Q&A on P/AR scores and related matters

What does it mean to maintain P/AR performance across years?

Maintaining your P/AR score implies that relative to the world's fittest persons of the same age as you, you are staying at the same relative level of fitness. 

How difficult is it to maintain P/AR performance across years?

To be succesful year-on-year in preventing your P/AR score from dropping becomes progressively more difficult. This is the case even for P/AR scores that are quite modest. A given person might be able to maintain a certain P/AR score, but some time in the future his or her health will falter or other set backs will happen, and (s)he will never get back at the same P/AR level. Why is this almost certain to happen? If you think about it, it should become obvious that to maintain your P/AR score (no matter how high or how low) ultimately implies reaching world-record level oldest age. Probably long before that time your P/AR score will have dropped significantly. The key point is: when the decades pass your P/AR score compares you with ever different individuals who happen to set the bar for that particular age. If you are 40 years old, you are compared with world record performers of roughly 40 years of age. Ten years later your P/AR turns into a comparison of world record performers of roughly 50 years of age. And so on. And while keeping up with a single individual might be feasible, doing so against the top-performer of a whole army of individuals is virtually impossible.

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