How Long Can Peak Performance Last?

The question “How long can peak performance last?” sounds more salacious than does the answer offered by  Elizabeth Weil, in her predictably lovely profile of a 41-year-old Olympic quality swimmer Dana Torres. Weil quotes Hirofumi Tanaka, the director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research
Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, who found that both elite
and nonelite runners and swimmers could maintain personal bests until
age 35, after which performance declined in a gradual, linear fashion
until about age 50 to 60 for runners and 70 for swimmers. Deterioration
was rapid from there, writes Weil. Tanaka also found that swimmers experienced more
modest declines than runners and that swim sprinters, like Torres,
experienced the smallest declines of all. At Yale,
Ray Fair, a runner and an economist, crunched statistics on aging and
peak athletic performance and created what he calls the Fair Model. The
model provides a table of coefficients that enable an athlete to take a
personal-best time and compute how long he or she should expect to take
to complete that same event at a specific point later in life (assuming
he or she has continued to train at the same level). According to the
Fair Model, a woman who swam a personal best 24.63 seconds in the
50-meter freestyle at or before age 35 should expect to clock 25.37
seconds at age 41. “I am struck by how small the deterioration rates
are,” Fair wrote in a paper titled “How Fast Do Old Men Slow Down?” “It
may be that societies have been too pessimistic about losses from aging
for individuals who stay healthy and fit.”
Read more from Liz Weil in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.