We all understand that we slow down as we age. As the body ages it seems to lose some of its capacity and it takes longer to get things done. I still remember my days from school when I would get up and be ready in 15 minutes. These days it takes me over an hour to do the same things and get ready for office. This point is also brought home when engaged in sports or during exercise. Setting out to beat a personal best established when our legs were years younger, we fall short and become convinced that we simply did not perform at our best.
Dr Ray C. Fair knows the agony, and he has a soothing explanation. Dr Fair is a professor of economics at Yale Uni-versity, best known for devising a mostly accurate formula to predict winners of US presidential elections. He is also the finisher of 17 marathons and counting; and he has turned his social scientist’s eye to a question that many serious runners have considered: how can you keep racing against yourself long after you can no longer catch yourself?
His answer comes in the form of a research paper he has written. Studying world records for runners all the way up to 92 years old, Dr Fair has developed tables that try to track the body’s physical deterioration and set an ever-moving target.
If a 50-year-old finishes a marathon in 4 hours, 10 years after having run it in 3 hours 45 minutes, for instance, she can know that she is aging no more quickly than the world’s fleetest runners.
Having been published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Dr Fair’s work has an academic credibility rare in matters of sport. But his tables are also part of a growing effort to help runners track their times over a lifetime.
Dr Fair became interested in the topic in the 1980s, when he realized that the national circuit of masters races, open to men older than 40 and women older than 35 and divided into age divisions, had created enough data for him to perform the calculations. He studied the tables published by the masters group and decided to approach the problem with the same rigorous technique, known as regression analysis that is at the heart of much economic research.
He devised a set of tables that show the deterioration in performance as we age. The tables show the equivalent time (at different ages) for somebody at the peak running ages of the 20s and 30s. A five-hour finish, after all, is much more impressive for a 70-year-old than for a 30-year-old.
These tables show a gradual decline in performance between the ages of 30 and 60. Sometime after that there is a big decline and then the rate of decline also increases in the next 10 to 15 years. This result is in line with our intuitive feeling for our decline in performance. Though these tables have been published for run-ners, the decline in performance (in percentage terms) should be applicable to other sports or physical activities.
It is interesting to note that underlying all the research, of course, is an assumption that ordinary people—or at least ordinary marathon runners—age at the same rate as elite athletes. If that is not the case, Dr Fair’s tables and the masters tables would be setting the bar at the wrong place for most people. Scientists have yet to agree on an answer, however.