motorcity wrote:
What does it all now mean for me? Is there a pattern (for whatever reasons), does it only apply to smaller races? No pattern at all (look at results from bigger races)...?
I am 42 now, I am slower than I was at age 35 or 36 (I would say that it is due to age and, mainly, due to significantly less training because of family commitments) - 15~20 min. on long course and around 10 min. on 70.3). With my latest 70.3, I won my age group, but would have finished 4th in M45 and 2 in M50. Assuming that I will keep my rank once I will turn M45 - will I become faster again by then or will M40's be slower than today!? ;-) Well, odd questions and assumptions .... let's turn this into another question:
We know that age mainly results in loss of power and flexibility. But that's maybe more towards 48 ~ 50 when you start feeling that decline significantly. However, do you think/know that you can still become faster at e.g. 46 compared to 42 if you ramp up training again? I am at around 10 hours/week now. Not sure if my body would actually stand going back to 15~18 hours/week...
Other than that: I will participate in German AG Nationals this Saturday and at 70.3 Worlds. I will take a look at the results again.
All depends on how fast you were at 35 or 36. I'll be 41 in a month and am quite a bit faster than I was then. Based on overall finish though I'm about the same, so it looks like the field in the races that I'm doing are getting better. I'm still making year over year progress, as this is year 3 of consistency after having my daughter, so I had some years where I regressed fitness/weight wise. Seems to me that consistent work, without going too crazy in volume, but making sure that there isn't a huge valley in training gets me a year over year improvement of: 5s/100y in the pool, ~15 watts on the bike, ~10-15s/mile on the run. Each year though I've had to find a way to get a nice bump over the previous year, even if it is just a small bump in time/volume per week, but when looking at hours/month (and then hours/year) there's an increase. Sometimes its not about bigger weeks, but just being more consistent and controlling the off-season valley. If you can start your base period only 5-10 watts off of your previous year's best, you're going to make some improvements. I believe that there are early indicators of when that decline is going to happen, as in it will take a bigger block of training to make those incremental gains, or you make very modest gains in the off-season. Looking back on my logs, most of the times that I didn't improve much in year over year performance is because of taking 2 months off in the fall and starting back at too low of a point to make year over year improvements.