Yale Professor on Aging in Sports

Our friend "Anonymous Economist," who last posted on the theory of rational expectations as it relates to achieving PRs, continues to prove she’s way too smart for this blog by pointing us to Yale finance professor and world-renowned econometrics authority Ray Fair for his theories on aging in sports. At age 45, Fair ran a sub-three-hour marathon. His bottom line: We don't slow down as much as you might think.

Fair uses performance data for elite athletes to estimate biological-capacity deterioration rates. A calculator on his web page enables users to compute predicted minimum swimming and running times by age based on their best previous time. The good news is that deterioration rates are small. For longer running events, time loss is 27% from age 35 to 65, 38% from age 35 to 75, and 76% from age 35 to 85. And Fair suggests you won't be half as slow as you are/were at 35 until your late 80s!

As for the public policy implications of the research, Fair suggests a tax break for anyone who finishes the marathon in an age adjusted respectable time.

Leave it to an economist to set his marathon goal so that he stays on his regression line. May you outperform yours!

Thanks, Anonymous Economist. Let’s all raise our Gatorade cups and vow together to never stop outperforming our regression lines!