GOOD FOR YOUR AGE?

There is no avoiding the fact that cyclists slow down as they grow older, but what counts as good for your age, and how can you stay faster for longer? David Bradford goes in search of age-related gold standards

- David Bradford

Earlier this year, we received an email with the subject line: ‘How good are you?’. No, it wasn’t a phishing attack; it was a genuine enquiry from a reader named Alex. To our relief, Alex wasn’t getting in touch to conduct an audit of CW staff FTPs or Zwift rankings. Instead, he was asking a serious question related to cycling performance and age.

“We all want to know how our numbers stack up against club-mates and pros, and we’ve all studied the Coggan watts-perkilo table,” he wrote, “but for cyclists of a certain age, these comparisons are difficult. We’re missing comparative statistics within our own cohort.”

It was a good question: how to benchmark your performance against your cycling peers? I immediately thought of the age-grading system used in running – a formula that calculates your performance as a percentage of the world-best for your age. In lifetime-best form, aged about 30, I’d hit around 82 per cent. These days, nearing 40 and comparing my ever-slowing times with super-veterans like the USA’s Bernard Lagat (5k in 13:38, aged 41), my agegraded score has plummeted, but it’s still an interesting yardstick. Cycling has no such system; in road racing, the reason why is obvious – there are too many variables. But in time trialling, there is nothing preventing us from comparing performances across the ages just like runners do.