Joe Friel's Blog, page 10

Aging: Is It Just a Number in Your Head?

People such as Diana Nyad who recently swam
from Cuba to Florida at age 64 change the standards of what it means to be “old.”
There are hundreds of aging athletes who have made great sports achievements
but most of us never hear of - such as Bob Scott.

At age 75 racing Ironman Hawaii Bob set a new course record
for his age group of 13:27:50. Winning and breaking triathlon records is
nothing new for him. He also set the men’s 70-74 age group record four years
earlier with a 12:59:02 finishing more than 90 minutes ahead of the second age
group finisher.

Or how about Libby James, age 76, of
Fort Collins, Colorado who set a new half marathon world record of 1:45:56 for
her 75-79 age group this year. She easily demolished the previous record of
1:55:19. Few women half her age can run such a time. Such a list of amazing
accomplishments from aging athletes could go on and on.

Most of what we think we know about aging
didn’t come from people such as Diana, Bob and Libby, but rather from aging,
sedentary folks watching TV in their La-Z-Boy recliners. As a result much of
the research on what the future holds is meaningless for those of us who
continue to push the limits of performance as we grey. The oldest athletes from
the Baby Boomer generation are now in their mid- to late 60s and have been redefining
what “old” means for almost 20 years. How can we explain their rather sudden changes
in aging performance?

As
I attempted to describe in my last post here, the aging process appears to
be part biology and part lifestyle. No one knows exactly what the mix is –
which has the greater impact. The trend in research currently appears to be
that lifestyle has the greater affect. Leyk and associates at the German Sport
University in Cologne summed it up: aging is a “biological process than can be
considerably speeded up or slowed down by multiple lifestyle-related factors.”
Every recent research study I’ve read on aging agrees that biology and
lifestyle do indeed determine the effects of aging. But is it 30-70, 50-50, 70-30 or some other mix? That’s currently unknown and undoubtedly depends on who
we are talking about. How we age biologically and how we choose to live are
highly individual matters with training playing an important role on the
lifestyle side of the equation for athletes.

To
find such answers it is sometimes best to study athletes from the highest
levels of performance to know what is possible. Let’s take a look at one such longitudinal
study.

Starting
in the 1970s, 21 male, elite masters runners were tested three times over 20
years for various physiological markers including maximum heart rate, body
weight, bone density and aerobic capacity (Pollock). When first tested the
average age was 50. The follow-ups were done at about ages 60 and 70. By around
70 each formerly elite athlete was categorized into one of three general groups
– 9 who continued to train and race at a high duration, volume and intensity and
remained elite age groupers, 10 who continued frequent but moderately rigorous
endurance training and 2 who greatly reduced training to a low level.

What they found was that, compared with age 50, 1) all lost 10 to 14 bpm
of max heart rate, 2) the two more active groups maintained their age-50 body
weights but the low-level group gained 2 to 2.5% additional fat, 3) those who
lifted weights had greater bone density and 4) all, including the most active
groups, lost 8 to 15% of their aerobic capacities with the most active
experiencing the smallest decline. Of course, the number of subject here is
quite small, but the results are pretty similar across most of the research
I’ve read.

So
what can you do to maintain or even improve fitness and performance? What
drives the physiology of training for high performance when you are old is no different than what it was
when you were 40 years younger. The principles of training don’t change. What
changes is our capacity – physical and psychological – to handle the stresses
associated with focused and serious workouts. In the next post I’ll offer my
suggestions for what aging athletes can do to maintain or even improve
endurance performance.

References

Leyk D, Erley O, Gorges W, et al. 2009.
Performance, training and lifestyle parameters of marathon runners aged 20-80
years: results of the PACE-study. Int J
Sports Med 30(5):360-5.

Pollock ML, Mengelkoch LJ, Graves JE,
et al. 1997. Twenty-year follow-up of aerobic power and
body composition of older track athletes. J Appl Physiol 82(5):1508-16.

Aging: What's Behind the Decline?

There’s
no doubt that there is a loss
of athletic performance with aging. We will never see a
70-year-old athlete take gold in the Olympic Games marathon. Sports scientists
have offered several
reasons why age robs us of the ability to compete with young endurance
athletes at the highest level. In my last post I described a couple of studies
examining the loss of muscle mass as this is one of the commonly accepted
reasons for slowing down as we get older.

What’s
not fully understood is why muscles atrophy. We know that muscle fibers get
smaller and even seem to disappear later in life. It has to do with some
combination of the well-documented physiology of aging and the less understood changes
that typically occur in lifestyle resulting in our being less active as we get
older. How much of the loss of performance can be attributed to these two
variables – physiology and lifestyle – is open to speculation. Which causes the
greater drop in performance over the years? The research I described here on muscle and aging still
leaves the question unanswered.

But
many scientists have come to conclusion that the major contributor to the
decline is not really age, but rather lifestyle, especially a reduction in
strenuous activity. They believe the physiology-lifestyle balance is around
30-70. In other words, 70% of our lowered performance may be explained by
changes in lifestyle (training) with the changes due to aging accounting for
only 30%.

Besides
muscle wasting, there are other physical changes that science tells us to
expect as we get older. Perhaps we can find an answer as to what the balance is
between physiology and lifestyle as the root causes in one of them.

One other such critical marker of aging is aerobic capacity (VO2max). This is one of the most
studied markers of endurance performance. Perhaps we’ll find the answer here.

But
before getting into that, let’s review the big picture of what accounts for our
performance in endurance sports. Science tells us there are three physiological
predictors of your endurance performance regardless of age:

�* Aerobic capacity has to do with how much
oxygen you use per minute relative to your body weight when at a sustained, maximal workload. This intensity can be maintained for only a handful of minutes by
highly fit athletes. The greater the aerobic capacity, the greater the
likelihood you can produce a high level of performance.

�* Lactate threshold is the percentage of aerobic
capacity at which you begin to “redline” meaning that you start to experience
an increase in the acidity of muscles and body fluids. Highly fit athletes can
maintain this intensity for about an hour.

�* Economy measures how efficiently you
use oxygen to produce a given output (pace, speed, power). The greater the
economy, the less wasted oxygen (and energy) and therefore the better your
performance.

Of
these three, science tells us that the best marker of age-related performance
decline is aerobic capacity and secondarily lactate threshold while economy is
a distant third and seems to remain stable (Tanaka, Tanaka, Wiswell). That
economy would not be a good age-related performance predictor makes sense since
after decades of training and racing the movement patterns of older athletes
have become well-honed. So it’s aerobic capacity that we need to examine
closely to see what might be expected as the candles on the birthday cake
increase.

