Olympic competitors over 40 are inspiring — and less of a rarity than they used to be. Scientists say athletes with extreme staying power may be that way due to molecular-level advantages. Studying those could further the quest to understand and slow down the ravages of human aging.
In Paris, the very oldest competitors showed up in the shooting, table tennis and equestrian events. And there were middle-aged folks in golf, beach volleyball, cycling, sailing, rowing and fencing — not to mention skateboarding, where Andy Macdonald, a 51-year-old dad in cargo pants, and graying 49-year-old legend Dallas Oberholzer held the crowd spellbound. They all notched clear victories over ageist stereotypes — and maybe even time itself.
Russell Hepple, a professor in the physical therapy department at the University of Florida, told me he is studying people who’ve persisted in sports even into their 80s and 90s, hoping to understand how they do it.
There’s more funding for studies of centenarians, he said, but he thinks there’s more potential benefit in studying subjects with athletic longevity — like Ed Whitlock, who in his 70s ran multiple marathons in under three hours; the people who compete in the Boston Marathon’s 80+ category; or the woman who could still sprint, long-jump and hurl the shot put into her 90s.
Hepple is interested in not just extending life, but extending the healthy, highly functional part of life.
In one study, super-agers had an abundance of hundreds of different proteins compared to normal agers. Some of the proteins were already associated with athletic performance, but the connection others might play isn’t yet known. Eventually, researchers want to tease out which differences are caused by long-term strenuous workouts, and which are genetic gifts that might be possible to copy with drugs.
One of the big areas of focus today are tiny structures called mitochondria — the power plants of the body. They have their own DNA and a sort of life of their own: Thousands of them live and die inside our cells. Scientists think animals acquired mitochondria from tiny bacteria that invaded early cells and developed a symbiotic relationship with us.
In recent studies, Hepple said, scientists have found that as people age, they lose the ability to clean up a metabolic byproduct called kynurenine, which is associated with physical and cognitive decline. The mitochondria normally do this critical job.
As you age, the number of mitochondria in your cells declines, but that happens much more slowly in people who continue to do strenuous exercise. They’re able to activate mitochondrial biogenesis, in which old mitochondria die, get cleared from cells and are replaced by new ones.
The immune system also starts to malfunction more as we age. If you’re over a certain age and sedentary, and you suddenly decide you’re going to run 3 miles on a Sunday morning, your body will produce a flood of inflammatory cytokines — immune molecules that will make you feel sore the next day. But if you run a little on most days, your baseline level of inflammatory cytokines will drop, along with your risk of chronic disease.
In the future, researchers might find personalized drugs that can keep mitochondria refreshing themselves and keep inflammation in check. In the meantime, Hepple said, there are too many empty promises on the supplement shelves.
Garry Palmer, who runs a sports performance center in Cannock, England, said the people who succeed in staying in the game for decades find it enjoyable; the idea of “no pain, no gain” should go in the trash, replaced with listening to your body and knowing when to take a break.
Aging isn’t a steady downhill slide. Instead, it offers plenty of opportunities for periods of improvement and growth, as well as learning new techniques and skills.
Better training and equipment is already allowing Olympians to compete for longer. And as scientists learn more, what looks like extreme staying power now might one day start to appear ordinary.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science.
