Does Endurance REALLY Improve With Age?

Let's face it, as we get older, we tend to only go one direction, downhill. However, that's just not true. Age brings with it a wealth of benefits, rugged good looks, wisdom, and endurance. Allegedly. In this video, I want to find out. I want to find out if endurance really does improve with age because it is super relevant to cycling, particularly because events that are longer and longer are getting more and more popular. I have been diving into the science to find the answer, but we will also be hearing from two very successful, super experienced riders from very different backgrounds. Round the world record holder, Mark Beaumont, and also former pro, Nick Craig, who is still tearing it up in cyclocross at the age of 54. Now, fortunately, we've got a lot of older endurance athletes as role models. In cycling, perhaps the world's number one male ultra-distance rider, Christoph Strasser, is 41. He became the first person to cycle over 1,000 kilometers in 24 hours at the age of 39. He's just won the two most recent editions of the Transcontinental. Then this Isa Pulver, she won the grueling race across America at 52. Amazingly, she wasn't either the first 50-plus athletes or the first woman to do so. Leah Goldstein had achieved the same feat a couple of years before, which was also the same year that J.P. Tavares had won the equally grueling Tour Divide at 49. Then running has even more, like Harvey Lewis, who just ran 450 miles in 108 hours at the age of 54. It's important to note, it's not just a few freaks of nature that seem to improve with age, because when we made a film recently about the Paris-Brest-Paris, their biggest ultra-distance event in Europe, we found out that the average age of participants was 51. What's going on here? Is it just that older athletes like doing endurance events, or is it that as we get older, we get better at endurance events? First, I suppose we have to start by defining what we mean by endurance. The Tour de France, for example, certainly requires endurance, but that seems highly unlikely to be won by a 50-year-old anytime soon. Although, we should say Annemiek van Vleuten won the Tour de France Femme Avec Zwift, and the Giro, and the Vuelta too, for that matter, at the age of 39, but even she retired soon after. That's because pro bike races, whether they're many hours long over successive days, or even successive weeks, like a Grand Tour, like the Tour de France, are actually won and lost in super high power output situations. That might be a 10-second sprint, it might be a three-minute max effort, a 10-minute max effort, or even longer than that. Unfortunately, we do know, because it's well-documented and long since proven, that our peak powers right through to our VO2 maxes and beyond decline once we get into our 30s. However, what about pure endurance, that ability to just keep on going mile after mile, hour after hour, never going super fast, but also crucially, never stopping either? That is a very different story. We found the answer in a paper called Muscle Characteristics and Substrate Energetics in Lifelong Endurance Athletes. In it, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh in the US and Lausanne in Switzerland showed that older endurance athletes, people in their 60s in this case, had significantly improved exercise metabolic efficiency compared to athletes in their 20s. Of course, there will be outliers and freaks of nature that buck this trend, but in essence, what the researchers have shown is that older athletes are better able to burn fat as their primary source of fuel at moderate intensities compared to younger athletes who rely far more on carbohydrate. Actually, more research has shown that that improvement may be even more significant for women than men. Unfortunately, younger athletes have an advantage at higher intensities because they can burn more carbohydrates. Older athletes actually simply can't store or don't store as much carbohydrates, but that doesn't really matter for endurance because gram for gram, fat is a far more energy dense source of fuel, thereby suggesting that as we get older, we are naturally better equipped for endurance. It explains why younger cyclists tend to hit the wall or bonk so hard and so catastrophically so frequently, whereas older athletes just don't tend to. That actually tallies up with my own experiences as well. I need far less fuel now on my long rides than I did when I was doing far more frequent long endurance training rides when I was a pro. Yes, the power output is slightly less, but not dramatically so. Now, while the research doesn't say so, my hypothesis is that whilst your peak power and your VO2 max decline in your 30s because your metabolic efficiency is improving, actually, you hit your endurance sweet spot in later decades. That's because you've got that ability to go longer, but your peak power hasn't declined too much. You're still fast and you can go further. As I got older into my late 30s when it