Aerobic
capacity is largely dependent on how much oxygen-carrying blood your
cardiovascular system can deliver to the muscles. So the starting point is your
heart’s stroke volume (how much blood is pumped per beat). Among the many other
aerobic capacity determiners are aerobic enzymes found in the muscles. Both of
these and a bunch of other aerobic capacity determiners – such as how elastic your
blood vessels are and how much red blood cell-building, natural levels of EPO
you produce – have been shown to decline with age.

Ok,
so aerobic capacity decreases as we get older. I can accept that. But by how
much, and more importantly, why? Let’s go back to the research to look for
answers.

There
is quite a bit of research on age and aerobic capacity. How come? I suppose it’s
because aerobic capacity is so easily measured in the lab (it’s been a common
procedure since the 1920s) and it doesn’t require invasive techniques such as taking
muscle biopsies or pricking the skin to draw blood (ouch!).

Since
VO2max testing has been so common for so long we now finally have some
longitudinal studies in which athletes are tested over several years to see how
their aerobic capacities change. This offers hope of finding the affect of
lifestyle on performance as distinct from the aging process. Let’s look at a
few such studies.

Research tells us that the decline has a lot to do with how active we are as we
get older. For example, a paper released in 2000 examined the combined affects
of age and activity level over time (Wilson). The researchers reviewed 242
studies on aging and VO2max involving 13,828 male subjects. Each of the
subjects was assigned to one of three groups based on how active they were:
sedentary, moderately active exercisers and endurance-trained runners. Aerobic
capacity was highest in the runners and lowest in the sedentary. No surprises
there. The aerobic capacity changes per decade of life were sedentary -8.7%, active
-7.3% and runners -6.8%. So if at age 30 a man had a VO2max of 60 and for the
next 30 years didn’t exercise and lived a “normal” life (sedentary) he could expect
his aerobic capacity at age 60 to be around 46. If moderately active it would
be about 48. And if he trained it would be in the neighborhood of 49. Those are
not significant changes.

But
the study further reports that the subjects who were “endurance-trained runners”
significantly decreased their volume (miles/kilometers run per week) and training
intensity as they got older. I’ve found that as a common practice with aging
athletes. There could be many reasons for this (which I’ll address in the
following post). So maybe it’s not simply working out that maintains aerobic
capacity and therefore, in part, race performances, but rather how much
training you do and how intensely you do it. This is an important lesson

That
aerobic capacity declines with aging and reduced training is not surprising.
I’ve mentioned “use it or lose it” several times in this on-going discussion. This
brings us back to the question of what the balance between age and lifestyle is
when it comes to performance.

Three
other reviews of the literature in the last decade or so examined the
relationship between aging and training status to figure out the relative
contributions of both (Hawkins, Wiswell, Young). They confirm that reductions
in training volume and intensity are primary contributors to the loss of
aerobic capacity with advancing age.

Let’s
dig a little deeper to find which is more important to the maintenance of
aerobic capacity with aging from a strictly training perspective – volume or
intensity. The answer may provide some insights into how to train as age sneaks
up on you – assuming you want to maintain, or at least slow, the drop in
performance which probably first becomes apparent in your 50s and greatly
accelerates somewhere beyond 70.

In
the 1970s a team of researchers at the University of Illinois measured the
aerobic capacities of 24 masters track runners who were 40 to 72 years old at
the time (Pollock). Ten years later they were retested. Over the decade all
continued to train but only 11 were still highly competitive. The other 13 quit
racing and decreased their training intensity. The competitive athletes
maintained their training intensities and, consequently, their aerobic
capacities. There was no significant change. The non-competitive, low-intensity
group lost about 12% of their aerobic capacities over 10 years.

So what’s the bottom line here? The research team led by Wilson showed
us that the changes in aerobic capacity with aging are not too different
between sedentary subjects and runners who
reduce their training. Several other studies also showed us that decreases
in training workload have a significant impact on aerobic capacity with the key
being intensity, according to the Pollock paper. When training intensity was
maintained by master runners over a 10-year period, aerobic capacity remained
unchanged. When training volume remained about the same but intensity
decreased, aerobic capacity dropped by an average of 1% per year.

That’s a clear message. It isn’t just exercising slowly for long periods
of time that keeps our performance, at least in terms of aerobic capacity, from
dropping rapidly; it’s primarily the intensity of the exercise that matters.
That raises new issues (problems?) that I’ll address in my next post.

References

Hawkins S, Wiswell R. 2003. Rate and mechanism of maximal oxygen consumption decline with aging:
implications for exercise training. Sports Med 33(12):877-88.

Pollock ML, Foster C, Knapp D, et al. 1987. Effect of age and training on aerobic capacity and body composition of
master athletes. J Appl Physiol 62(2):725-31.

Tanaka H, Seals DR. 2003. Invited review: Dynamic
exercise performance in masters athletes: insight into the effects of primary
human aging on physiological functional capacity. J Appl Physiol 95(5):2152-62.

Tanaka H, Seals DR. 2008. Endurance exercise
performance in masters athletes: age-associated changes and underlying
physiological mechanisms. J Physiol
586(1):55-63.

Wilson TM, Tanaka H. 2000. Meta-analysis of the
age-associated decline in maximal aerobic capacity in men: relation to training
status. Am J Physiol Heart Cric Physiol 278(3):H829-34.

Wiswell RA, Jaque V, Marcell TJ, et al. 2000. Maximal aerobic power,
lactate threshold, and running performance in master athletes. Med Sci Sports Exerc 32:1165-70.

Young BW, Medic N, Weir PL, Starkes JL.
2008. Explaining performance in elite middle-aged
runners: contributions from age and from ongoing and past training factors. J Sport Exerc
Psychol 30(6):737-54.

Aging: What’s Happening to My Muscles?

Scientists who study aging have been telling us for years that we can
expect a loss of muscle mass as we get older. We’re simply destined to lose muscle
fibers, especially type II fibers – the fast twitch ones (Deschenes, Iannuzzi-Sucich,
Karakelides, Proctor, Short,
Wilkes). We are told to expect about a 40% to 50% loss by age 80 (Doherty, Faulkner,
Karakelides, Lemmer). Depressing for someone of my advanced age (69).

Several more recent studies, however, are now concluding that the
changes with aging reported in such research are largely the result of disuse
and not as much due to the ravages of age as previously believed (AAgaard, Maharam,
Melov). How is it that science is finally coming to this conclusion? By
measuring what’s happening with older masters athletes who continue to compete
and comparing them with young athletes and with the oldsters’ sedentary age
peers.

For example, Wroblewski compared athletes aged 40 to 81 in a cross-sectional
study and found that although body fat increased with age, quadriceps muscle
mass and strength were similar across all ages. All of the subjects, regardless
of age, trained four or five times weekly as runners, swimmers, cyclists or
triathletes. Use it or lose it. Right?

