If you're looking at races with only a few hundred entries or less, you can get screwy results. Races with >1000 entries will be more representative.

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Ed O'Malley
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Outside of nationals or IM brand. Are there any 1,000 plus races? None near me.

Speaking of nationals, I was looking at the winners of all AG's from 35 to 50+. In the mens anyway, you could have thrown a blanket over the sprint race in those groups, with the 50+ guy actually having one of the fastest times in that 20 year span of men. Robert Skaggs was the dude's name, I have never really heard of him. But he is doing something to defy Mother Nature, clocked in a low 1;01 time, only 3 minutes slower than the overall winner, and beat up a bunch of younger age groups...

So using this larger and about as stacked field as you can get, it goes to the OP's query about old guys slotting in among the several younger age groups for overall..

Attrition is also a factor

The guys left >45 could be the by-products of the unfortunate natural process of weeding out that occurs as we age up. So the guys at the top of these "older AG's" are the survivors with years of quality training = fast times.

I think you will find as you get outside of the top 5-10 in the older AG's you will find the real story.

It also appears at age 55 and up there is a bit of an inflection...no one outruns father time.

I would partly agree with this, that it is those who stuck with it as a lifestyle rather than a thing they did from a pure competitive standpoint (yet were competitive at a point early on) continue to be near the pointy end. People have families, start businesses, personal issues, develop sport ending injuries, financial ruin, all things that can take someone out of the game as they get older. Those who survived all that--the lucky ones, are still doing it without losing a whole lot.

Those getting into the sport later in life (where you see the gap usually between them & the ones at the very top--seemingly HUGE gap at that...) have lost so much in experience and build up years, that this is where we are getting that difference from. Well--to a point...the rest is who knows what. 50 is the new 40 & 40 is the new 30.

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.

From a personal perspective - I'm 46 and am perhaps a little faster than I was at 41.

Maybe this is because I wasn't doing it right. Since then, I have had a few years of better focused training, lost some weight, found a fast run training buddy. I now rarely miss a training day, whereas in my 20s and 30s I could sometimes go a week with no training if family and work conspired. Also because I'm more financially secure, I've been able stop working on call / at night and at weekends.

Or maybe it's all the drugs

But, I think a lot depends on your trajectory up to age 40. If you have been elite/ top AGer in your 20s and 30s then possibly you have already seen your best performances in absolute terms. However, you can still dominate your age group.

That is still my goal ;-) Well, let's rephrase: Be in the mix for the podium....

Well, I definitively will not swim any faster than I did some years, I might be able to bike almost as fast and run a bit slower compared to maybe five years ago. I am not expecting any improvements in speed. Naturally, I would expect that I would rank higher in M45 with the same time as what I am capable to do today in M40. But I am not sure if that will really be the case. This is why I came up with this topic.

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.

All true, as far as I can tell from my experience and feedback from friends. Consistency is key to remain at a certain level and to have at least a chance to ramp it up again later...

Anyway, for me personally, I feel like there is not much room for improvement in terms of consistency and efficiency. Would be the question if I could still improve (i.e. get to the same/similar level as 5~7 years ago) if I added more training volume. I might find out if my family will let me do so in a few years ;-)

I think it really depends on who shows up. I'm in the F45-49 AG and I've seen faster times in my AG compared to the F40-44 in many IM events (full and half). In 2016 I was 4th at IMMT in the F45-49 AG. My time would have placed me 3rd in the F40-44 AG. Plus in my AG there seems to always be at least one woman who raced as a former pro (or qualifies for a pro card) or has some sort of elite athletic background. I was 15 seconds behind Ashley Tappin a 3x Olympic gold medalist (swimmer) at IMTX 70.3 this year. The 45-49 AG is fierce. It's sometimes the largest AG too. And I would assume the same goes for the men.

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.

Yes, I think so, too. I do not have the exact slot allocation numbers in mind, but I believe that M45 or F45 typically have the biggest number of Kona or 70.3 Worlds slots.

"Anyway, for me personally, I feel like there is not much room for improvement in terms of consistency and efficiency. Would be the question if I could still improve (i.e. get to the same/similar level as 5~7 years ago) if I added more training volume. I might find out if my family will let me do so in a few years ;-) "

There is alot to be said for training "smarter".

That may be the reason for alot of older (wiser) people doing well.

This is my experience in the small (100-200 participants) local races. The age groups from 40-59 have more participants. Looking at who ends up in the top ten overall, they overwhelm the 20-year olds based on their strength in numbers at these smaller races. And the 45-49 age group has a lot of people with their FOP folks still posting some fast times.

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

35-39 here (I am actually 34)

I have almost no interest in racing local anymore. I got into the sport at the end of 2017 and have now done:

5 Sprints (3 of which were in a 1 month time frame at the end of 2017, 1 was on vacation, and 1 was a benchmark to see my improvement from the prior year)
3 Olympic (All 3 were done last year. It is a fun distance to race, but I was being told to race elite at future "regional" events. I am not that good.)
2 Half Ironman (Totally under prepared for them 26th M30-34 in my first one and 20th M30-34. Told you in not that good.)
1 Full Ironamn- (Worked harder but still felt way under prepared. 25h M35-39.)

I will be doing 70.3 races in back to back weekends in a few weeks coming up.

I do not plan on racing locally right now. I tend to either win my age group of podium overall at the events and feel like a jerk.

I would argue that the faster folks in the age groups being discussed have mostly stopped racing local and are focusing on competing on a larger stage. Unfortunately, that means travel, paying more money, and going to M-dot races is a general requirement. I could be totally wrong about this.


