Want to continue to crush well into your 80s? Here’s how.
Last February, 59-year-old Ned Overend, aka “The Lung,” aka “Deadly Nedly,” won the first National Fatbike Championships, held in Ogden, Utah. Fat Bike Nats isn’t exactly the Tour de France, but it’s no charity ride, either. Overend had to compete against a field of much younger pros, including former national mountain bike champion Travis Brown, 46, on a tough 19-mile course.
It’s tempting to dismiss Overend as a genetic freak, an outlier who defies comparison with the rest of us. He has dominated nearly every sport he’s entered since the early ’90s, from cross-country mountain bike racing to off-road triathlon. But even among the genetically gifted—and many elite athletes are—Overend is unique in his competitive longevity. Which is the reason he’s also one of the dozen or so athletes spotlighted in Joe Friel’s latest book, Fast After 50 (Velo Press), part of a growing library devoted to salt-and-pepper chargers past (and occasionally well past) the half-century mark.
I recently spent a few weeks immersed in Fast After 50, along with a few other books on the topic, including Margaret Webb’s Older, Faster, Stronger, Lee Bergquist’s Second Wind, and Bill Gifford’s excellent and entertaining Spring Chicken. My interest was both professional and personal. I was staring down the gun barrel at 50, the ominous milestone, just a year and change away. Should I prepare to surrender to backgammon and bocce, or was there still hope for my lifelong addiction to biking, skiing, climbing, and other outdoor activities and races?
I just entered myself for a cycling event in the Alpes next year. Trying to set a time for myself I thought I must surely be able to beat the best 70+ entrant but looking at his placing (74/4369 of which one of the contestant i recognise as professional speedskater) , nope must set a different goal…
I would guess these people reflect the small corner of the bell curve. And a large number of us can and will exercise into old age. But to apply to a whole population isn’t realistic.
I have a hunch most people could get a lot more out of fitness if they exercised in a more fast twitch manner. More sprints, jumps. They cannot be replicated by any other exercises and most people don’t do them at all.
I would imagine that kind of exercise would be the most difficult for most of the people I’m seeing that would have trouble with exercise. I’m thinking a walk would be challenging lol.
Not to mention that a fall could be fatal.
The vast majority of people are nowhere close to “doing too much” and even talking about the concern of “doing too much” does them a disservice because it discourages them from doing a lot more, as they are certainly capable of doing.
This is a subject i have been fascinated with. Thanks for positing. I too recently turned 50 but am still in the “game” (just) of competitive exercise. I competed elite level at duathlon and triathlon in my mid 20s and still race now pretty competetively and have been lucky enough to win 9 World Duathlon AG titles and have every intention of continuing if i am able to. I have noticed my V02 has dropped a little since 40 but my threshold much less. As a software engineer i like measuring everything with training and health so have my training logs going back to the mid 90s. My FTP on the bike is within 20watts of my best in my early 30s and my half marathon times are around 1-2 minutes slower than my peak (the erosion is somewhat halted by the carbon plate shoes). Even though my data still looks decent now i do absolutely think there has been age related decline which i have largely offset by smarter training, technology (shoes), better nutrtion, better sleep and less alcohol etc etc So for me personally i am closer to the genetic ceiling now for my age than i was in my supposed peak (mid 20s). The biggest challenge though is susceptibility to injuries. I have mutliple tendon tears which have been tricky to overcome; luckily we live in an era of amazing regenerative medicine and with procedures like PRP i have largely overcome all of them. Feel very fortunate. As a relatively new Rapa user curious if any performance biomarkers have improved for athletes?
i would agree. Peter Attia recently discussed this and his view is there really isnt any upper limit to the benefits of aerobic exercise…although obv there are dimishing returns once you reach a certain level. The only caveat to this in my view is that their is likely a sweetspot of volume/intensity for certain sports for each of us since the risk of orthopedic injuries offsets the benefits.
Supposedly drop in VO2MAX is mainly due to a drop in maximum heart rate. In mice rapamycin can restore cells from the sino-atrial node but I haven’t tried any maximum efforts since starting rapamycin to see if I can beat my maximum heart rate. In mice rapamycin can also increase stroke volume which can compensate a bit for the loss of frequency