Of course, the confounding element in cross-sectional studies such as this is that the
older athletes may have self-selected. In other words, perhaps they didn’t
maintain their muscle mass because they were athletes, but rather they were
athletes because they maintained their muscle mass. Those who couldn’t maintain
muscle mass with age may have quit their sport or never even started such
strenuous activities. So the research still leaves us wondering.

It could be inevitable that you will eventually lose some muscle, but it
may be insignificant for decades if the more recent research is to be accepted
at face value. The most common reason given for this happening is a decrease in
the body’s production of anabolic (muscle- and tissue-building) hormones such
as testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor. But
then exercise is anabolic also – it may help us hold onto muscle as we get
older by slowing the demise of these hormones (Arazi, Kraemer, Cadore).

The accompanying pictures of the cross-sectional areas of three people of
different ages illustrate this belief (Wroblewski). These MRIs compare the
thigh muscles of two male triathletes at ages 40 and 70 with those of a
sedentary 74-year-old male. Note the atrophied muscles and surrounding fat on
the thighs of the sedentary man and how similar the muscle mass of the two
triathletes are regardless of age. Is this what we can expect? These pictures
made the rounds on the internet about a year ago and lend support to the idea
that remaining active through strenuous
exercise may well be the best thing you can do to hang on to your muscle mass
as you age.

One of the authors of this study believes that aging accounts for only
about 30% of the decline in athletes (Wright), whereas most cross-sectional
studies of sedentary older people place 50% to 70% – or more – of the blame on
age alone. Could exercise keep your muscles young?

A couple of recent, unique studies from the University of Western
Ontario lend support to the “use it or lose it” concept (Power, Power). The
researchers counted the number of motor units in both young and old subjects. A
motor unit is a group of muscle fibers activated by a single nerve in the
spine. With aging (or is it disuse?) those nerves die and their associated
muscle fibers atrophy. And so we lose muscle size, strength and power. This has
been known for quite a long time with aging rats. But how about with people? The
initial Power’s study done in 2010 was the first to examine this phenomenon in
humans.

Basically, the researchers found that we’re quite similar to rats in
this respect. Runners in their 60s had about the same number of motor units in
their tibialis anterior (a shin muscle) as runners in their 20s. But when they
counted the motor units in sedentary but healthy people also in their 60s the
scientists discovered the inactive older folks had 35% fewer motor units than
the same-age runners. Essentially, the old runners had young leg muscles.

The Canadian researchers logically wondered if this finding meant that
all the muscle motor units in an aging runner’s body were maintained, or just
the running-related motor units? So in a similar follow-up study they counted motor
units in the biceps brachii (upper arm) of aging runners, young runners and
aging sedentary. They found that the older runners had about 48% fewer motor
units than the young runners and about the same as the older sedentary.
Apparently, exercise does not maintain muscles unless they are strenuously
trained. So there is now little doubt – use it or lose it. Right?

But, again, could this result could be the consequence of who the
subjects were? After all, it was a cross-sectional study. The subjects may have
self-selected. People who maintained their motor units may have continued to
compete into old age while those who didn’t maintain them dropped out of sport at a much younger age.
I wish we could take a look at some longitudinal studies of aging to see if these
results hold true when athletes are followed for several years. Unfortunately,
such research is lacking.

So it still comes down to opinion. Mine is that the existing research is
probably accurate and that while aging has some affect on muscles mass, the
greater cause of the decline is more than likely lack of use – an increasingly
sedentary lifestyle as we get older. I see this even in master athletes. The
older they become, the less strenuous their training.

In the next post I’ll take a look at sport science’s somewhat depressing view of aerobic
capacity (VO2max) and aging. Then we’ll move on to what I think the solutions
may be for maintaining (or even improving) muscle mass, VO2max and performance as we get older. I know
some won’t like my conclusions. Everyone is entitled to an opinion when we
have little in the way of data. 

References

AAgaard P, Svetta C, Caserotti P, et al. 2010. Role
of the nervous system in sarcopenia and muscle atrophy with aging: strength
training as a countermeasure. Scand J Med
Sci Sports 20(1):49-64.

Arazi H, Damirchi A, Asadi
A. 2013. Age-related hormonal adaptations, muscle circumference and strength
development with 8 weeks moderate intensity resistance training. Ann
Endocrinol (Paris) 74(1):30-5.

Cadore EL, Lhullier FL, Brentano MA, et al. 2008. Hormonal responses to resistance exercise in
long-term trained and untrained middle-aged men. J Strength Cond Res 22(5):1617-24.

Deschenes MR. 2004. Effects of aging on muscle fibre type and size. Sports Med
34(12):809-24.

Doherty TJ. 2003. Invited review: aging and sarcopenia. J Appl Physiol 95(4):1717-27.

Faulkner JA, Davis CC, Mendias CL, Brooks SV. 2008. The aging of elite
male athletes: age-related changes in performance and skeletal muscle structure
and function. Clin J Sport Med
18(6):501-7.

Greenlund LJ, Nair KS. 2003. Sarcopenia--consequences, mechanisms, and potential therapies. Mech Ageing Dev 124(3):287-99.

Iannuzzi-Sucich M, Prestwood KM, Kenny AM. 2002. Prevalence of sarcopenia and predictors of skeletal muscle mass in
healthy, older men and women. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci 57(12):M772-7.

Karakelides H, Nair KS. 2005. Sarcopenia of
aging and its metabolic impact. Curr
Top Dev Biol 68:123-48.

Kraemer WJ, Hakkinen
K, Newton RU, et al. 1999. Effects
of heavy-resistance training on hormonal response patterns in younger vs. older
men. J
Appl Physiol 87(3):982-92.

Lemmer JT, Hurlburt DE, Martel TBL, et al. 2003. Age and gender
responses to strength training and detraining. Med Sci Sports Exerc 32:1505-12.

Maharam LG, Bauman PA, Kalman D, et al. 1999. Masters athletes: Factors
affecting performance. Sports Med
28(4):273-85.

Melov S, Tarnopolsky MA, Beckman K, et al. 2007. Resistance exercise
reveres aging in human skeletal muscle. PLOS
One 2(5):e465.

Power GA, Dalton BH, Behm DG, et al. 2010. Motor unit number estimates
in masters runners: Use it or lose it? Med
Sci Sports Exerc 42(9):1644-50.

Power GA, Dalton BH, Behm DG, et al. 2012. Motor unit number survival in
lifelong runners is muscle dependent. Med
Sci Sports Exerc 44(7):1235-42.

Proctor DN, Balagopal P, Nair KS. 1998. Age-related sarcopenia in humans is associated with reduced synthetic
rates of specific muscle proteins. J Nutr 128(2 Suppl):351S-355S.

Short KR, Nair KS. 1999. Mechanisms
of sarcopenia of aging. J Endocrinol Invest 22(5 Suppl):95-105.

