Study: Older Runners Getting Faster

Sept. 1, 2004 -- The Fountain of Youth is within ourselves.

That is the resounding message from a major new study out of Yale University that shows that older top finishers in the New York City Marathon have significantly improved their performances over the past couple of decades. In fact, they've done better than younger runners at improving individual performances, and that's especially true for females.

The bottom line of the study is this: Don't wait for a medical breakthrough if you want to reduce the ravenous effects of aging. Instead, get off your rear end and hit the bricks.

"Our data reflect the potential for improvement of the general health status of our aging population," says Peter Jokl, professor of orthopedics at the Yale School of Medicine and one of the nation's leading experts on sports medicine. Jokl is the lead author of the study, which appears in the August issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Paul Sethi and Andrew Cooper, also of Yale, are the co-authors.

Faster Through the Years

The researchers studied the records of 415,000 runners who participated in the New York City Marathon from 1983 through 1999 to see if what they call "elite master" athletes — those at least 50 years of age who are capable of completing a marathon — had improved over the years, and how they compared to younger runners.

In a finding that is consistent with other studies, the researchers found that top younger runners showed no improvement.

"The performance of the 20-30 and 30-40 age groups has actually plateaued, with no improvement in running time," the researchers wrote. But that was far from the case for older runners, although older males gained less ground than females. That's possibly because it was "unfashionable" for females to run in marathons just a few decades ago, so they have more room for improvement today, the researchers suggest.