third (where masters athletes want to be), or fourth (rare, often the result of structured optimisation).
The number you actually need is not a national average. It is a percentile.
The Crash Bill You Are Still Paying
This is the part of Gordon's conversation that lands hardest on a cycling audience. Every crash you have ever had — every collarbone, every road rash, every "I'm fine, I just got the wind knocked out of me" — is sitting on a ledger your body has not closed.
Gordon calls them micro-traumas. Western medicine, in his view, defines traumatic brain injury too narrowly. The standard checklist is loss of consciousness, confusion, amnesia. Most cycling crashes do not tick those boxes. You stand up. You brush yourself off. You finish the ride.
That is not the absence of trauma. That is an under-acknowledged version of it.
The mechanism Gordon explains is grim and elegant. A crash creates an acceleration-deceleration injury. Your brain continues moving inside your skull when your bike stops. The frontal lobe takes the hit. Inflammatory chemistry — cytokines, peroxynitrite, reactive oxygen species — kicks off in the brain. That inflammation reaches the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus stops sending the signal that tells the pituitary to release luteinizing hormone. Luteinizing hormone is the gatekeeper for testosterone production. Cut the signal, and your body's hormonal switchboard quietly downshifts.
One crash you survive. Cumulative micro-traumas across a twenty-year cycling career, layered on top of work stress, broken sleep, and the standard inflammatory load of modern life, are a different problem. They add up. Gordon points to research showing that even a fractured bone — without a head impact — can shift hormone levels because the inflammatory cytokines from the fracture site reach the brain.
Now layer this on the average podcast listener. A masters racer. Professional career. Kids. Eight to twelve hours a week on the bike. A couple of broken collarbones. One or two genuine head impacts in the last decade. The standard slow grind of cortisol-elevated weekday life. By forty-five, the hormonal capacity that should be holding the line for endurance, recovery, and motivation has been chipped at from multiple angles.
This is not an excuse. It is the part of the picture nobody told you about.
Cortisol Is Not the Villain You Think It Is
The other useful reframe Gordon offers — and the one that breaks the wellness internet's lazy cortisol panic — is that the stress hormone is not your enemy.
Cortisol is an adaptogen. It is what allows you to get on the bike and produce power. It rises in the morning so you can move. It rises during a hard interval so the body can release glucose into working muscle. It rises after an injury so the inflammatory response can clean up the damage. A cyclist with a healthy physiological cortisol response on race day is not broken. They are doing exactly what cortisol exists to do.
The problem is not the spike. The problem is the inability to switch it off.
Chronic, unmodulated cortisol is what damages the system. It suppresses immune function, drives the brain inflammation Gordon describes, disrupts sleep, and over time rewires the whole stress-response architecture. The professional athlete adapts — their cortisol rises sharply during effort and falls cleanly during recovery. The chronically stressed masters amateur, juggling work and family and training and a half-managed sleep schedule, runs an elevated baseline that never quite resets.
The fix is not "lower cortisol." The fix is build the capacity to switch it on and off.
Gordon points to research he references on the podcast: fifteen minutes of meditation, three times a week, can halve cortisol levels. That is a measurable, repeatable, time-cheap intervention. It does not require kit, a coach, or a clinician. It requires fifteen minutes you currently spend doomscrolling.
What This Looks Like In Cycling Terms
You are not a clinic. You are a cyclist trying to compound work over a season without burning out. Three things from Gordon's conversation map directly onto a training week.
Get the right blood panel. When you book your next physical, ask for free testosterone, not total. Ask for DHEA-sulphate. Ask for vitamin D, with a target north of the standard "within range." Ask for zinc and magnesium status. Then do the percentile math yourself. You are not waiting for a clinician to interpret a result that the system was never designed to flag.
Treat your crash history as relevant data. When you next have a conversation with a coach, a doctor, or anyone trying to make sense of why your performance is plateauing, the answer is not just training load. List the crashes. List the broken bones. The inflammatory residue of a cycling career is part of the picture. The cyclists who refuse to count their crashes are the ones still confused about why nothing in their training plan is moving the needle.