Wilkes EA, Selby AL, Atherton PJ, et al. 2009. Blunting of insulin
inhibition of proteolysis in legs of older subjects may contribute to
age-related sarcopenia. Am J Clin Nutr
90(5):1343-50.

Wright VJ. 2012. Masterful care of the aging triathlete. Sports Med Arthrosc 20(4):231-6.

Wroblewski AP, Amati F, Smiley MA, et al. 2011. Chronic exercise
preserves lean muscle mass in masters athletes. Phys Sports Med 39(3):172-78.

Aging: More on Science

The
traditional advice from the medical community is that older people (usually
meaning age 50 and up) should avoid strenuous exercise. Instead, once we reach
that doddering age, we should walk – not too fast, mind you – work in the
garden and, at most, square dance on occasion or participate in water aerobics
classes.

I
suspect that since you are reading blog that you don’t listen to such advice.
Your parents may have, but not you.

If
you’re on the AARP mailing list then you are helping to redefine the
expectations of aging by training and competing at a high level. Fifty-plus Boomers,
as a whole, are more active and fit than their parents were at age 20. Why the
change? That’s way beyond the scope of this post, but I suspect it has
something to do, in part, with people such as Kenneth Cooper, David Costill, Frank
Shorter, Albert Salazar, Mark Spitz, Julie Moss, Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Greg
Lemond, Gary Fisher, Jacquie Phelan and other endurance-sport trend setters and
athletes from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The rise in popularity,
at least in the US, of fitness, running, swimming, triathlon, road cycling and
mountain biking can be traced to such people. The change didn’t come from
science.

Sport
science has a poor record when it comes to leadership. It almost always lags
behind the most obvious changes that happen in sport. For example, sport
science didn’t come up with the Fosbury Flop high jump technique, but later on
explained why it was so much more effective than the previous eastern and
western roll methods (the jumper’s center of gravity passes under the bar
rather than over it). Now all high jumpers do the Flop. Sport science didn’t
invent the bicycle aerobars. That was the brainchild of a Montana ski coach by
the name of Boone Lennon. Sport science later reported on why they worked so
well (they greatly reduced drag caused by the body which is the greatest
impediment to going fast on a bike). I’ll bet you have some in your garage and
wouldn’t think of doing a time trial or triathlon without them. And the list of
things sport science learned about after the fact could go on and on. It’s rare
when science leads the way on anything.

There
are rare exceptions. Training periodization came from sport scientists in the
Eastern Bloc countries in the early 20th century based on the work
of scientists such as Tudor Bompa, PhD of Romania. But he was also a coach. More recently we’ve seen the
development of power data analysis tools (WKO+ and TrainingPeaks.com) from the American sport
scientist Andrew Coggan, PhD. Of course, he's also an athlete - road cyclist. There’s no doubt that such contributions to sport
have had a significant impact on how athletes train. But such breakthroughs
aren’t common. It’s largely athletes and coaches, not scientists, who do the innovating.

And
so we come back to aging and how athletes are revising the way we think about
“old” people.

In
my last post here I listed some of the
performance-detracting consequences of aging that sport science has identified for
us. It’s rather demoralizing – and this is only a partial list:

Declining
VO2max
Reduced
maximal heart rate
Decreased
volume of blood pumped with each heart beat
Lowered
lactate threshold
Less
economical movement resulting in wasted energy
A
decrease in muscle fibers and strength
Less
effective and less abundant aerobic enzymes
Reduced
blood volume
Decreased
growth hormone production
Loss
of muscle mass

With sport science’s record of lagging behind sport in general it’s no
wonder that we should question their conclusions. There’s little doubt,
however, that our physiology changes as we get older. The issue is, by how
much? I’ll examine some of the above age-related changes in the next post.

Aging: Research

In
the last five posts here I’ve been examining the effects of aging on my
training, racing and life in general (vision, recovery, more on recovery and vision, race weight, performance). It appears that I’m starting to realize the consequences of 69 years of
living. Due in part to my level of physical activity for most of those nearly seven decades I’ve seen very little reason to be concerned about my decline. It’s
been minimal to non-existent. But as I explained in my last post on performance, the changes seem to be accelerating this year as I approach my 70 birthday in
a couple of months. Or are they? It’s hard to see the forest for the trees. I’m
sure it will be a year or more until I know for sure. But for right now I’m
focused on understanding what’s happening and doing my best to control the rate
of decline.

So
what is it that happens to athletes as we age? There is a ton of research on
this topic, some better than others. There are two types of studies you find when searching the
scientific literature. The most common are called “cross-sectional” studies.
These examine two groups of subjects – one “older” group (the researchers are
kind in never referring to us as “old”) and a group of young athletes. They
typically assign these groups so that gender, body size, training and other variables are
similar. Then they simply measure the physiological differences between the two
groups and assume the differences are the result of aging. These studies are relatively easy to do because, for one thing, they don’t take
much time. The study can be completed in a few weeks time.

The
other type of aging study is “longitudinal.” This is the gold standard. A group
of athletes is studied over time, often for several years or even decades, to see
what happens to them physiologically speaking. Cross-sectional studies are
hugely dependent on how the subjects were selected (was a key element of change
unaccounted for when selecting the subjects, such as lifestyle or diet or
smoking or type of work or even culture?). Something overlooked could account
for much of the change and have little or nothing to with aging. That would
render the results useless in trying to understand what happens to athletes as
they age.

On
the other hand, in longitudinal studies the independent variables are just a
part of life and can be assumed to help account, at least in part, for the
physiological changes taking place over time. They sometimes become obvious
predictors of change, such as reducing training load or stopping training
altogether. The data is more reliable since it’s real people living real lives as we follow their progress.
The downside of these studies is that the researchers must invest years and
years into following the subjects (people move, become difficult to reach and even die) and
measuring the changes the athletes experience in their lives. It may be 10 or
20 years – or even longer – until the study is completed, and there’s no
guarantee it will be published then.

So,
with all of this in mind, what does the research say we should experience as we
become “older” endurance athletes? Here’s a partial shopping list of changes as
revealed in some of the research:

Declining VO2max
Reduced maximal heart rate
Decreased volume of blood
pumped with each heart beat
Lowered lactate threshold
Less economical movement
resulting in wasted energy
A decrease in muscle fibers
and strength
Less effective and less
abundant aerobic enzymes
Reduced blood volume
Loss of muscle mass

There’s more, but that’s
enough to make you want to avoid birthday parties. Incidentally, not all of the
research agrees on all of the above results of aging.

Which of these do I seem to
be experiencing now? Is there anything that can be done to delay and reduce the
negative changes? I’ll address that in my coming posts. Stay tuned.

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and warm Mallorca in the Mediterranean off the
southern coast of Spain, 15-22 March 2014. The training is great and I‘ll guarantee you’ll
come away a fitter and smarter athlete. Go here for details.

