At what age did performance start to decline?

When I become a father!!!!

You know when you're at the age when you find yourself grateful that everything still works.

I think you notice its harder and harder after about 40. I noticed age 44 there was a massive performance drop and its just as big a drop again for each year after that, so far anyway. Not a chance of competing with anything even approaching my best years again after 44 for me. Most people older than me tell me the same. Knees started to feel stiffer from about 40 though. They are actually squeeking now. Started cycling and the knees were getting worse. Had a chat with a consultant who is also im my cycling club and he said worst thing ever for your knees is cycling, even though most people think that cycling is easier on the knees. Says he has more patients, including himself, whos knees wore out after taking up cycling in their early 40s but they put up with it because they get addicted to cycling.

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I think it is a very difficult question to answer because so many factors are at play. I think one thing to consider is that whatever age you start running as an adult, you get injured a few times, but you improve fast. Then, because of the buzz of improvement, you think that if you try harder, you will improve even more, and that's a big mistake. You have to give time to time. Because then you often overtrain, run tired too much, and improvements stall and performances go backwards, and that's not necessarily because of age or because you hit 10 years of running. It is due to a tired body and not enough focus on recovery.

You often see this in runners who start later in life: meteoric rise, top of their game for a year or two and then disappearance into the doldrum and disillusion. A good coach should help in these circumstances...

That is my current theory anyway, as a 52-year-old with 10 years of running experience and a 4-year-old marathon PB of 2:47: I am trying to focus on recovery, not run harder or more than I did when I last did my PB, but focus on not repeating mistakes (be it dietary or over-exhaustion) of previous training blocks. A detailed running diary helps... If it takes another year to get there, so be it!

I notice that after 40 years old even cuts and bruises seem to take longer to heal. Never mind muscle injuries. Even your eyes take a second longer to focus. Im told by 50 i wont have to worry about that at all because they wont focus at all :)

what about raw speed ?

creeping up on 50 and noticing that the 5 /10k time is getting marginally slower .. and harder to keep respectable .. thats taking away the advantage of the super shoes and comparing like with like, late 30s early 40s sub 20 5k was easy enough to get to, now it can only be done with the super shoes

endurance stuff, half marathon onwards , is definitely improving and it feels like there is still a decent margin to improve further , but speed for me is definitely declining ,

Joined a club earlier this year just before turning 48, was probably running for the previous 2 years on my own - the decision to join a club has massively improved my times and also my enjoyment. I think that is the best advice I would give to anyone starting out.

I do miss training regularly but the advice and team spirit along with the varied training instead of my clueless run the same route fast approach has meant that I reduced my 5km from 22 min to sub 20 & hope to get sub 19.

My 10 mile best was 75mins+ and it is under 70mins now and hope to get to 65mins in the next 12 months.

I even completed a half marathon and may do a full in the future though not sure if I would have the mental strength for it!!!

There was a very feelgood and beautifully shot programme on RTE1 last night about living well into older age and the basic point - rammed home repeatedly in a nice way - was to keep moving and exercising and being curious about the world around you and the aging process won't be so bad.

One of the hill running legends told me once that performance degrades very slowly in the 40s and then appreciably faster in your 50s. At the time he hadn't reached his 60s :)

But for many folk it'll be other life pressures taking time away from running - both the actual training andnearly more importantly the mental freedom to be thinking about running. Back in the day I spent all week thinking about sport and the weekend of sport to come and then spent the weekend at the sport and then spent the week thinking about the sport to come and what we had done at the weekend. It's just not as important anymore. And when something is less important then you don't do it as much and performance declines.

The good news from last night's programme appeared to be that the mental freedom comes back after that busy middle period of living a full life.

From a physiological perspective I would agree things like Vo2max and other factors have been proven to decrease as young as mid to late 20s.

I think the big question is how much do these metrics impact performance? this is very debatable. Many take decades to get to a level of expertise in terms of getting the best out of themselves training wise. From a performance perspective I would argue that age makes little difference to performance but where you will find it makes a difference is that the margin for error is a lot finer. You can't get away with training foolishly as you age as much.