I'm not getting much done at work today, so I'll play with this topic a bit.
I've been a bike guy all my life--my first job, at the age of fourteen, was as an apprentice bike mechanic. Even before that, I spent a LOT of time on two wheels. Mom (you folks know her as Catnapper) tells the story of how she watched me ride my little sidewalk bike with one training wheel dangling loose, and when it fell off she essentially refused to fix it as I clearly didn't need it.
Over the years, I'd probably been one of those hundred-mile-a-year guys, due to involvement in other things. In the early 1990s, though, I discovered recumbent bicycles. My mileage shot up to a thousand miles a year, while still doing lots of other stuff (including working at three jobs for a while).
Then I started working in a bike shop again. I was in a place such that it seemed normal to ride to work, instead of odd or quirky. The first year I was there, I rode a bit more than 3,000 miles, including my commuting. The second year, I started doing much more riding with the local bicycle club, and while my commuting miles dropped due to closer proximity of living quarters, my club miles made up the difference.
I typically ride in the range of 2500-3000 club miles per year, now. I'm active as a ride captain, and have this year stepped up to be the club VP/Education (I also have a League Cycling Instructor certificate).
Several years ago, as my mile counts were starting to increase, I had the sense that I was not getting enough oxygen while I rode. I thought about my dietary intake (not that I've ever really planned that before), and added some green stuff (broccoli, spinach...), and started fixing my breakfast in iron skillets rather than teflon-coated ones (potatoes fried in a drizzle of olive oil--yum), in hopes that getting a bit more iron in my blood would aid oxygen carrying ability of those neat little red cells.
It helped a little, probably more due to the better variety of food than anything else.
I'd heard of sleep apnea, and at least two prior sleep partners had mentioned that I would stop breathing at night, but had no idea what to do about it.
Then Mom was diagnosed as having apnea, got her machine, found this forum, and began her own struggle with finding the right combination of machine and mask(s). She, as moms are wont to do, insisted that I go get tested. I, in turn, got a machine and mask(s), and have had less struggle than many adapting to the therapy.
It's a bit hard to isolate CPAP's effect on my cycling, as there were several other large changes in my life at about the same time. However, given that it has had such positive effect on my ability to sleep, my ability to stay awake when I need to, and my overall energy level, it has to have helped me. Before starting CPAP, I had done the ride called RAIN (
http://www.rainride.org) a couple times, with my best rolling average about 20.1 miles an hour for the 160 miles. The summer after starting CPAP, my average speed on RAIN was over 21 miles an hour!
Has it helped me ride better? Sure! I don't feel like I'm oxygen-deprived while I ride, even when I ride harder than I used to go. Now it's simply lack of training that keeps the muscles from performing as I'd like, and that is seasonal for me, even though I commute almost year-round (the commuting riding seems to not have any effect on my top speed or average speeds, as the commuting is done at relatively low power output, but when I look at the numbers things are better than I realize).
