国产吃瓜黑料

GET MORE WITH OUTSIDE+

Enjoy 35% off GOES, your essential outdoor guide

UPGRADE TODAY

If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. This supports our mission to get more people active and outside. Learn more

Wisdom, a deeper kind of knowing that can only be gained through experience, matters.
Wisdom, a deeper kind of knowing that can only be gained through experience, matters. (Photo: Rob And Julia Campbell/Stocksy)

An Ode to Being Old

On the harder-to-measure benefits of age and experience

Published: 
Wisdom, a deeper kind of knowing that can only be gained through experience, matters.
(Photo: Rob And Julia Campbell/Stocksy)

New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you. Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! .

What age is someone most likely to achieve their peak performance?

It's a good question, and a聽logical聽place to start is with cognitive flexibility, or the ease with which one can switch between thinking about two different concepts or think about two different concepts simultaneously. Lots of people call this 鈥渟harpness,鈥 补苍诲听 it peaks between the ages of 21 and 30. This aligns with the聽 that youth is a key determinant of success. In the聽 of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 鈥淵oung people are just smarter.鈥

Not so fast.

Zuckerberg聽wasn鈥檛 just being uncouth. He was downright wrong, at least according to the latest science.

A new聽, conducted by MIT in conjunction with the U.S. Census Bureau, analyzed 2.7 million people who started companies between 2007 and 2014 and found that among the fastest growing tech companies, the average founder was 45-years-old at the time of founding. The researchers also found that a 50-year-old is twice as likely to have a massive success鈥攄efined as a company that performs in the top 0.1 percent鈥攖han a 30-year-old. 鈥淭hese findings strongly reject common hypotheses that emphasize youth as a key trait of successful entrepreneurs,鈥澛 the authors of the study. 鈥淭he view that young people produce the highest-growth companies is in part a rejection of the role of experience.鈥

In other words: Success in business, even in the fast-paced start-up world, isn鈥檛 just about age-related smarts. Wisdom, a deeper kind of knowing that can only be gained through experience, matters too. And apparently, it matters quite a bit.

Might there be a parallel in sports?

It鈥檚 hard to say for sure, but contemporary performances suggest so. From a physiological sense,聽 shows that athletes tend to peak in their early to mid twenties. Yet many聽recent champions are much older: Des Linden (34), Shalane Flanagan (36), Meb Keflezighi (38), Roger Federer (36), Anthony Ervin (35), Serena Williams (35), Novak Djokovic (31), and Rafael Nadal (32)聽to name just a few.

鈥淵ou don鈥檛 need to be 25 years old to have your greatest performance,鈥澛says seven-time mountain bike world champion Rebecca Rusch, who, at age 47, was part of the third party ever to summit Mount Kilimanjaro via bike. 鈥淚鈥檓 still improving and having some of the best days of my career. I may not be as strong or have the same VO2 max as when I was younger, but wisdom is the great equalizer. I鈥檓 smarter about things like nutrition and race tactics, and I have a special self-knowledge that only results from years of experience.鈥

Alpine climber聽Jimmy Chin 丑补蝉听 that perhaps his best ever performance was a first ascent up Mount Meru, which he accomplished at age 37 on an expedition with Conrad Anker, who was 48 at the time.

鈥淵outh is wasted on the young,鈥 says Chin. 鈥淚鈥檝e had conversations with other climbers about surviving 28. At that age you may think you have enough experience to really go for it, but in reality, you still haven鈥檛 seen that much and whatever experience you do have can be easily outweighed by brashness and impatience.鈥

Chin, now 44, told me he鈥檚 realized that with age comes wisdom. 鈥淭he older you get the more experiences, successes, and failures you have. You have more information to draw from. The more information you have, the more patterns you recognize. The more patterns you recognize, the better you are at making tough decisions and assessing risk,鈥 he says. 鈥淵ou also become more efficient and better at pacing, both of which are important on challenging climbs.鈥

Maybe the best way to conceptualize age and athletic performance is to imagine two curves: one for physiological fitness, which peaks relatively young and then slowly declines; and another for wisdom, which starts off low and gradually rises over time. When these two curves intersect, you鈥檙e primed for your best performance.

The slope of these curves varies by task. For example, in sports that rely heavily on physiological fitness鈥攍ike sprinting 100 meters鈥攖he decline of the fitness curve would be steeper than in a sport like alpine climbing or orienteering, where pure fitness matters less and wisdom gained through experience matters more.

Lots of athletes intuitively follow the logic of these curves. It鈥檚 quite common for聽 补苍诲听 to go up in distance as they age. This makes sense. A marathon requires a lot more wisdom than a 5K and an Ironman requires a lot more wisdom than a sprint triathlon. A 2013聽 published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that the median age for a first-time ultra runner is 37 and the median age of all ultramarathon finishers is 43鈥攕even years older than the聽.听

All of this points toward a greater theme: Peak performance is complex, and results from a combination of variables. Sometimes the variables that are hardest measure, like experience, matter the most. So try not to sulk at your next birthday鈥擶hatever you鈥檙e giving away in age you鈥檙e gaining in wisdom.

Brad Stulberg () writes 国产吃瓜黑料鈥檚 Do It Better column and is the author of the book .

Lead Photo: Rob And Julia Campbell/Stocksy

Popular on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online