Catrin, I agree, the rest is just as important as we age. I take one, sometimes two full rest days. Often, one of them is a short walk, but I have to be careful not to walk too fast up the hill! Other times, I try to do yoga, at home on the 2nd rest day. And the influence of hormones, lack of thereof, and other medical stuff can't be denied. I've made peace with my butt and thighs. They will never be firm. The only time it was, I weighed 92 and the rest of me looked like I had just escaped from Auschwitz. That is genetic. It's a whole lot better than it was before I started cycling, so I'm good with it. I'm the kind of person that looks extremely thin in clothes and not so thin in a bathing suit! I just happened to be looking at some pictures from around 1999, about a year before I started riding. I was pretty much barely putting in an effort at the gym and my eating, while not bad as in typical American junk food, was nowhere as good as it is now. I looked like a chunky mom of teenagers and at my height, I can now see why I was kind of scared into getting on the bike. The pictures on the beach looked terrifying to me, and I probably weighed about 12-15 pounds more than I do now. Not a lot, but the weight loss and body reshaping initially from riding and then from all of the other stuff I do made a huge difference.