Edit: New Jersey State Triathlon gets like 1,000-1,200 entries and has a pretty darn deep field racing. It's the only Oly I really considered this year...just didn't work out.

Indeed. And I believe that I could talk to it. I am on a level to do KQ (Ironman Frankfurt) with an avg. of 10 hours training per week (without any specific former elite level). Sure, there is always room for improvement. But I am confident enough to say that I spend those 10 hours already pretty smartly ;-)

I know of skaggs. The guy doesn't age. At big races 5150, ITU San Diego, he beat all 20 year olds for overall win. Would be a good interview if ST reached out him ... Dan is near by

I think its really hard to draw these conclusions, every race is sooo different.

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2024: Bevoman, Galveston, Alcatraz, Marble Falls, Santa Cruz

He lived and raced fast some time ago in Florida.

He lived fast? That's doubly impressive

I'm sure the answer to this question is multifaceted, but don't discount modern pharmaceuticals as one of the reasons. I've been paying attention to this phenomenon for several years, both at a local level (Phoenix, AZ) and nationally. I've been racing since 1996. Over those years there are a handful of guys that I've completed against season after season. During our 20s and 30s the overall performances remained stable. There were those guys that I knew would always beat me. There was a group that I would beat 50% of the time. There was a group that I would beat without much issue if I had a semi-normal race. Then there was a group that I didn't know the names of the people because they were always way down the standings. Starting in our 40s that pecking order got all screwy. Some of the guys that I didn't know the names of starting smashing me consistently, along with a good portion of the guys that beat me consistently. Some of the guys that would consistently end up 5-7 behind me in Olympic distance races over 20 years started ending up 3-4 in front of me, consistently. I went back and did some research. One thing stood out. Relative swim times stayed similar over the years. So did run times. The normal decline you would expect was observed. Swim times got slower over the years at a smaller rate than did our runs times. But on the bike, many, if not all had vast improvements on the bike from their 20s. They were setting PRs, but only riding.

I went back and looked at finish times at a local race that has maintained the exact same course since I first raced it in 1997. From 1997 to about 2013 there were only 3 athletes of the 45+ AG that were in the top 10. In the past three years there were 12. The majority of those that were in this group slowed or maintained performance in the swim and run, but now crushed the bike. Some guys were going 4 minutes faster on this Olympic bike course than they did 5, 10, 15, even 20 years ago.

I've also been riding the same Tuesday group ride for the past 12 years. About three years ago everyone started commenting on how many "older guys" (50+) were now pushing the pace on the group ride. On the few hills and sustained hard climbs we do, it was not the college aged guys at the front, but many of the older guys.

Then I had my epiphany. A guys started chatting me up during another large group ride. He was a "doctor" at one of the many anti-aging clinics we now have in the Phoenix area. He was soliciting me to come to his clinic for his male-enhancement, anti-aging protocol of testosterone replacement therapy, HGH, vitamin B and nicotinamide riboside (NAD). Then the dumb-ass started pointing out the people in the group that were his patients. I guess he forgot about HIPPA. He went into great detail about how his therapy translates into more increases, thus much faster ride times as well as overall enhanced training. Up to this point I've always suspected this was the case, but now I had a guy verifying what I was thinking and seeing.

So, when you wonder why the 45+ AG might be getting faster than those in the 35+ groups, don't discount the crazy explosion in guys using Testosterone and other substances, especially the super competitive guys at the front that tend to have more disposable income that most.

So, when you wonder why the 45+ AG might be getting faster than those in the 35+ groups, don't discount the crazy explosion in guys using Testosterone and other substances, especially the super competitive guys at the front that tend to have more disposable income that most. //

I've been beating that drum for over 15 years now, glad to see someone else doesnt have their head in the sand. Not to point at any one individual, although many have been actually caught now, in an almost non existent testing culture. That says a lot right there. But the overall times and performances across the board, triathlon, running, cycling, and swimming, is just off the charts. It bums me out two fold, one is that I have to actually compete in this environment, and as I age, the drugs get more effective. That is just putting some things out of reach anymore. And lastly, I would love to have confidence in some of the performances I see in the old folks, a benchmark so to speak to reach for. But I dont anymore, so just ignore most to what is going on, and just do my best.. I would just like to know how prevalent it is, hopefully not as bad as I imagine.

Would be fun sometime for some organization to come in one day after some big race, and take a hair follicle from everyone and test them. Just for data purposes, just to see the enormity of the problem, or not I guess...

That’s a disappointing story.

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

While I don't discount the prevalence of pharmaceuticals, I know some if the guys my age who are faster than me are taking something, just don't know which ones. I think the advent of the current indoor training options for the bike are somewhat responsible. The monotony of the trainer has been greatly reduced. I've really only trained seriously over the winter on the bike the last 5 or so years; that has led to significant gains.

Yeah you guys have a pretty big problem with that up there. It doesn't even amaze me anymore when dudes who have never been within 15min of me in an oly are now only 3-5 min back. Or guys who are 48-55 turning in 15-30 min 70.3/IM PB's who have been racing for 10+ years.

I have a pic somewhere of one of the pros I used to coach a few yrs back who was up in the PHX area standing next to a 50+ yo up there after a swim in their swim trunks.

If you chopped the heads off you'd have thought the pro was the 50yo and the 50yo was the 24yo just based on how lean, how ripped, and how young their skin looked.

Unfortunately for us AG athletes USAT has shown very little interest in testing AG athletes outside of national championships events.

You racing the LTF tri in Sept? I'm debating it, will probably head up for it.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
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