Aging: My Performance

I’ve got training logs that go back to the 1970s when I
first started recording my workouts. My heart rate data started in 1983, power in
1995. I had intended to go back and review all of that before sitting down to
write this. But last weekend we flew to Lucca, Italy, where I am now. Preparing
to leave is always a hassle. But being gone from my office for two months meant
getting a lot done before the trip. I never got around to checking my training
records, so much of what follows is based on memory. And it seems the older I
get, the better I used to be.

Things appear to be changing this year. I’m not sure if it’s
my age that’s behind it, just an aberration, or the inevitable circumstances of
a busy life in 2013 with lots of travel. Of course, it could be some
combination of all of these – and more. Regardless, it’s disturbing and has me
wondering.

By “changing” I mean I’ve become less powerful. And it seems
like it happened all of a sudden. In March I tested my Functional Threshold
Power (FTP) and it was right where it has been for the last six springs when I first
started testing this marker of performance. This was done in Scottsdale, Ariz.
where I spend my winters. My summers are in Boulder. My power is always
considerably lower in the latter due to the altitude. And sure enough, my FTP
was where it always is in the first few weeks after arriving at 5500 feet –
down about 8% from Scottsdale where I live at around 1800 feet.

Usually, around a month into my adaptation to the higher
altitude about half of the lost watts come back. By the end of the summer when
I’m ready to head south to Scottsdale, my FTP in Boulder is about
what it was at the lower altitude in March. Then when I get back to the
lower altitude I see my peak FTP for the season.

But not this year. Things were different. My FTP in Boulder
never rose. It stayed at the -8% decrement all summer. And when I got back to
Scottsdale, it didn’t come up – at all. To add to the concerns, my sprint power
is the lowest it’s been since I started testing it. Could these changes be the
first signs of age catching up with me?

For many years my FTP and sprint have been about the same
with only seasonal or environmental (altitude in Boulder, summer heat in
Scottsdale) shifts. My power for specific types of workouts, especially
intervals and tempo rides (here’s the questionable memory part), has changed
very little since 1995. As a 50-something rider I was slightly above average
at, for example, time trials and climbing back then. Fifteen years later I’m a
much better-than-average senior rider for TTs and hills. I don’t think I improved;
my age peers just slowed down more. But now I may be catching up with them, it
seems.

Of course, we are all going to have reduced athletic performance in
endurance sports as we age. It’s inevitable. But we really don’t expect to see it happen - ever. And when it does, as I seem to be experiencing this
year, it’s a bit frightening.

How much of a change should we expect? And when?

There was a great study that came out of Boise State
University in 2009 – “Masters Athletes: An Analysis of Running, Swimming and
Cycling Performance by Age and Gender” (Ransdell). The problem with most
studies on athletes and aging is that they look at broad cross sections of various
age categories by gender. That means they are comparing a wide range of
abilities – front to back of pack – with motivation having a lot to do with
performance. Some people simply aren’t motivated to train. And as the number of
participants in endurance sports increases, the percentage of those who could
not care less about performance and are only doing it for social reasons is
likely to increase. That waters down the data so that we really don’t know what
the true impact of age on performance is likely to be.

The authors of the Ransdell study examined only current US
and World record holders by age groups in three sports – swimming, running, and
cycling. That means we are now able to better understand what happens when
motivation to train and compete is taken out of the equation leaving only age
and gender as the modifiers of performance.

The following three charts are based on data from this
study. While the scientists looked at several event distances within each
sport, I’ve selected out only the longest and most common, long-endurance
distances – 1500m swim, marathon, and 40k time trial. On the left side of each
chart (the X axis) are the times of the records and across the bottom (Y axis)
are the age groups. The charts aren’t terribly precise but give us a good look
at trends.

Note from these charts that in the age groups from 50-59 there is a
slight decrease in performance with it being greatest in swimming (the times get slower as indicated by rising
lines). Women’s performances tend to decline even faster than the men’s,
especially in running. Swimming shows the least gender-related decline.

These findings are roughly in agreement with other papers
that also studied elite age-group athletes. For example, Wright and Perricelli
looked at the performances of senior Olympians (50+) in the 2001 National
Senior Olympic Games. Both male and female performances declined by about 3 to
4% per year from age 50 to 85, but at a great rate after age 75.

Tanaka and Seals looked at US Masters Swimming Championship
results from 1991 to 1995. They found a steady decline in performance until
about age 70 when times started declining at an exponential rate. The declines
were greater in women than in men.

Many other researchers have found similar rates of decrease
in elite master-athlete performances at national championships in swimming
(Donato, Fairbrother) and triathlon (Lepers). In the triathlon paper Ironman
age group performances declined faster than for those doing Olympic-distance
races. I’ll get to the assumed reason why from the authors in an upcoming post
here.

So it appears we can expect to slow down significantly some
time in our 50s and experience the greatest negative rates of change in our 70s
and beyond. (Want to guess what my next birthday will be? Right. 70.) The key
questions are, why are these changes taking place and what can be done to slow
them? That’s what I’ll take a look at in my next three posts.

 

References

Donatao AJ,
Tench K, Glueck DH, Seals DR, Eskurza I, Tanaka H. 2003. Declines in
Physiological Functional Capacity with Age: A Longitudinal Study in Peak
Swimming Performance. J Appl Physiol
94(2):764-9.

Fairbrother JT.
2007. Prediction of 1500-m Freestyle Swimming Times for Older Masters
All-American Swimmers. Exp Aging Res
33(4):461-71.

Lepers R,
Sultana F, Bernard T, Hausswirth C, Brisswalter J. 2010. Age-Related Changes in
Triathlon Performances. Int J Sports Med
31(4):251-6.

Ransdell LB,
Vener J, Huberty J. 2009. Masters Athletes: An Analysis of Running, Swimming
and Cycling Performance by Age and Gender. J
Exerc Sci Fit 7(2):S61-S73.

Tanaka H, Seals
DR. 1997. Age and Gender Interactions in Physiological Functional Capacity:
Insight from Swimming Performance. J Appl
Physiol 82(3):846-51.

Wright VY,
Perricelli BC. 2008. Age-Related Rates of Decline in Performance Among Elite
Senior Athletes. Am J Sports Med
36(3):443-50.

Aging: My Race Weight

I’ve always considered my racing weight to be 154 pounds
(70kg). Why? That’s what I weighed when I was 18 years old. Over the years my
out-of-season weight has gradually climbed. In my 30s and 40s I had no trouble staying
around 154 pounds year round. In the following decade it rose to the high 150s.
In my 60s it would climb to the mid-160s in the winter. I had to very careful
with how much I ate. I viewed weight management as calories in vs. calories out
(more on that shortly).

