I received an interesting question from an HMM user. Essentially, the athlete asked about staying motivated as they had “passed their prime” and what kind of goals one should set. Personally, I was intrigued to explore this query for my own selfish reasons. As I write this, I still compete at a high level, but the people beating me are now much younger than me. There’s so much to dig deeper into here, so let’s break this up a little.

First off, I wondered about when people really start falling off their best performances. I’ve been coaching runners of varying abilities since 2006 and it seems (purely from observation) that performance didn’t necessarily decline drastically at a certain age. I came across a study by Zavorsky, et al. (2017) entitled “Declines in marathon performance: Sex differences in elite and recreational athletes.“

What the researchers did was look at finishing data for all age groups and gender from the NYC, Chicago, and Boston marathons between the years 2001 and 2016. Not a bad subject pool!

With that many subjects over such a long time, there is no doubt we could get a good makeup of performance as we age. Here’s some quick statistics:

* Fastest age group was 25 to 34 years old (big surprise, right?), with the average male champion being 28 years old and the average woman champ being 30 years old (almost 31).

* From ages 35 to 74, the average female age group winner dropped 2 minutes 33 seconds from the next youngest age group, while the average male dropped about 2:06.

* The median times only began to slow after the age of 50. After that, the rate of decline was similar between men and women.

This is all great, but what exactly does that mean for us?

To me, it means a couple things. The first is that the faster you are when you are younger, the more you will feel the effects of aging. Or, put another way, if you are a lifelong competitive athlete, the more likely you will drop off from your peak younger performance. Now, I say that based on what the the data says from a pure numbers standpoint. I think there is also a lot of reading between the lines that needs to occur. For one, most elite runners who “retire,” really do that. When most are done, they are just done. They don’t keep training as hard as they did. Heck, I know a lot of former competitors who haven’t raced at all since they left the professional scene. So, while the younger age groups will obviously dominate major road races, it does leave the door open for “middle aged” runners to move up the ranks in their age groups. It would be interesting to see how recreational runners in the 25-34 year age groups compared to the 35+ age groups.

Second..

…the median times never really dropped for 35-50 years old. I find this interesting as this is the biggest age range for people who are starting families, careers, are invested in a lot of other areas of life. To me is says that everyone here is probably very limited for time to train and can’t train to what their physiological potential is (we’ll go into this more). Beyond that, times do drop off, but I think this is only partly due to age and more to do with training. In short, if you are beyond that 35 year old age group and can invest into the right training, you can be highly competitive and not see a big drop in time. If you are a newer runner and above 35, then I would be very optimistic that you could improve well into your forties and fifties before reaching a plateau and inevitable decline in performance.

Why would I make a claim like that? Well, take a look at this graph from Jeff Horowitz’ book Ageless Strength: Strong and Fit for a Lifetime.

I get it. Sometimes you want to just run for the fun of it, or do a race with a loved one, or something like running a marathon in every county of every state (is that a ...