Decline with age

[lindsayh]

I trained hard to get the 6.47! and although will want to continue with the cycling, will again. This thread has been informative and I thank those who have or will contribute

It is very rewarding Bob and there are some serious people doing great things well in the 70s and beyond. For me it is great that progress and performance is so measurable and that being competitive is so possible. It seems to me that there are quite a group of competitive cyclists who have transitioned to the erg really well especially if they can get some upper body strength happening.
FWIW my erg buddy Terry Dargan is a good benchmark for you. He is now 73 lwt started at 67 and got to 7:11 as 69y then 7:19 early 70s. He is an aerobic beast who got to WRs on 3 of the longer ones. If you want to see what is possible though look at the rankings for 70+ lwt now there is a Danish Olympic rower who is rewriting everything - amazing times.

[joe80]

The Nonathlon is based on C2 ranking data. An explanation of the scoring may be found here:

http://www.nonathlon.com/rules_scoring.php

I scored my 2km PB of 7:15.5 in August 2008 aged 59 after two years of 5,000km+ training. This yielded 937 Nonathlon points. Yesterday's SB, now aged 69, of 7:33.1 produced 945. I take some satisfaction, despite the decline in performance, in an improvement relative to my peer group.

A large part of the decline over the years is associated with a decrease in heart-rate. My PB was set with HR ave 162 max 172 whereas yesterday's effort came in at ave 154 max 158. In long rows at, say, 2:06 split, my average HR is lower now than it was ten years ago.

Regards,
Joe

[Gammmmo]

@Greg - thanks for sharing. The dropoff for 2K was more marked than I expected once one gets beyond 20-25.

[bob01]

Hi Lindsey... what is the meaning of the numbers in parenthesis ???

[Gammmmo]

@Greg - thanks for sharing. The dropoff for 2K was more marked than I expected once one gets beyond 20-25. Anecdotally, I am pretty much where I am at 46 as I was at ~35:

5K: 17-55 (45) vs. 18:02 (35)
30mins: 8128m (45) vs. 8120m
10K: 37-18 vs. 37:22

...the other marks I consider not reliable enough to compare. One thing I truly believe is that our training (habits particularly) and minds are self-limiting all of us.There is nearly always more but suspect at least our "desire" to suffer stays fairly constant as long as one is still mentally competitve and thinks there is theoretically more to give and train for.

[lindsayh]

Hi Lindsey... what is the meaning of the numbers in parenthesis ???

Hi Bob - if you mean the numbers in my signature they are the year the PB times were done

[jackarabit]

3.4% average performance decline per annum over 35 yrs. (age 50 to 85) w/ sharp downturn after age 75 for Senior Olympics athletes, male and female, in study linked below:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10. ... 6507309673

“Senior Olympics” athletes are, of course, not synonymous with Olympic level athletes of advanced years. Appears to me that C2-ranked indoor rowers are exhibiting a significantly slower rate of decline than are Senior Olympics participants.

Age 30 to 70 in Greg’s analysis vs. age 50 to 85 in the “elite”[?] senior athlete study presents two quite different rates of decline. As usual, selecting the data has a strong influence on the “hard number” results.

[bob01]

Joe Friel in his book 'fast after 50' has at its take away point do more high intensity sessions(ok it aimed more at triathletes and cyclists but I think its safe to assume that the principles will read across to rowing) argues that doing only LSD will result in 1% or greater loss per annum. High intensity training 'has been shown to cut that by half (pg 126) I hope its ok to quote that.

[Yankeerunner]

If you want to see what is possible though look at the rankings for 70+ lwt now there is a Danish Olympic rower who is rewriting everything - amazing times.

If you mean Jørgen Engelbrecht (and I'm sure that you do), I remember him coming to Boston about 5 years ago and he looked quite intimidating. Solid muscle. I thought he had a good shot at being the first 65+ lwt to break 7:00, but I seem to remember him coming up just a fraction short.

Looking him up on Wikipedia I found that he and a partner had won the world championship double sculls in 1970 and placed 4th in the 1972 Olympics. It makes me wonder how many other past Olympians are out there who could easily kick our butts if they wanted to, but they don't take the erg seriously enough to bother with us. Thanks guys, whoever you are.

[Cyclingman1]

It makes me wonder how many other past Olympians are out there who could easily kick our butts if they wanted to

I'm not so sure about that. They too are subject to decline. Furthermore, while obviously talented, they undoubtedly had extreme training programs in the past that basically are not sustainable for decades. I seen any number of former Olympic and collegiate All-American rowers in the standings with times in the mainstream.

[lindsayh]

If you mean Jørgen Engelbrecht (and I'm sure that you do), I remember him coming to Boston about 5 years ago and he looked quite intimidating. Solid muscle. I thought he had a good shot at being the first 65+ lwt to break 7:00, but I seem to remember him coming up just a fraction short:

Yes Rick that is the guy. The only puzzling thing is that he hasn't claimed the WRs that he has set as far as I know.
The first 70+ hwt Sub 7 was an Aussie olympian Paul guest who rediscovered the erg pretty late in life and I think now has 75+ @around 7:10. There must be others of course but a lot of otw rowers don't want to erg I suppose

[mdpfirrman]

I like that Greg! Means I'm not as pathetically average as I think I am at 53 having done a 7:11 recently. If my terrible math is right, I would have done a 6:20 in my 30s (12% better). I can live with that.

[hjs]

I like that Greg! Means I'm not as pathetically average as I think I am at 53 having done a 7:11 recently. If my terrible math is right, I would have done a 6:20 in my 30s (12% better). I can live with that.

Hmmm, really don,t think thats right. The current 50 plus records are rewritten this season, using this adjustment, at levels below the current overall WRs. Can,t be right.
2k record will be close to 6 flat this season for 50 years old.
500 record is already 1.13.7

[gregsmith01748]

Henry,

A couple of points.

1. The analysis that I did is looking at the whole population of rowers, by definition, the WR holders are outliers, so would have a different characteristic.
2. In some cases the world record holders in a new age group were world record holders in prior age groups, but in other cases they are new folks. The effect of this is that you get the best of each age group, not a picture of the way the population changes with age.
3. Your point about rewriting the record books is a good one. Every year, there will be new data and it's likely that the trends will change.

One side note, I found that the decline for the top 10% of ranked rowers was pretty similar to the decline for the 50th percentile rowers.

One thing I have not figured out how to do is to follow specific rowers through the rankings over the 16 years to see how they changed as individuals. This kind of a longitudinal analysis would remove some confounding factors.

[gregsmith01748]

Here's another tidbit for you all to munch on.

One common idea expressed here is that "sprinting is the first to go". So, I looked at the age related decline for all of the different ranked events.

Here's the plot for open weight male rowers (75th percentile)

What does it say?

The format of the chart normalizes the power achieved for each event with the 75th percentile power for rowers between 20 and 30 years old. So, for example, the 75th percentile rower between 30-40 achieves 94% of the power on the 100m event that a rower between 20 and 30. By the time you get to a rower from 70-80, it's down to 65%.



A couple of interesting things jump out of this data.
1. There is a huge drop off for the 2K and 5K between the 20s and 30s. I think this is because there are lots of collegiate athletes ranking those distances and they are replaced by less capable rowers in their 30s, while the elites disappear from the rankings after they graduate from college. The other distances behave a lot better.

2. You can see that the longest distances (30 minutes and longer) hold up better over the decades than the shorter distances.
3. I was surprised to see that the shortest distances (100m, 1m) did not have as dramatic a decline as the 500. I suspect, but have not proven to myself that this is related to much smaller populations for the 100m and 1' events.