As an athlete who has just entered the realm of “Masters” (I turned 40 last September) I am intrigued by information about older athletes and the aging process of athletes. I am sure, if you are “past the threshold” like me that you have been told countless times that your performance, strength, stamina, [insert any word associated with young vibrant athletes here] is inevitably going to decline.
I am the first to admit that things definitely change at this ‘advanced’ age. I have struggled to deal with the changes in my body and figure out the training that is going to work for the new me. But I’ve always believed that I can still be fast and strong, even in my older body. (I am still working on proving this…)
You have to admit that more and more aged athletes are competing at a high level, not just at a high Masters level, but against younger competition. Yes, they probably have to train differently than when they were 20, but they can still be competitive.
I recently came across a study that gave me even more hope; hope that perhaps we shouldn’t accept that we older folks can no longer be the athlete we once were.
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Best decision I’ve made in a long, long time!
I have been a contact and glasses wearer since 2003. In my early twenties I tried on a pair of a friends new eyeglasses and realized I could see far better than I had been. Sure enough, I got my eyes checked, and I needed glasses to see and read things clearly in the distance. While this new and improved vision was great, the wearing of glasses was unacceptable during training. I soon looked into contacts and thought my problems were solved. They were better, but far from solved. Contacts are a pain in the butt! Putting them in, taking them out, cleaning them, traveling with them, riding in foul weather, the list goes on and on. I’m sure any contact wearers out there can fully relate to the hassle. I just chalked it up to the way it had to be and soldiered on. Several years went by, and the frustration gradually increased. Then earlier this year, in a muddy mountain bike race it happened, I got mud in my eye like many times before. This time though, my contact worked it’s way out resulting in blurred vision and a horrible finish to the race. Again about a month later it happened again in a more important race, and I decided that I needed to fix this problem. A friend mentioned LASIK eye correction as a solution. I thought, sure why not, I’ll look into it.
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A couple of my former adventure racing teammates and I have had an interesting discussion going, sparked by an article written by Matt Fitzgerald on the research of Samuele Marcora. In short, Marcora believes (and has done interesting research that supports his hypothesis) that we make a conscious choice to quit based on our perception of effort. He argues that we rarely reach physical exhaustion, but rather that we mentally give up. It is a fascinating – and, of course, controversial position – but it is definitely worth a read: www.mattfitzgerald.org/html/PDFs/YouAreAQuitter.pdf
I should preface the rest of this post by saying that I am not a researcher and I do not support (because I do not really know) one hypothesis over another. But it fascinates me, and I find it a compelling argument that our mind is a huge part of our performance, within the realm of our physical abilities. Think about it a little as you read the article. As my buddies and I have bounced this topic back and forth, several interesting thoughts have come up:
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