People who analyze these things say that for any given sport, athletes typically achieve their top performance around a certain age and then gradually decline until they retire. Female gymnasts peak in their late teens. Swimmers of both genders peak in their early twenties. Tennis players peak in their early to mid twenties. Soccer, football, baseball, and basketball players peak in their mid to late twenties. Naturally, some athletes don’t fit the normal bell curve, such as swimmer Dara Torres, who won three Olympic silver medals in 2008 at age 41. But most athletes fall pretty close. This article discusses the typical ages of peak performance in various sports and some more detail on how and why athletes improve, peak, and decline.

However, this model assumes that the athlete has trained hard for years prior to the “optimum” age range in order to peak then. On an individual level, the timeline might be different for someone who picks up the sport later in life.

This is good news for me.

Distance runners tend to peak in their late twenties and early thirties. Indeed, in my last 10k a few weeks ago, the overall winner was a 31-year-old man who beat me by 10 minutes. Since I’m in my mid-thirties now, I should be starting my downhill slide into slowness. But I still have hope. I didn’t get serious about running until a couple of years ago. I missed years of training prior to what should have been my best years. So if I work hard, I should be able to keep improving for a while, maybe a few years or even more, until I become the fastest I can be. Fortunately, running is a sport one can do well for decades, and there are 50- and 60-year-olds still run times that I’ll never touch. So it’s not like I’ll suddenly turn into a turtle four years from now.

A day will come when I set my final personal record (PR). I won’t know until afterward, though, when I keep trying to beat it and never succeed, and I finally accept that I’ve crested the hill. That will be a bittersweet realization. After that, I’ll run every race expecting to finish behind the young phantom Andy who’s waiting for me at the finish line, swigging Gatorade and checking his mile splits on the iPhone.

But I haven’t peaked yet. I can still do better. I can still get stronger and go faster. I can still improve my technique and run more efficiently. I can still add fuel to the fire.

And I will.