Running Under Your Age: Years for Seconds

Special data-heavy edition for masters track fans and dedicated sports/fitness quants!

Here’s an ultra-nerd analysis of world record times at various distances across age groups. From short sprints to middle distance to long distance events, the effect of aging is similar – older champions are slower than younger champions. But the different physiological strengths that allow elite-level performance at different distances might not age at the same rate.

I don’t really play golf but I’ve always heard about “shooting your age” as a special goal for a committed older golfer. It’s hard, and not often done – more rare than shooting a hole-in-one, the golf statisticians say.

In masters track, an age-specific goal is to run 400 meters under your age. That’s one lap around a standard outdoor oval track; your age in years, and run the lap under that number in seconds. Since the world record for the 400m is 43.03 seconds by 24 year old Wayde van Niekerk, it’s clear that a young man can not get close to running under his age. This special goal is one of the rare activities where aging is an advantage. Some excellent articles have been written about this recently. In his blog, analysis and great photographs by masters athlete Dave Albo show that it is always difficult -- maybe impossible for guys under 50, but there is an arbitrage of years for seconds that gives a chance to a few very good runners at around age 55, and quite a few more in the ages 60-74.

A warning if you’re thinking about trying it for the first time – the 400 is a special kind of race. Whereas sprinting 100 or even 200 meters can be fun, many athletes would tell you that the longest sprint, the 400 (or its demonic sibling, the 400 meter hurdles) is the hardest event in track and field. Over the final stretch you can see even world class athletes tighten up, struggling to lift their knees. Our nerves and muscles have a limited capacity for top speed, which is completely exhausted long before the 400m finish line appears like a mirage in the distance.

I’ve previously written about the effects of aging on 100 meter performance in masters men. No surprise -- the older we get, the slower we run the 100m. I wondered whether aging runners in longer events slowed in the same way. First, this analysis (Figure 1) of world record times in the 100m, 400m, 1 mile, and marathon shows that no matter the distance, the fastest in the world get slower with age.

Figure 1: Open and masters age group world records at various distances. A) 100 meters, B) 400 meters, C) one mile, and D) marathon. Age group data from https://mastersrankings.com/

My next question was: Do all the world record times for all the different events slow at the same rate? In the following analysis, for each event the age group world record times were divided by the open world record time to determine an age-related slowing ratio for each age group world record. The age-related slowing ratio ranged from 1.01x for 35 year old Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce at 100m, to 6.00x for 105 year old Julia Hawkins, also running 100m in a bit over a minute. (At age 101, Julia had run 39.62, setting the world record in that age group as well.) Figure 2 shows the age-related slowing ratio out to the 80 year old age group, the oldest for which there is a recognized world record in each of the events analyzed. Figure 4B shows the results for all age groups including the oldest athletes.

Figure 2: Age-related slowing, defined as the age group world record time divided by the open world record time, for various individual events. Masters men and women running 100m slowed relatively less than the participants in longer races.

The performances of the best short sprinters seem to slow down relatively less than the best longer distance runners. What does this demonstrate about aging? It does not prove anything, of course. The number of participants, for example, differs from one age group to another, and from one event to another, so these comparisons are hardly the last word in aging physiology. I would not begin to suggest that this means you should prefer sprinting over jogging to slow your rate of aging. In fact lifespan analysis of Olympians who participated between 1928 and 1948 found that high jumpers and marathoners lived longer than short sprinters and discus throwers.

As the great statistician of financial risk Nassim Nicholas Taleb has noted, the effect of aging on world record holders is also a poor representation of the general population. These individuals represent extremes at any age. But world record observations probably do point out what we already know about how different are the physiological demands for these events. The 100 (the shortest Olympic sprint) is an event that favors the strongest athletes, who are able to push their center of mass forward with maximum power, accelerating to the highest speeds of any track event. The 100m world record for men is 9.58 (Bolt, 2009) and for women is 10.49 (Florence Griffith-Joyner, 1988.) A few elite sprinters have kept their edge into their late 30s and even early 40s. Justin Gatlin ran 9.87 at age 37, and Kim Collins ran 9.93 (his lifetime best!) at age 40. On the women’s side, Shelly Ann Frazier Pryce ran 10.62 at age 35. But as the decades pass, the fastest in the world become less fast than they used to be.