What I’m going to describe here is the changes I’ve made in
my diet in the past year and what the results have been both for body weight
and performance. Not all can expect the same results from dietary changes.
These are quite individualized. So please realize that I am not telling you or
anyone else how to deal with body weight issues. In fact, I usually avoid
talking or writing about either nutrition or weight. Both are hot button issues
for a lot of people and for some unknown reason produce emotional reactions. I
get angry emails from people whenever I write about either. It always amazes me
that there is such a reaction. I’m afraid some get nutrition and religion
confused. Both are generally belief-based systems. I much prefer to work with
data rather than belief. So that’s what I’m going to describe here.

With that caveat out of the way, let’s get back to racing
weight and age.

Why do we commonly gain weight as we age?

The following excerpt is from the book, Why
We Get Fat by Gary Taubes and may help to explain
what’s going as we age.

“One reason men get fatter above the
waist as they age is that they secrete less testosterone, a male sex hormone, and
testosterone suppresses LPL [an enzyme – lipoprotein lipase] activity on the
abdominal fat cells. Less testosterone means more LPL activity on the fat cells
of the gut, and so more fat.

In women, the activity of LPL is high on
the fat cells below the waist, which is why they tend to fatten around the hips
and butt, and low on the fat cells of the gut. After menopause, the LPL
activity in women’s abdominal fat catches up to that of men, and so they tend
to put on excess fat there, too.”

 So, back to my personal battle with about 10 pounds of
annual fat gain. Last fall I started following Tim Noakes on Twitter. He’s the
author of The Lore of Running and several other excellent books. It just so happens that Noakes was also
dealing with a weight gain issue as he aged into his 60s. He’s a runner. He had
discovered a solution and tweeted about it frequently. In fact, he still does
(you can follow him on Twitter at @proftimnoakes). He simply adopted a
low-carb, high-fat diet (LCHF). It’s not like this was his invention. LCHF has
been around for well over a century (you can read his brief summary of this way
of eating in his new book Challenging
Beliefs). I
decided to give a try.

At first, I was a bit reluctant to do it for several reasons
which I’ll get to soon, but I’ve always used myself as a lab rat when it comes
to new ideas. I’ve discovered some interesting things this way of which I
originally was skeptical. That’s largely how the training methodology I
describe in my Training Bible books came about. I just tried new stuff I heard
of from other athletes, coaches and sports scientists. This is how I came to
eat a Paleo diet and why I now place my bike cleats
at the midsole.

So why was I a bit reluctant to give LCHF a try? Well, for
one I was concerned about my training and racing. Would my glycogen stores be
low? Might that mean poor performance? Also, we’ve been told by the US government,
the medical profession and nutritionists since the 1970s that dietary fat
causes coronary artery disease. And in my world (I enjoy racing well and
being alive!) these were big concerns. So I began to read anything I could find
on these topics. I’m not going to go into all of these here as it’s now been 10
months of almost daily reading of online articles, books and research. (If interested
in an introduction to these topics I’d suggest reading The Art of and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance and Good Calories, Bad Calories  as starting points.)

After initially reading both sides of the issues, I decided
to give it a try. The bottom line is that last fall I lost 8 pounds in 9 weeks
by eating more fat and less carbohydrate. That was 5% of my body weight (160
pounds – at the time I was well on my way to my normal winter weight). I was
never hungry. In fact, it seemed like the more fat I ate, the more weight I
lost.

I learned that weight loss is not just calories in vs
calories out. I used to lose weight that way. It works in the short term. When it was time to
lose weight in the base period I’d workout, estimate the calories burned and
not quite replace all of them. But there is an obvious downside. Not replacing
the calories means you are hungry - a lot. So in order to lose excess fat by
relying on not replacing expended calories, I had to be willing to put up with
hunger. This isn’t easy for me or anyone else. But I used to view it as one of
the “sacrifices” I must make to perform well. As soon as the race season ended and
I abandoned frequent hunger the weight would slowly come back. Hunger is not
pleasant. There is a limit to how long I could put up with it.

What I learned from all of this is that weight loss can also
be achieved by changing the foods I eat. Hunger does not have to be an issue.
This is where LCHF comes in. It has to do with insulin production and also with
something called “insulin resistance” in more extreme cases than mine. (I’m not
going to go into the physiology of insulin here as that’s a bit outside of the
scope of this post. But if you want to read the details go here and here.)   

The primary change I made was greatly reducing sugar and cutting
back on fruit. I used to eat 5 to 7 servings of fruit a day. That’s roughly 600
calories of carbs from fruit, about 20 to 25% of my calories for the day. I now eat less
than one serving per day on average. Foods high in fat I now eat a lot more of
are olive oil, coconut milk, nuts, nut butter, eggs, avocado, and bacon along
with the normal Paleo foods I’ve eaten since 1994 — animal products, especially
fish and poultry, and vegetables. Foods high in fat I eat only a little of are
dairy products. I avoid as best I can trans fats (“hydrogenated” on the label)
and omega 6 oils (for example, soy, peanut, cottonseed, corn, safflower). Both
categories are found in almost all processed and packaged foods in the grocery,
especially junk foods. I seldom eat grains — probably less than one serving per
month. I once used these as recovery foods on an almost daily basis.

So what’s happened to my training and performance since the
switch to LCHF?

During rides I take in only water unless it lasts longer
than 4 hours. In that case I will carry a sports drink in one bottle and save
it for the latter portion of the workout. I typically do intervals of various
intensities both above and below the lactate threshold, tempo, and aerobic
endurance sessions. These are all less than 3 hours. Water only. In the summer
I do rides well in excess of 3 hours in the mountains of Colorado with Intensity Factors generally between 75 and 85%. I’ve done rides of greater than 5 hours several
times this summer at 70 to 80% taking in no more than a few ounces of a sports
drink. There has been no bonking, unusual fatigue or loss of performance from how
I’ve done in the past when I was taking in a lot of sports drink.

So what’s going on? Apparently my body has adapted to using
more fat for fuel thus sparing glycogen since my diet changed back in October.
In exercise physiology terms this would be called a lowered respiratory
quotient (RQ).

I should point out that eating a LCHF diet has not directly
improved my performance. I’m not faster now than I was before. This is common
in the research I’ve read on the topic. What it has improved is getting to and
staying at race weight without calorie counting or hunger.

Of course, what’s missing in my recent experience is long
road races with lots of deeply anaerobic efforts with each lasting several
seconds to a few minutes. I’ve not been able to do any such races this year (a long
story that has to do with my annual pilgrimage from Arizona to Colorado every
summer). It could well be that my top end power in frequent max efforts during
a race won’t be sustainable on this diet. Such efforts are typically the determiners
of road race and criterium outcomes. But I don’t see any downsides for steady
state events done at or below the lactate threshold. This would include non-drafting
triathlon, road running, and time trialing.

