After carefully considering the 3 feet of the fitness tripod, I came to an unexpected and somewhat unsettling conclusion:there was nothing wrong: I was eating right and getting enough sleep. Moreover my exercise technique had probably further improved compared to 5 years earlier when I could bench-press my record 235 lbs.
The only explanation left was that I was 5 years older.
ACKNOWLEDGING ONE'S LIMITS
I must confess that it took me a while to recognize this very basic truth: as we age, even if we exercise on a very regular basis as I do, peak performance imperceptibly drops. This should sound like a common place not worth mentioning to most baby boomers: we are not as strong or fast as in our 20's or 30's. Yet for a surprisingly large number of mature athletes, particularly in their 40's and 50's, the fact that their physical abilities are bound to decline with age no matter how hard they train is a kind of taboo, or at least something they vehemently deny, no matter what the scientific evidence suggests.
The most striking example I have in mind are long-distance runners in their 50's trying to find all kinds of exotic or downright absurd explanations to the ever so slight increase in their marathon or semi-marathon time.
I perfectly understand that this may come as a sobering reality to most life-long athletes like myself who had experienced constantly increasing performances into their late 30's or early 40's. To be honest, it took me several months as well to accept this basic fact of life.
The reason why I wanted to address this subject though is not because I enjoy raining on others' parades but because not coming to this realization early enough may wreak havoc on a mature athlete's body. As illustrated in the New York Times article I mentioned before
trying to desperately hang on to personal records as we age very often lead to serious injuries typically as a result of overtraining.
INJURY RISKS SKYROCKET FOR MIDDLE AGED OVERTRAINED ATHLETES
To get back to the long distance example, a 50-year old runner desperate not to see his peak performance decrease will probably first try to increase training frequency from say 3 times a week to 4, or increase the duration of each training session from 10 miles to 13. This change will almost always result in failure.
As we age our training capacity (the volume of exercise we can absorb weekly) declines in part because our recuperation abilities do too. Our body tells us to stop sooner than 20 years before and for good reasons. Our conjunctive tissues are weaker, our cardiovascular capacity decreases and so on. If we persist in not listening to our body, disaster often ensues: fatigue fractures, tendinopathies (formely referred to as tendinitis), muscle or ligament tears are the most frequent consequences for both resistance and aerobic athletes.
Moreover these injuries take a lot longer to heal in a mature athlete than a 20-something.
SIMPLY NOT WORTH THE RISKS
At the end of the day, pushing oneself to the max in a futile effort to stop or turn back the biological clock is just not worth the risks: if you must stop all exercise for 6 months following a shoulder cuff injury then you will have lost out by a huge margin in terms of fitness level to somebody with a wiser, less intensive regimen. And recovering from a 6-month interruption to reclaim one's pre-injury fitness level can be hell (I went through this as a 22-year-old after I broke my anterior cruciate ligament, so you can imagine what this would have been like in my mid 40's!).
When it comes to fitness, my mantra has thus become: "the winner is the last man standing at the gym". I'd rather still be working out at 60 than having been a top athlete with impressive personal records in my 30's but 35% body fat today because I cannot train anymore as a result of recurrent severe injuries.
EXERCISING WITHIN ONE'S LIMITS IS WELL WORTH THE EFFORT
Having said that, the above recommendation should not be construed as meaning that since performance decreases with age, no matter how hard one trains, it is just not worth training at all after a certain age.
Actually the exact opposite is true. In spite of having gone down from 235 lbs at about 40 to 225 lbs now, my bench press max is a still lot higher than the average 47-year old. According to an age-ordered chart by the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research, my performance is approximately 70% more than the average man my age and body weight (225 lbs vs 134 lbs). Actually the discrepancy between the physical performance between a trained and sedentary person tends to increase with age, as sarcopenia starts to wreak havoc at an accelerating rate on sedentary individuals. In other words, the older you are, the most difference you will see in physical fitness and appearance compared to the vast majority of people your age, to the point when a large number of people in their 70's or 80's won't be able to live independently anymore because of sarcopenia and other associated ailments, whereas you will probably still be enjoying a fully active life at their age. Isn't a steady, reasonable training regimen throughout life worth it?
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