Re: aging and riding

On 4/30/2025 6:25 PM, Mark J cleary wrote:

I am in the process of refinishing/repainting my kitchen cabinets. A tedious job you have to remove doors and handles. Clean, sand a bit, and paint 2 coats. Getting the hinges off and bending and getting on the floor is not easy as it was 6 years ago when I repainted inside of house.
 Normally I do  my ride early in the morning and come in and eat good them rest a bit and dive in. Well not the back does not like all the bending and up and down. I was never good at it and not real flexible for sure. On top of that the normal 40-55 mile ride now takes enough out of me that I don't have the pace I once did.
 Even 6 years ago I would jump  on bike and ride 50 and come back and go for say 4-5 hours easy. Now I tell you after 2 I am getting wiped. This painting is like painting a bike you have to mask things to avoid problems.

Joe Friel's book Fast After 50 has detailed tables showing the performance loss with aging of age-group competitors. Let's just say it isn't linear (and rather depressing TBH). I can't find any snips from his book online, but this is a pretty close representation:
https://www.whyiexercise.com/images/jogging-hiking-aging-decline-estimate.jpg
which is from here:
https://www.whyiexercise.com/aging-and-exercise.html
Not discussed there is the time to recover, which is also non-linear. Last fall I went on a rather hilly 75 mile ride. We weren't exactly hammering, but I was surprised at how whipped I was the next day - And that was at the end of a summer of training/racing.