At what age do the wheels fall off?
Turns out it is highly personal
I’ve been thinking a lot about just how aging effects athletic performance. I have seen a number of moons set myself and like to have strategy or at least the rough outline of one for the future. I wouldn’t say I’ve been researching exactly, just paying attention to the experiences of others.
What I’ve found is it really depend on the individual, their history and their genetics. Just like everything else in our lives it comes down to an experiment of one. That being said, if you aggregate enough data in the form of experience you can see some patterns.
I belong to a Facebook group called “Runners over 50”. Someone asked a question, something like “do you feel like the wheels fall off after a certain age?” There was a long string of answers.
Some where in ‘yes, definitely, after (pick and age) things began to unravel’. A definite feeling of there being an expiration date after which you were pretty much spent.
Many others were in the ‘no way! I’m in better shape now at (pick an age), than I was when I was 40 (or 30 or whatever). These tended to be the people who had started running later in life, so stick a pin in that and we’ll come back to it.
I use the generic ‘pick an age’ because this is one of those things that is a curve and turns out to be very specific to the person. Some said 50 was their expiration date, some said 60, some said 70 and some denied any hint or whiff of age-related degradation at all.
It seems, age, and the effect of it on your athletic performance is highly individual in nature and dependent on your point of view.
There seem to be categories. There are those that were highly competitive when they were younger. This cadre either burns out, gets a career-ending injury or stays competitive as they slowly fight a retrograde action against the entropy of aging.
For those that stay in the fight, they learn how to do more with less, or more appropriately, how to do less with less and be happy about it. For this crew, it’s a matter of perspective. Do you walk around sad because your last race was 2 minutes a mile slower than your PR in your youth? No, the successful find a way to be happy with relative performance and personal accomplishment.
Another advantage the life-long competitive runners have is that, since they were relatively fast in their day, the loss of performance leaves them still relatively fast in their golden years. They don’t fall off the bottom so to speak, they go to the middle. Which is still a great community to hang around with.
Then there is a category of athletes who discover their athleticism or return to it later in life. These folks seem to be comparatively quite satisfied with themselves. Out of this category come the standouts who are setting age group records. They have the advantage of not having abused their bodies for 30 years and are, in their age, ‘fresh’ to the competition.
Then there are those who never were athletes and emerged from a comparatively unhealthy existence. These are the ones that happily shout ‘I’m in better shape today than I was when I was 30!’ They have no expectations or memories of fast times and are just thrilled to not be dead or in a wheelchair. They are living the dream.
The answer to the question at what age do you lose your ability is what then?
In some regards it is up to you. You get to define what ability is.
I’m 57 and just ran an easy 6-mile trail run with my dog as part of training for my 21st Boston marathon. It was easy for me. It was enjoyable. It was also 2+ minutes per mile slower than I would have run 10 years ago. Does that really matter? Nope. Does not change the experience for me at all.
For many 20 or 30 or 40 year-olds this sort of mild Saturday outing would be athletically out of reach. Does that really matter? Nope. It’s all about your life, your choices and your point of view.
At the end of the day, actually at the end of many, many, many days, you get to decide whether to worry about what you can’t do or celebrate what you can do. That hasn’t changed since you were 18. Hopefully you’re smarter now.
Athletic ability falls off as you age. How much and when is a function of your genes and your lifestyle.
What you do with it is a function of your mindset.
You can change your approaches and tactics and strategies to get more out of what you have but entropy doesn’t stop for you or the universe. Eventually we all return to the stardust from which our corporeal form emerged.
And that’s the answer to that question.