I was wondering about my cardiovascular abilities. How much of a bad shape I am really in?
And how to benchmark my cardiovascular fitness? How to track progress? What would be a reasonable fitness goal?
So many questions.
Running is the simplest solution. It only requires a flat surface and a watch and you can measure for how long/far you can go, and how intense the activity is (i.e. how fast you run).
But what about goals? One answer would be to aim to meet the admission criteria for an armed force. For example, the Australian Navy require that you run 2.4km in 13 minutes.
Another answer: could you beat a 100 year-old in a race? But how fast does a 100 year-old run?
For the answer we look at the world records for master athletics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_masters_athletics)
I built the following table that shows the time and pace required to beat each master record. Notes: based on men time. Time and pace are truncated to the whole unit.
Looking behind the data, the youngest categories seem to be dominated by ex-top-athletes. The further down the age scale, the athletes seem to have an affinity with sports over their life, but not top athletes.
So how do you compare?
