Great article from the NY Times Health and Fitness section. They had to set a new age level classification as he set a world record for people over 105 year olds. Mr. Marchand is the only one in the that group. Testing shows he's more aerobically fit then most 50 year olds. And his aerobic fitness has increased in the last several years, by raising the intensity of his training. Excerpts below, hit the link for the full article – it's about a dozen paragraphs.
Mr. Marchand pedaled more than 14 miles, setting a global benchmark for cyclists age 105 and older. That classification had to be created specifically to accommodate him. No one his age previously had attempted the record.
Mr. Marchand, who was born in 1911, already owned the one-hour record for riders age 100 and older, which he had set in 2012.
It was as he prepared for that ride that he came to the attention of Veronique Billat, a professor of exercise science at the University of Evry-Val d’Essonne in France. At her lab, Dr. Billat and her colleagues study and train many professional and recreational athletes.
She was particularly interested in Mr. Marchand’s workout program and whether altering it might augment his endurance and increase his speed.
Conventional wisdom in exercise science suggests that it is very difficult to significantly add to aerobic fitness after middle age. In general, VO2 max, a measure of how well our bodies can use oxygen and the most widely accepted scientific indicator of fitness, begins to decline after about age 50, even if we frequently exercise.
But Dr. Billat had found that if older athletes exercised intensely, they could increase their VO2 max. She had never tested this method on a centenarian, however.
Leave a Reply to nancy Cancel reply