Build the off-switch on cortisol. Fifteen minutes of meditation, three days a week, is the intervention with the published evidence behind it. The cycling-specific version is the same: a deliberate downshift after the hard sessions. Easy days that are actually easy, not "endurance with a sneaky bit of tempo." Long sleep. Time off the phone. The signal you are sending the nervous system is not "I am pushing harder." It is "I am safe enough to recover."
The session in TrainingPeaks tells you what you did. The hormones tell you what your body could afford to do. Both numbers matter. Most cyclists are reading one and ignoring the other.
Sleep Is The Cheapest Lever
One specific, cycling-relevant detail. Gordon points to research showing that poor sleep alone strips around forty percent of male libido — and the same hormonal cascade that drives libido drives recovery, muscle protein synthesis, and the will to get on the bike on a wet Tuesday.
If you are sleeping six broken hours a night, you do not have a motivation problem. You have a hormone production problem upstream of the motivation. The fix is not a stronger pre-workout. The fix is the boring discipline of getting to bed at the same time, in a cool dark room, with the phone in another part of the house. Pregnenolone, GABA, deep sleep cycles — the chain Gordon describes for himself in his seventies, sleeping five clean hours and waking phenomenal — is the same chain you are interrupting every time you scroll until midnight.
Sleep is the most under-priced training intervention available to a serious amateur. It is also the most quietly cycling-specific. The only way to absorb the load TrainingPeaks tells you you have done is to actually be in deep sleep enough hours per week to consolidate it.
The Supplement Conversation, Honest Version
Gordon spends a chunk of the episode on supplementation — DHEA, vitamin D, zinc, CoQ10, pregnenolone. The detail matters, but the framing matters more.
The framing is this: supplementation without testing is guessing. Gordon repeats it on the podcast. Every dose he prescribes is predicated on lab results. Vitamin D absorption varies wildly between individuals depending on gut health, genetics, and what you ate the dose with. Zinc requires a copper and iron context to be safe at higher doses. DHEA is calibrated to free testosterone and DHEA-sulphate readings, not bodyweight. The internet's "take this every day, here is the dose" model is exactly the model Gordon argues against.
For cyclists, the practical version is two-step. Get the panel first. Then build a small, evidence-driven supplement layer on top of what the panel actually shows. Vitamin D in winter for the rider in northern latitudes. Magnesium for the cyclist running on broken sleep. Zinc when the immune system is showing signs of running thin during a hard block. Each of those is a response to a measured deficit, not a default protocol pulled from a YouTube video.
The cyclist who out-trains a poor blood panel for ten years eventually meets the wall. The cyclist who handles the inputs early — sleep, nutrition, micronutrient status, stress regulation — is the one still progressing into their fifties.
The Bigger Pattern
Gordon's view on why none of this is mainstream is the bit worth holding on to. Healthcare is reactive. You arrive with a problem, the system treats the problem, the system sends you home. The system is not built to ask why your free testosterone is sitting at the bottom of the range or why a thirty-year cycling career has left an inflammatory ledger nobody is reconciling.
That work is on you. Not because the system is hostile. Because it was built for a different question.
The masters cyclist who is still riding well at fifty-five is not the one with the best genetics or the youngest body. They are the one who took the unglamorous, slow, fixable parts of recovery, hormonal health, and inflammation seriously a decade before they had to. The training is the loud part. The hormones are the quiet part. Both decide whether the season compounds or stalls.
You are not done yet. Your body is not in decline because you are forty-five. Your body is in conversation with the cumulative load of two decades of riding, crashing, sleeping badly, working hard, and being told you were "within range" when within range was never the standard you needed.
The first move is the blood test. The second is the percentile math. The third is the boring discipline of cortisol regulation, sleep, and an honest accounting of what your body has been carrying.
The window does not close at forty-five. It closes when you stop asking the right questions.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode with Dr Mark Gordon is on the podcast. For the cycling-specific picture on hormone use in masters racing, see the testosterone in masters racing episode. For the recovery side, read our sleep optimisation guide and the overtraining signs guide.
If you want help building a training year that respects the physiology underneath the watts, the Roadman coaching system is the place to start. If you have a specific question and you want a fast answer grounded in the same library, ask the AI coach.
