Key Issues for Aging Athletes
If you have maintained an active lifestyle into your forties, no one needs to tell you that your body has been changing over time. You have experienced it. You know that a day off between workouts is essential to prevent injury. You know that when you do hurt yourself, it takes longer to recover. Things hurt that never used to.
You haven't lost your motivation to stay fit and compete, but you know that you can't train the way you once did. You would rather slow it down and be conservative than end up sitting out a racing season because you overdid it and injured yourself.
New athletes who are younger were cautioned earlier in this book to go easy, especially at first. That applies even more to those who are trying to become athletes for the first time in their forties or beyond. No one is saying you can't do it. Just be careful.
One's VO2 max is usually measured in terms of milliliters of oxygen per minute per kilogram of body weight. A typical club athlete has a VO2 max of 70. For an elite athlete that number will be 90 or higher. By way of comparison, the VO2 max for a typical thoroughbred horse is 180.
A Natural Process
There are ways to slow down the aging process, but it is unstoppable. It is just nature at work. You can fight back and stay fit if you don't try to do at forty-five what came easy to you at twenty-five.
One of the first things to change in your body is its capacity for processing oxygen during a time of physical exertion. The measurement of how much oxygen your body can process during a specified period of exercise is expressed in terms of VO
Your maximum heart rate usually drops as you age, meaning that when you are really pushing it, the blood carrying oxygen through your system will not circulate as rapidly as it once did. This will affect how fast you can run, swim, and cycle — and it's one reason race organizers have competitions within age groups. It would not be fair to pit a fifty-year-old against a twenty-five-year-old. If the two had similar ability and training, the twenty-five-year-old would win every time.
It's Cellular
As you age, your body does not repair and regenerate cells as well as before, and there is higher free radical damage. Exercise produces free radicals, which are molecules with single unpaired electrons in the outer shells. Free radicals are blamed for damage to cells, called oxidation, another way of describing the aging process.
As the term oxidation implies, the process involves the interaction of oxygen with something else. When metal oxidizes, you get rust. When a slice of apple turns brown, that's oxidation. In your body, free radical production is the result of the interaction of oxygen with your tissues.
Free radicals come from your body's production and use of adenosine triphosphate, more commonly known as ATP. That substance is the immediate source of energy for muscle contraction. Without it, the muscles won't work. The body makes ATP from glycogen, the sugar that is stored in your liver and muscles. You need ATP, but it leaves free radicals behind. Dealing with them is important for everyone, and in particular for athletes. Chapter 12, focusing on nutrition, will provide you with ammunition to fight free radical damage.
Not So Strong
Another change you will experience as you age is a loss of muscle strength and power. It is for this reason that strength training is given its own chapter (Chapter 6) in this book.
You have more than 600 muscles in your body, all connected by tendons, fascia, and other tissue. Some of your muscles are fast-twitch, the ones that help you run fast. The others are slow-twitch, the muscles you use to run long distances.
Fast-twitch muscle fibers don't turn into slow-twitch fibers. Without adequate training, fast-twitch muscles simply atrophy. It is vital for an older athlete to maintain proper training to keep from losing fast-twitch muscles.
Flexibility is a key issue for older athletes, mainly because they have less of it than their younger counterparts. A tendon is the fibrous tissue that connects a muscle to a bone. A ligament runs from bone to bone. Ligaments and tendons in older athletes are less flexible and more prone to injury. Neither has a copious blood supply, so when they are injured it takes longer for them to heal.
Take It Easy
If all this sounds as though the forty-plus athlete is heading for disaster just getting out of bed, it is not intended to. These admonitions are meant to remind you that you do not have the body of a twenty-year-old any more, and you should behave accordingly. That means more days off during training season, more easy days, and fewer intense workouts.
If you make your triathlon preparation a slow and steady process, you might actually beat out some of the young Turks who went all out in their training every session and ended up injured.