The eight finalists in the Olympic men’s 100m in Paris all looked like Marvel superheroes. In contrast, at longer distances the athlete’s aerobic capacity becomes the dominant consideration, and as we compare elite runners from short sprinters to marathoners, their physical appearance is accordingly quite different. As the race distance increases the best athletes generally are more and more slender. The top finishers in any elite marathon appear strikingly free of extra muscle.

Also in Figure 2, the men’s mile and marathon times slow with aging at almost exactly the rate (to age 80; the curves separate in older age groups.) While this might be only a coincidence, we know that high-performing milers and marathoners both have a great ability to exchange oxygen from the air into the blood, the cardiovascular system, and the skeletal muscles; the VO2max is a measurement of this capacity. An analysis of 190 Spanish runners who were high level open competitors found that the VO2 max was lowest in 100m specialists and increased across groups from 100m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, and 3000m. But then across 5000m, 10000m, and marathon distance (42,000m) there was not significant further increase in the runners’ VO2max, and this is consistent with the observation of many coaches that performance at a distance like 1500m, 1 mile, or 3000m can be used to predict marathon results.

It is well-known that VO2 max declines with age. My cardiologist colleague Dr. Jerome Fleg performed thousands of treadmill tests over decades at the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) to measure the VO2max of participants since 1978 (Figure 3.) These are not elite athletes, but the subjects’ fitness represents a range of regular physical activity from sedentary (Activity 0) to low-intensity (Activity 1, slow to moderate walking), moderate-intensity (Activity 2, mowing the lawn or fast walking), and high-intensity (Activity 3, vigorous calisthenics or running.)

Figure 3: from Fleg et al, Circulation 2005. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.105.5454

In the BLSA study population, sedentary subjects had consistently lower VO2max than more active subjects in any age range, but over the years the rate of loss of aerobic capacity was similar, and it accelerated in the older decades. Whether more exercise in highly trained older athletes can slow or delay that loss of VO2max remains an important question. Most if not all of the older masters world record holders represented in Figure 1 continue to prioritize sport-specific training, and this lesson from the highly successful masters athletes seems to be consistent with the observation by investigators studying masters athletes at the Institute of Sport Sciences at the University of Lausanne that approximately half of the aging-related loss of aerobic capacity is attributable to decreased training volume and not to age itself.

To return to the 400m, it’s an event that needs the top speed of the sprinter but also needs aerobic capacity to stave off exhaustion and finish the race. For the final analysis in this essay, I looked at what happens when we study the 4x400m relay, where each runner on a team of four carries the baton around the track for one lap of 400m. The total, 1600m, is very close to 1 mile. Figure 4 shows A) the age-related slowing for the women’s and men’s 4x400 relays, and B) the age-related slowing ratio for all age groups, including the relays.

Figure 4: A) Age-related records in the 4x400m relay. B) Age-related slowing ratio for all events, all age groups.

For this comparison to the world records in open competitions, masters athletes running the 4x400 may have an additional handicap besides age. The open world records are established by national teams at events planned for months or years in advance, whereas the limited number of participants in masters athletics, divided into yet smaller age groups means that it is rare to have a team of the fastest individual performers all at the same meet. For masters athletics relay world records we are not looking only at the limits of aging physiology, but also at the logistical challenges of organizing and maintaining a team. For many master athletes, this makes the relay events all the more meaningful.

Figure 4B suggests that one curve is an outlier: there is relatively more age-related slowing of the 4x400 records for women aged 75 and 80, and an absence of records for women aged 85 and older. I don’t expect this trend for slower masters women’s relays to last, though. The best of the current participants are extremely good. In the last five years, 11 of 13 women’s masters 400m age group world records have been broken. For men, it’s only 3 of 14 in the same period. Is the reason that the number of women participating in masters track was lower but has increased recently? Is it something special about new training approaches? If you are a dedicated masters athletics data nerd and you’ve made it this far, please let me know your theories in the comments with this article. Whatever the explanation, I expect to see a number of masters women’s 4x400 relay records demolished in coming years, and to see them come in line with the rest of this multi-colored analysis.

I am skeptical about most anti-aging/longevity claims. If something actually influences the reality of aging, I would expect to see these age-related slowing curves flattened downwards or shifted to the right. Performance-enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids probably do have this effect, but their safety for this use is uncertain, and in most competitions their use is disqualifying. The best approach to keeping yourself as strong and healthy as possible is to keep moving, keep training, and if you are inclined — keep racing.