Health & Fitness

The Science: Riding the Storm

Four giant waves pummeled the men. Finally, they were driven out of the crash zone. Lickle floated 50 feet away from Hamilton, while the watercraft surfaced a quarter-mile away. Lickle's face was gray. "I need a tourniquet," he shouted. The aluminum fin of a spare board had flayed open Lickle's left leg from the back of the knee to the ankle. Blood gushed from the wound, clouding the water and causing Hamilton to fear that the fin had punctured Lickle's femoral artery. They were half a mile offshore, and no other surfers were in sight. Hamilton realized there would be no help--it was all on him. He stripped off his wet suit and cinched it above Lickle's wound. He swam in a dead sprint to the watercraft, afraid that, behind him, Lickle was bleeding to death or, potentially even worse, that the blood spurting into the ocean would serve as chum for the tiger sharks that cruise the reef.

What do I tell Brett's wife? Hamilton thought with each stroke. What will I tell his kids?

The watercraft's engine started. Its radiophone still functioned. Stark naked and reeling from the quarter-mile sprint and his own beating by the waves, Hamilton radioed 911 as he raced to pick up Lickle. The sharks hadn't discovered him. Hamilton screamed into shore, steering with one arm, cradling his hemorrhaging friend with the other. An ambulance met the surfers on the beach. Lickle's femoral artery was intact, but the wound would require 53 staples to close.

Once he knew that Lickle was safe, Hamilton looked out to sea, where the monsters still stomped along the Outer Sprecks break. In honor of his friend and because of his own uncompromising code, Laird Hamilton rode back out to surf a few more big waves, to properly close his terrible, triumphant day.

40 is the new 30…at least on the playing field One evening last June, in a more publicized but less fraught equivalent of Hamilton's ordeal, seven pitchers age 40 or older took the mound in major-league baseball games. In fact, 40-year-olds are playing a more prominent role in almost every professional sport, from ice hockey to ultimate fighting, not to mention the swollen ranks of masters athletes competing in all kinds of races and activities. It's as though 21st-century professional athletes and weekend warriors are living out the Dorian Gray fantasy: Through a combination of scientific training, disciplined diet, and advanced sports medicine, they are overturning immutable laws of biology, and they are reversing, or at least fighting to a draw, the aging process. The new old pros are busy making 40 the new 30. The truth behind the headlines, while encouraging, is complicated. Overall, athletic performance clearly declines with age. At the same time, late-career athletic productivity is showing an unprecedented rise. To explain the apparent contradiction, let's start with the bad news.

In 2005, Ray C. Fair, a Yale University economist, published a statistical analysis examining the age of peak performance among major-league baseball players. Fair determined that the age of peak production for hitters was 28, and that pitchers achieved optimal production at 27. Data from the National Football League and National Basketball Association tells a similar story. The Fair study further determined that, at age 40, a ballplayer's average decline from peak performance stood at 9.8 percent when measured by on-base -percentage plus slugging percentage (or OPS), and 14.9 percent when measured by earned run average. In other sports, the decline is less dramatic: At 40, the average decline from peak for sprinters is 3 percent; distance runners, 4.1 percent; and swimmers, 2 percent.

While these numbers seem modest--if not actually encouraging--from a citizen athlete's perspective, they are huge for elite performers. The average middle-distance runner who notched a 4:00 mile at his peak, for instance, slows to 4:12 at age 40. On the track, that translates to a gap of about 100 meters. "It's irrefutable: Certain physical changes accompany advancing age," says orthopedic surgeon Vonda Wright, director of the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletes (PRIMA) program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "Power, flexibility, balance, and VO2 max all either level off or decline from peak levels."

Various studies in the American Journal of Sports Medicine and the Journal of Clinical Sports Medicine have detailed the different aspects of this decline: Starting around age 30, maximum heart rate decreases six to 10 beats per minute per decade, thigh muscles start to lose density, intramuscular fat increases, and the number of type-2 fast-twitch muscle fibers decreases. Lung function and capacity, anabolic hormone levels, and the number and quality of neural pathways also show inexorable drops with advancing years. Among all the physiological changes connected with aging, none correlates more closely with athletic performance than the decline in VO2 max, which measures the body's maximum cardiovascular performance. The latest data suggests that VO2 max decreases by approximately 10 percent per decade, starting at around 30, according to a groundbreaking study published this year in the Journal of Physiology. The researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Colorado at Boulder determined that athletes could still maintain peak endurance performance until age 35. This was followed by modest decreases until age 50, with more dramatic declines thereafter. Three factors contribute to this decline: lower lactate threshold, lower exercise economy, and lower VO2 max. Of these factors, VO2 max proved the most important.