Can you get fitter as you get older?

VO2 max starts declining at 25. Uh-huh. Uh, by 50, it starts to fall off a cliff. And it used to be one of these things where it didn't matter what you thought about was possible in the second half of your life, somebody was gonna hammer you with VO2 max. It's your upper aerobic capacity. So when you're breathing really hard, if you're jumping rope, if you're mogul skiing, if you're doing high-intensity training, that's what you're training. It's your upper respiratory range. And then this weird thing started happening in ultramarathons. They started to realize that 70-year-olds were beating 60-year-olds and 80-year-olds were beating 70. And so the older people were doing much better and they went, wow, this is really weird. What's going on? Let's look at the VO2 max of just an sort of average, uh, triathlete in their 80s. They have the VO2 max of healthy 35-year-olds. So this thing that we thought fell off a cliff starting at 25 and you could never get it back, we now know if you train it properly, like you are doing with high-intensity training, you can really preserve it.