wasn't really a job anymore, I'd been a pro mountain biker and I was switching into this transition where I did go to do more endurance racing. I found the first few years I only needed to do one long training camp week a year. It seemed to remind my body how to do what it did. It's almost like a muscle memory. There was almost a memory in endurance, but I don't know what that is. It was just there. In my 40s, I seem to be able to ride less explosively and more like a diesel. Now, it's important to note that as a cyclo-cross racer and cross-country mountain biker, endurance to Nick is three, two, five hours, not 35 hours. It certainly seems to be the case with him that his improved metabolic efficiency was kicking in. Maybe your 40s, your 50s, and perhaps even beyond is really the time to kick on with your endurance. Certainly, with our improved training knowledge and nutrition knowledge now, age is not the barrier it once was to performance. Older athletes are just getting better and better. In fact, a study conducted in the British Journal of Sports Medicine from back in 2004 showed that New York marathon runners, top runners of 50 and over, their finish times improved more between the period of 1983 and 1999 than those of younger athletes. Actually, now, people that technically qualify as pensioners are performing as well as top athletes once did. If you look at the times for the first ever Olympic Games back in 1896, the time for the winner of the marathon has now been bettered by a 73-year-old. It's really important to note here that this endurance ability goes way beyond the physical. I mentioned in the introduction about age and wisdom, and that is also absolutely critical for endurance. The innate ability to do big, big distances, I think, does come with the way you see yourself. I think if you're scared by big distances, if you're scared by endurance, you can be quite intimidated by whatever that is, a 50-miler, a 100-miler, a double century, whatever's in your comfort zone. I think a lot of it is how you see yourself. If you think, well, I've done this before, I know what it's going to feel like. I'm in that place again. I know how to deal with it. The mental toolkit, I think, is a huge part of it. I remember when we did the North Coast 500 in three days and you had some dark moments. I observed that maybe you hadn't been there quite as often as I had. It's not that I was physically hurting any less, I think it was just I was more familiar with that place. He's right. I did have some very dark moments on that trip, but I have got better. I've got better at endurance and it's not through training, it can only be through experience. I'll stop short of saying that I have reached a point of wisdom, but I do feel like I could say that about Nick. Do you find that you can draw on your experience to get a bit more out of yourself? Yes. I suppose if I was riding the three peaks and I'm with some young guys, I'd certainly know how to work and ride with them. I often find myself riding with the younger guys and I'm thinking that this kid's going to ride off in a minute and it's me that rides off. I think because they can go faster, up that climb, along that bit there, they can't resist putting the effort in. I can't put that effort in, so I can't damage myself. When we go from, say, in the three peaks, when I go safe on the road section from Ingleborough through to Wernside, kids that are youngsters, 20, 22, 24-year-olds, I'm encouraging them, riding with them, and I guess that's experience. The strange thing is it was me that then went forward when you would think on that road section, the way the kid was riding, you would think it would be him that would have ridden off, so that's experience. I think maybe just the fact that I can't make those efforts, that means that I will do a more consistent, slower, longer effort to get the best result I can. To me, I see it quite simple when we're racing. We have a start line, we have a finish line. You work with people and you get the best out of yourself and them. I talk to people, I encourage people, and I'll get them to help me, basically, without them even knowing it. Does endurance improve with age? Yes, absolutely it does. Physically, it does, although up to a point. However, wisdom, resilience, and experience just keep on getting better and better. Challenge yourself. If you've only ever ridden 60 or 70 miles, you can do 100. Just go and do it. Now, as always, I'd be really, really interested to hear your thoughts and experiences. Get stuck in in the comment section down below. If you're an older athlete, have you found that your endurance has improved with age? What kind of personal best records and events have you been doing as the years have advanced? How much have you improved? If at all, get involved in the comment section. As I said, really looking forward to read that. Huge thanks, as always, to Mark and to Nick for their time and their insight as well. Please, if you've enjoyed this video, give it a big thumbs up.