Performance in 100-km ultra-marathoners - At which age it reaches its peak? The number of 100 km runs and the number of successful finishers is rising from year to year. Nevertheless, we still know relatively little as the age of the best performance has developed over this route. We have therefore searched for all successful finishers since 1959 and with over 370,000 successful women and men who have brought such a competition to the goal of examining the development of the age of the best performance. To find this age of the best performance, there are various options such as 5-year intervals or 1-year intervals to consider the best, the top ten or all finishers per group. The age of the highest performance was 40-44 years in women and 45-49 years in men when all finishers were analyzed at 5-year intervals, while the women were 30-35 years and at men 35-39 yearswhen the top ten finishers were taken into account. When the finishers are analyzed at 1-year intervals, we find the age of excellence at 41 years of women and 45 years in men taking into account all finishers, and at 39 years in women and 41 years in men taking into account theTop ten finishers. The age of peak performance was younger at the women than in men, which could reflect the overall younger age of women as men in this discipline. Compared to previous studies, we observed the excellence of around 10 years later than previously known, which is due to an increase in age of the finisher over the calendar years.
Since the knowledge of the service center for each sport is unique, trainers and fitness trainers could benefit from the findings of the present study in the long-term training of their athletes. The whole work can be found under https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32324710/