A couple weeks ago, I attended the 2017 Training Peaks Endurance Coaching Summit. Through two and a half days of networking, keynote presentations and breakout sessions, I left with a lot of notes. But one of the things that really struck me was a talk by coach Kathy Zawadzki. Kathy specializes in Masters cyclists (technically anyone over 40, but she works mostly with 50+). A portion of her talk focused on our conventional thoughts on aging. Like the chart below, we typically think that we’ll get more fit to a certain point, but when we hit 30-40 years old, there’s nothing we can do, we will get slower.
BUT, in fact, what declines isn’t our performance, it’s our POTENTIAL performance. If we were to train like an Olympian from age 15, yes we would start to ever so slightly decline in performance starting around age 40 (the green line below). If we don’t train at all, we follow the red line.
HOWEVER: If you have not been training like an Olympian since the age of 15, it means that at any given time, at any age, if you train hard, and with purpose, you would very likely see performance GAINS for five, ten, or even fifteen years.
Coach Zawadzki cited an athlete she’d been working with starting at age 55, and only at age 70 did this athlete start to plateau in VO2, lactate threshold, and functional threshold power. In one of the most extreme cases, she talked about a study (here) with an athlete who trained hard from age 101 to 103 (and in fact at 105 is still riding) and saw his VO2max, peak power, and performance INCREASE over those two years. He got FASTER as a freaking 101 year old!
So what does this have to do with you? It means that, for 99% of us, we can GAIN fitness, speed, and capacity at almost any age. Want to adventure more, win races, or go on that cool adventure but thought you’d missed your window? Get the out there and get to work, it’s yours for the taking!
