RDH - Hill and Dale

Hill and Dale

January 18, 2007

Like many people these days, I look things up that I wouldn't have bothered to look up before. One thing that recently caught my eye was a table showing in thrilling detail the decline that can be expected in foot speed as you age:

World Records by Age Group, 100 meters (men, indoor)*

10.42 seconds, Troy Douglas, NED, age 40
10.72, Willie Gault, USA, 45
10.95, William Collins, USA, 51
11.50, William Collins, USA, 55
11.70, Ron Taylor, GBR, 61
12.53, Paul Edens, USA, 65
12.77, Bobby Whilden, USA, 70
13.61, Wolfgang Reuter, GER, 75
14.35, Payton Jordan, USA, 80
16.16, Suda Giichi, JPN, 85
17.83, Donald Pellmann, USA, 90
21.69, Kozo Haraguchi, JPN, 95
30.86, Philip Rabinowitz, RSA, 100

Source: WMA Record Administration, July 25, 2006

First, congratulations to Mr. Collins on owning two age classes, especially considering the fact that he's got a lot of competition (his age group is the huge Baby Boomer population, many of whom were raised on the early, successful network television presentations of the Olympic Games). Second, note how brutal the competition must be: nobody except Collins or Ron Taylor managed to set the record for his age group past the very first year of eligibility.

In any case, apparently, as you age, your strides get shorter and shorter. And your legs bend less and less as you stride (you have less of a "kick"). In short, at some point most people begin to shuffle rather than run. The table also shows, however, that if you don't plan on living past about 60, you can make it through life barely losing a step on your 40-year-old counterparts. But between about 80 and 95, something clearly starts to ebb.

A caveat. The advice on this page, including but not limited to the suggestion that pipe-smoking is pleasurable and the idea that punishing runs in the hills will increase your foot speed, should be considered only in consultation with the advice of a licensed, practicing physician.

Is there anything that you, personally, can do to try to hang in there, on top of your game, as long as possible, especially if you do plan to live much beyond 70? Actually, I wouldn't worry about it too much; rather, I would advise letting nature take its course. Continue to walk briskly well into your 80s or 90s, if that's your style, but don't worry about sprinting. And remember to enjoy life and your ever-longer perspective on the world around you. Use all of your remaining health to simply rest and savor things. If you find yourself still quite robust in your 80s, take up pipe-smoking or crossword puzzles. Sit around until late into the morning and read a major urban newspaper back to front. You deserve this much.

But if you insist on maintaining your edge or beating the odds—and the table of world records suggests that these people were doing something right—my advice is to start running hills. This idea is my own, but it's not exactly worthy of a copyright or patent. I arrived at it through independent investigation, but it's really just a matter of common sense. Running uphill is more challenging than maintaining your inertia across a level course.

Much of the decline in old age is known to come from loss of strength. The feebleness that we've all noted in the extremely (and sometimes not so extremely) elderly is nothing more than a wasting away; in short, a loss of muscle mass. The only proven way to arrest or reverse this loss, aside from growth hormone, is resistance training. So it's axiomatic that if you want to retain your strength as a runner, you'll need some sort of weight-bearing exercise. Lift weights if you want to, but I think you'll agree that running up (and down) hills, outdoors, is far more challenging and satisfying. So take to the hills if you can.

I could be wrong, and remember: I advise running the hills only if you've simply got to push your limits. I've only just started down the road to elderliness, and I've been running the hills in my neighborhood only for the last eighteen months, for at least thirty minutes a day, four to six times a week. Yes, I've noticed that I feel stronger and faster than I did when I started, but that could be my SSRI. (And at one point I realized that hill running wasn't a cure-all: I learned that I could eat and drink more than I burn off, so I gained a bit of weight at one point, even while radically increasing my daily distances and elevations, before wisely backing off my consumption of food and beer.)

In sum, try to enjoy your old age. The choice to exercise or not is yours.

*"Mr. Harper, why don't you present this as a true HTML table?" I didn't feel like it. Besides, all I really care about are the boldface ages and times. The other information is ancillary, though fascinating in its own way (e.g., why, oh why must the USA, GBR, and JPN always measure themselves against the rest of the world? the ongoing need to justify Manifest Destiny? the insecurity natural to tiny island empires? xenophobia? [respectively, excepting the Netherlands {whose record-holder was born in Bermuda and, at 40, was probably just seeking to extend a career that had been tarnished by a positive test for nandrolone} and South Africa {see GBR}, and also Germany, where a touch of xenophobia has been historically mixed with a little jealousy vis-à-vis powerful island nations {see their naval buildup at the beginning of the last century} and pioneer nations {see the German fascination with the myth of the American West; added to which the apparent need to emulate one's vanquisher, which they share with Japan <speaking of Japan, see China, doubtless soon to appear on a revised version of this list \moral: we're all crazy, given the chance\>}]).