When I read the caption of Gretchen Reynolds’s New York Times article, “Age Like a Former Athlete”, my immediate reaction was, you mean be in constant pain? Every real athlete places stresses on his or her body that result in injury and in many cases those injuries in turn result in continuing pain, particularly in old age. There’s a reason for the cliche of the elderly (age 50) prima ballerina hobbling around the young students in her ballet class, leaning on a cane. Those retired ballerinas were in pain.
Here’s Ms. Reynolds’s peroration:
But the broader message of the study, she says, could be that we may need to rethink what normal fitness is or should be in older people. The tables that doctors and other experts currently use to determine “normal†fitness have been constructed with data gathered from typical older people today, many of whom have been sedentary for years.
These men’s lives suggest that greater fitness is possible in old age, even for those of us who were not previously Olympians, Dr. Everman says. “These guys were not training hard†by the time they became septuagenarians, she says, and most already had eased back considerably in their workout routines by the 1993 testing, she says, when they were middle-aged.
But they never stopped exercising altogether, except during periods of illness or injury.
If the rest of us followed a similar workout trajectory during our lives, she says, we might wind up with a higher VO2 max than otherwise in our old age, resetting both our expectations about age-related fitness and the existing tables.
VOX2 max (milliliters of oxygen used per kilogram weight per minutes) is a lousy proxy for total health. There’s got to be some healthy medium between athletics and, as a recent study of the UK has found, people over the age of 40 not walking for ten sustained minutes per month. As another recent study (on diet) did we might turn to hunter-gatherer societies for guidance. In hunter-gatherer societies people routinely walk a lot but rarely engage in extreme exertion. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
