Lessons from the Senior Olympians

Is aging a number, a feeling or an inevitable biologic process we can't alter? Much of what we know about the aging process has come from studying sedentary people. The problems typically attributed to aging have less to do with actual aging than the sedentary way that more than 70% of people in this country choose to spend their lives. This sedentary living results in 35 chronic diseases that kill more than 250,000 people a year in the US. This is many times more than any bacteria, spinach or bird flu outbreak. Our couches are not only aging us—they're killing us!

It occurred to me that, in order to understand the true nature of musculoskeletal aging, we had to eliminate the variable of living a sedentary lifestyle. Only this way could we answer the question of "What are our bodies really capable of if we aged actively, the way we were designed for?"

For this reason I started studying the Senior Olympians. These active agers consistently exhibit high levels of functional capacity and a high quality of life. I wanted to know why the 50-year-old male winner of the mile sprint was capable of finishing in 4:34 or why the 70-year-old winner still can blow away many sedentary people half their age by running a mile in 7 minutes.

I began looking at performance times of the top 8 finishers in every track distance from 100m to 10K, from age 50 to 85 in the 2001 Senior Olympics. Would there be any kind of pattern to how we age? When does biology take over, no matter how active we are?

What I found amazed me. Master's athletes' performance declined less than 2% per year for both men and women from age 50 to 75. This means that you could put a 50-year-old and a 70-year-old in the same race and no one gets lapped. This was true for the sprint distances as well as the endurance distances.

After 75 years old, however, something happens. The slow 2% decline in performance times suddenly becomes more than 8% decline per year. Why does performance plummet? Is it the cumulative factors of loss of muscle mass, flexibility, coordination or aerobic capacity that suddenly catch up with us?

To evaluate this effect further, I looked at American Track and Field record holders—the bests of the best. From 30-50 years old, there is less than a 1% decline in performance. From 50-75 this increases to less than 2% and after 75 years old, there is again a sharp decrease in performance.

There are many reasons for these observations and maybe you have experienced them yourselves. In the next several blogs I want to talk about these reasons and how you can stay at the top of your game or race for as long as you can.

You can read the full study in the March edition of American Journal of Sports Medicine.