I like the idea of bench mark performance measures that you test every year or so - maybe more often, maybe less - but frequently enough that if your performance has fallen off a cliff, it is not too late to do something about it. The year we left Nelson (2012), we skinned up Summit Side of Ymir Mountain (about 400 metres) in 40 minutes which was pretty much exactly the time it had taken us to skin up when we first moved to Nelson a decade before. I remember the last time we did that, it would have been spring 2012, feeling pretty chuffed that over a decade I had maintained at least that level of power endurance.
There are literally dozens of bench mark metrics you could use, like lifting a sea kayak onto the roof of your car, climbing a certain route or boulder problem that is near your hardest grade, running your favourite trail in the same time as you did last year, squatting a certain weight, I could go on and on. The idea is to choose one or preferably more bench mark measures and test them occasionally. If you are still meeting your bench mark measures, carry on, if not, tweak something in your nutrition or training program. If you don't train, start. Exercise is a wonderful thing but will never replace training.
Mark Anderson (one half of the well known rock climbing Anderson brothers and author of The Rock Climbers Training Manual) writes "if you want to be as good as everyone else do what everyone else does. If you want to be better than that, you have to do something different." Most people watch their performance degrade as they age and do nothing about it, writing off sarcopenia, changing body composition, weakness, loss of fitness and strength as a natural adjutant to aging. Don't be like them.
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