How Old Is Old?
Does Age Matter?
When you were a child, anyone who was at least twenty years old was grown up. Anyone who was thirty plus was just old.
When you were a late teenager, thinking of being 40 was out of the question – that was so old. I remember my mum getting an “over the hill” mug for her 40th birthday, so 40 must’ve been positively ancient!
As you go through the decades though, old age seems to be that little bit further away – until you hit 50 that is. It seems that all of a sudden you are making age-excuses for everything from being a bit stiff and creaky to being a bit forgetful to not being able to handle a night out as well as you used to be able to. But how old is old?
How Old Is Old?
Well, there are some official classifications of “old” and they vary between countries. For example, you are elderly in Germany (What happens when you age1) if you are aged 60 to 75 years, and classed as old if you are between 75 and 90. Anything over 90 and you are very old. Over 100 and you are known as a centenarian, which is a common classification across most countries.
In the UK it’s less clear. Traditionally we see 65 as being the start of old age because it used to tie in with the standard retirement and pension age. In 2019, Age UK2 were still using 65 years old as the starting point for quoting population percentages in certain age groups in an information leaflet. However, an article from BBC news3 also from 2019, questions the 65 year old marker for the start of old age. It raises the fact that there is an increasing ‘older’ population in the UK, and this puts a new perspective on how we should view old age.
The article states “we should consider the years people have ahead of them, not just chronological age when deciding what “old” looks like.” They use a 15-year future life expectancy model to judge the start of old age. For example, in 1951, if you were around 60 years old you could expect to live until you were 75. The 15-year life expectancy had changed by the time the 1990s came around, and you could expect to live until you were 80. This effectively shifted the start of old age to 65 years. In 2019, this had shifted to 85 years, moving the start of old age to 70. It’s expected to rise again by 2057, this time to 75.
Do You Want To Live Forever?
This all very encouraging, but so far what we’ve been talking about is how long you live for. The medical community is very good at helping people live longer. With advances in medication and surgical practices, you can expect to live longer than ever before. This is often referred to as longevity, and has long been the Holy Grail promoted by movies, gurus and some sectors of the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries. But is it really longevity that’s important? Do you want to live forever?
Ageing is complex, mainly because we are complex beings. But one thing that is certain in my case, is that I want to have a high quality of life rather than just a long life. According to some commentators, the majority of “older” people live a fairly miserable existence through their later years. They fall foul to all manner of age-related diseases and disorders, and can spend more than a decade experiencing a poor quality of life. A great book that looks at this in some detail is Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia. More specific to runners is Richard Askwith’s book called The Race Against Time: Adventures in Late-Life Running.
Richard’s book poses questions and uses masters athletes as case studies, some of whom have achieved some incredible things. And while these two books are very different, one thing they do agree on is prioritising a higher quality of life as we age.
So getting back to answering the question posed in the title of this article, How Old is Old, and Does it Matter?
Lifespan and Healthspan
Official classifications aside, I believe that up to a point we are as old as we allow ourselves to be. There is an inevitability to ageing, and at the time of writing, there is an inevitability to death. However, the quality of that lifespan is largely under our own influence.
Your quality of life throughout your lifespan is called your healthspan. Officially, this is defined as being disease free. But as Peter Attia asks in his book, is this really enough? Don’t you deserve to be thriving in your later years? Can you be like some of those masters athletes highlighted in Richard Askwith’s book? Can you at least carry on running the way you want to for as long as you want to?
So does “old” matter? Ultimately I think it does, but I also believe you can have a lot of fun, live a full life and carry on running well beyond what you may think is possible.
References:
- InformedHealth.org [Internet]. Cologne, Germany: Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG); 2006-. What happens when you age? 2020 Sep 10. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK563107/
- Ageuk.org.uk [Internet]. Later Life in the United Kingdom 2019. https://www.ageuk.org.uk/globalassets/age-uk/documents/reports-and-publications/later_life_uk_factsheet.pdf.
- bbc.co.uk [Internet]. 2019 Nov 19. Old age: Why 70 may be the new 65. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50472775.