Will this work for you? I can’t say. There are simply too
many variables when it comes to the metabolic systems of individuals. All I’ve
done is an experiment with 1 subject – me. And, obviously, there was no control
or double blind administration. There’s only one other person who has tried it
along with me – a friend of many years, Bill Cofer. Bill is a 65-year-old, serious
recreational cyclist who has been trying to shed more than 30 pounds for the
last 20-some years by restricting calories. He started a LCHF diet in February
and has so far dropped 27 pounds. His experience with hunger and refueling in
workouts has been much the same as mine.

Okay, so now I have n=2. But again, that doesn’t mean you
should expect the same results.

This post is not intended as a general guideline for all
aging athletes on “how to lose weight” or “how to improve performance.” It is
simply a description of something that seems to have been working for me for
about 10 months. I’ve still got a lot of learning to do on this subject.

As always, your comments on personal experiences with an
LCHF diet would be greatly appreciated.

Aging: Update on Recovery and Vision

It seems there is never enough time to do all I want to do.
By the time I watch the Tour de France, work out a few hours, answer emails (it
seems that is what I mostly do these days), and other stuff I can’t always
account for, there is not enough time left to devote to things I enjoy such as
writing. I expect you have the same problem. I thought when I cut back on
working (I’m now retired from full-time coaching—more on that at another time)
that there would be more free time. Ain’t so.

Back to Recovery

Speaking of aging, I was in the mountain community of
Breckinridge, Colorado on the July Fourth holiday weekend. While there it
dawned on me that there is another aspect of my recovery I didn’t mention in my
last post on the topic. 

My family drove up to Breck on the afternoon of July 3. That
morning I did my normal Wednesday workout in Boulder: 2 x 25-minute hill climbs
on a 9% grade at about 90% of FTP followed by 8 to 12 minutes of short,
anaerobic endurance intervals at 120% of FTP. These latter intervals are also
on a hill, but not as steep. With warm-up and cool down the session lasts about
2.5 hours. It pretty well leaves me wasted for a day or so.

What struck me while in Breck was that two days after the workout,
despite riding easily and sleeping and eating well, I was still not even close
to being recovered. That’s unusual. Then it dawned on me: I was living and
sleeping at about 9600 feet (3100m) and my “easy” rides had taken me to over
11,000 feet (3600m). You simply don’t recover as quickly at such altitudes.

The same is true when back in Boulder, where I spend my
summers. Our home here is about 5200 feet (1680m). That altitude also has
negative consequences for recovery and makes sleep, nutrition and everything
else I do to hasten recovery even more important. There’s an obvious difference
to how much training stress I can manage here as compared with Scottsdale,
Ariz. where we stay in the winter – 1800 feet (580m). In Boulder I can manage
only two high-stress workouts per week. In Scottsdale it’s usually three and
even four when in the base period.

The aerobic-enhancement advantage of living at a high
altitude may well be offset by the slower recovery and decreased power
production of all workouts. (What I’ve learned about how to modify training at
altitude is a another topic for a future post.)

Also of interest on this topic of aging and recovery are the
comments that older athletes have posted and the emails I have received from
others in the past two weeks. Most have agreed that they also have experienced
a slowing of their recovery rate as they age. The most common solutions they
report using are decreasing the total weekly workload and allowing more time
for recovery between challenging workouts. Please continue to give me your
thoughts on this.

And My Aging Eyes

I guess this could be called an ad for one of my sponsors,
but it’s warranted. I managed to break my every-day glasses last week. And I
only brought one pair with me from Scottsdale. That made driving at night,
going to movies and watching TV a bit challenging. So I asked ADS Sports Eyewear, which I
mentioned in a previous post on this topic, to make some replacement glasses with clear lenses for me using the same frame
as they used for my prescription Oakley sunglasses. I had them in a week and I’m happy to now have my vision back. They’re fast
and the quality is excellent. Thanks ADS!

Moving On

The next topic I want to write about is another common one
for aging athletes: weight gain. I hope to do that as soon as I get caught up
with email.

Aging: My Recovery

When I was
in college around 50 years ago (wow, am I really that old?) I was a runner on
the track team. The coach used to have us do what I now call "Anaerobic
Endurance" intervals 3 to 5 times each week. Back then I called them
"intervals 'til you puke." Because that's basically what we did.

We'd warm-up
on our own and then the coach would blow his whistle. That meant we were to jog
over to where he was sitting in the stands next to the start-finish line on the
track. He looked a bit like Buddha with a whistle, stopwatch and can of Coke.
We knew what was next: 440-yard intervals (we didn't have metric tracks back
then) with short recoveries. We never knew how many we were going to do, how
fast we should run them (other than "as fast as possible"), how to
pace them or how long the recoveries were going to be. We may wind up doing a
dozen or 15 or 7. Nobody knew, not even the coach. When people started throwing
up he'd give us a longer recovery and only a couple more intervals. We always hoped
that someone would toss their cookies so we could get it over with as soon as
possible. That's sports science 50 years ago.

Interesting
thing was, in my youth I could do that workout night after night for days and
even weeks with only 2 days of recovery in a week (no one trained on the
weekends back then). And I would be ready to go hard again the next day. Today
if I tried to do 3 to 5 AE interval workouts ('til I puked!) in a single week
I'd soon be totally wasted and by the third back-to-back interval day my
performance would be going rapidly south. The fourth or fifth such session (if
I managed to even start them) would be a joke. There's simply no way I could do
that workout day after day now.

In fact,
this is what I hear from nearly every aging athlete I talk with about getting
old. There is little in the way of research on this, especially with truly
“old” athletes, by which I mean over age 55. But one study from a few years ago
compared the perceptions of 9 older (45 +/-6 years) and 9 younger (24 +/-5
years) well-trained athletes (1). All of the subjects did 3 consecutive days of
30 minute time trials. Each reported their subjective measures of soreness,
fatigue and recovery daily. While there were no significant changes in
performance over the 3 days for the subjects in either group, the older
athletes reported significantly higher levels of soreness and fatigue and lower
levels of recovery.

One study
isn’t much in the way of evidence, but based on what I’ve experienced and what
older athletes tell me, it seems to be the case. We simply don't recover as
quickly as we did when younger. And it seems getting everything dialed in just
right is increasingly critical to our recovery. The two most critical are sleep
and nutrition--as they are for all athletes. It's just that when you are young
you can mess these up and still get away with it. In college I'd stay up most
of the night studying, eat crappy food, and still manage to do "puke
intervals" several times a week with little degradation in performance.

The
few studies I can find on the topic of nutrition, recovery and aging, indicate
that older athletes may need more protein in recovery than do younger ones
(2,3). This implies that there may be a reduced need for carbohydrate during
recovery. In fact another study found that healthy, elderly men (non-athletes)
had a reduced capacity to oxidize carbs and an increased capacity to use fat
for fuel (4). Whether or not this also applies to athletes is currently open
for conjecture.

