French cyclist Jeannie Longo is competing in her eighth Games at the age of 49 and it is the second Olympics for Israeli marathon runner Haile Satayin whose passport says he is 53.
Dr. Michael Joyner, an anesthesiologist at the U.S. Mayo Clinic who studies the effects of ageing on athletes, said normal "physiological" ageing starts at 30 but athletes can delay this until their late 30s or 40s with prolonged, intense training.
He said lab data showed that for physiological factors associated with endurance sports the decline is about 10 percent per decade starting at 30 but this can be halved with continued hard training, especially if it remained intense.
"If you look at top performers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, the volume of training (hours per day) is sometimes down, but they keep the intensity high. They usually also do things to prevent age-associated declines in muscle mass," he said. ..." ...
"All things being equal the person who can put forth a maximum effort and at the same time relax has a real edge. A lot of it is learning how to compete in a relaxed way when the pressure is on," he told Reuters. [Link]
This says to me that after 30, you can slow down one's degrading endurance issues by 50%. Therefore, at age 76-years old, which is the average life expectancy, you would have the oxygen saturation ability of an average 53-year-old. That seems accurate to me.
Oh, and then there is this "chick" named Dar Torres... ;-)
