The slowdown of age: mental or physical?
New research suggests that declines that once seemed "inevitable" may be partly explained by changes in training patterns.
My Jockology column in today’s Globe and Mail takes another look at aging and physical decline:
It’s the chicken-and-egg question of aging: Do we become less active as we get older because our bodies start to break down, or do our bodies start to break down because we allow ourselves to become less active?
For years, it was widely accepted that humans would start getting slower, weaker and more fragile starting in their 30s. But new studies on topics ranging from the cellular mechanisms of aging to the time-defying performances of masters athletes are forcing researchers to question this orthodoxy. It seems increasingly likely that the first signs of decline are more a function of lifestyle than DNA: If you keep using it, you’ll be well into middle age before you start losing it. [READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE…]
One of the studies discussed in the article is this analysis of the finishing times of 900,000 German marathoners and half-marathoners, published last year. The researchers argue that the rate of decline of mid-packers is a better way of judging “natural” aging processes compared to the outliers who set age-group world records. For fun, I plotted the average finishing times of the runners in the German study, and superimposed the curve that you’d get if they declined at the same rate as age-group records. It’s pretty clear that this group of midpackers does decline at a slower rate:
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