I've been
doing some tinkering with my nutrition in the last 8 months and the results have been
really interesting. I'm going to devote an entire post to that soon, so won't
touch on it now. Whatever you've found works well for you when it comes to diet
simply can't be compromised as you get older. Only a few aging athletes who are truly unique can continue eating lots of junk food and still perform at a high level
well into their 50s, 60s and 70s. I've certainly found that I can't.

Sleep is an
interesting phenomenon. In college I could sleep 10 to 12 hours straight on a
weekend regardless of whether I was in-season and training hard or not.  Now it seems I only need 6 to 7 hours a night
regardless of training. It's rare that I sleep more than 7. I don't know what's
going on here, but I've had a few other senior athletes also tell me this. But
it's got to be every night. I can’t
miss a few hours of sleep like I used to and still perform well.

I know of
some older athletes who swear napping is successful for them. I don't doubt
them at all, but it seems there is no way to fit that into my lifestyle.
Something would have to change. Maybe you can do. It's probably a good thing.

So that's
the Big Two for recovery--sleep and nutrition.

I've also
tried lots of stuff beyond those two to speed recovery. Some have helped a
little (compression socks, elevating legs, massage, cold water immersion, and
some new recovery products such as Firefly and Barefooter shoes). Of course, when the change is barely perceptible I always
wonder if it's a placebo effect or "real." The only thing I've found
that seems to have a significant
impact on speeding up my recovery from hard workouts is “Recovery Boots.”
 (That’s my granddaughter, Keara, demo’ing the Boots in this picture.)

I got these
two years ago and, as always, was somewhat skeptical at first (it’s a good idea
to be skeptical of everything as we motivated athletes tend to buy
any snake oil that comes along if we think it may give us a slight edge). But
that never stops me from trying something. (I like to use myself as a lab rat,
as you’ll see in my next blog post.) I was soon convinced. I use them after all
hard workouts and races now. Typically, I spend an hour in them in the evening
after a high workload day. They are a bit like the combination of massage and
compression garments. They slowly inflate starting at the foot and ankle, next
apply pressure up the lower leg, then the knee and lower thigh, and finish with
the upper thigh. The pressure is released and it starts over again. By the next day my legs are noticeably more recovered than
when I don't use them (which happens when I travel). Again, is it placebo? I
don't know but I'm unwilling to go without them for several days to find out.

I'd be
interested in hearing what other older (50+) athletes have found works for them
when it comes to recovery.  Please feel
free to post a comment here. I've been thinking about writing a book on this
subject, so any ideas and leads I can get from you would be much appreciated.
Thanks.

1. Fell J,
Reaburn P, Harrison GJ. 2008. Altered perception and report of fatigue and
recovery in veteran athletes. J Sports
Med Phy Fitness, 48(2):272-7.

2. Thompson
LV. 2002. Skeletal muscle adaptations with age in activity and therapeutic
exercise. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther,
32(2):44-57.

3. Dorrens
J, Rennie MJ. 2003. Effects of ageing and human whole body and muscle protein
turnover. Scand J Med Sci Sports,
13(1):26-33.

4. Krishnan
RK, Evans WJ, Kirwan JP. 2003. Impaired substrate oxidation in healthy elderly
men after eccentric exercise. J Appl
Physiol, 94(2):716-23.

Next: Aging
and my nutrition.

 

Aging: My Eyes...

 and Prescription Cycling Sunglasses 

It's been quite a while since I posted here. I used to think I was simply too busy due to travel, but now that I'm on vacation in Boulder for the summer I'm coming to realize that I'm just lazy. It's well past the time to get involved again. 

-------------------------------------------------

Lately I've been thinking a lot about my age.

I’m 69. When I was younger it never occurred to me that I’d
ever be this old. But some how it happened. In the following weeks I’ll write
about some of the physiological changes I’ve experienced due to aging and what
I’ve learned about them. It isn’t pretty. Some are big deals – such as tendencies
to add body fat and slow recovery from exercise. Others are merely nuisances.
That’s where I’m going with this first post on the topic.

One of the greatest inconveniences of aging, I’ve found, is the
loss of near vision – the need for bifocals. It seems that every product on the
market, from home thermostats to cell phones, was designed by someone who is 30
years old with excellent eyes. Why do they all use such small fonts? Don’t they
understand that it’s mostly people over 50 who can most easily afford them? In
this hard-to-read category are bicycle handlebar computers and head units.

Some head units are easier on old eyes than others. But in
the aero position with the head tucked in and low, the only way to read my
Garmin 800 is to raise up to get some distance between my eyeballs and the head
unit thus greatly increasing drag, or to wear bifocals which is beyond
nuisance. I’ve tried stick-on bifocals on my prescription Oakley sunglasses. That didn’t work too well. I’m nearsighted so having a bifocal on top of the
prescription lens made for fuzzy vision up close. They worked OK with non-prescription
sunglasses but became cloudy over time. And without the prescription lens,
looking up the road was always a bit blurry. Exasperating.

Recently I heard of a company making prescription-cycling
lenses using a new digital technology - ADS Sports Eyewear. So I had a
pair of lenses made for some Oakley frames. What a difference! Now with a free-form,
digital, progressive bifocal I can easily read my head unit while low in the
time trial position, and I can see clearly up the road. It’s remarkable how
such a seemingly small thing as this could so greatly improve my enjoyment of
riding a bike.

In addition, my peripheral vision with a wrap-around frame
is just as crisp and clear, as it is front and center. And the ADS lenses are
no thicker than my old non-prescription Oakley lenses. This is a clear
improvement over the prescription, wrap-around sunglasses I’ve had before with
the corrective lens “sandwiched” on to a standard, non-prescription lens. That
technology made for limited peripheral vision and bulky, ugly sunglasses – and without
bifocals.

I was so impressed by ADS’s lenses and service that I asked
them to be one of my sponsors (you can see them in my new sponsor section on
the right side of my blog home page).

The price for a pair of ADS sunglasses depends on several
variables. ADS can use your existing frames so long as they are in good
condition and will work with their lens. The lens-only price ranges from $119.00 for a clear, single vision lens
to $219.00 for the polarized version.  A progressive bifocal section in
the bottom will add about $200.00 to the lens price. Or you can buy a
lens and frame package. Frame
prices average between $79.00 and $200.00. Standard cycling frames are
available from several companies such as Oakley, Nike, Adidas, Kaenon, Wiley,
Bolle and Smith. The ADS web page for cycling sunglasses shows your options. All of the
sunglasses on the page are prescription-ready.

In my next post
I’ll comment on recovery devices I’ve been trying out over the last several months and what I’ve discovered
about them. All, of course, from the perspective of aging. That will be
followed by the topic of body weight and aging. Again, I’ve been tinkering,
reading research and found some interesting stuff.