Most athletes peak at about the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven. For tennis players, it’s a bit younger; for golfers, a bit older. Most everyone starts to fade by about thirty. There are, however, a few freaks. One of them pitches relief for the Yankees. Another of them won the two-mile at the Millrose Games, at the Armory, on Saturday night.

The runner is named Bernard Lagat, and he’s thirty-eight. He completed two miles, indoors, in eight minutes and nine-and-a-half seconds. That’s the fastest an American has ever run, and Lagat now holds national records in the fifteen-hundred metres, the mile, the three-thousand metres, the two-mile, and the five-thousand metres.

Lagat grew up in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province, often running to and from school, and to and from home, in the middle of the day, for lunch. He came to the United States for college, and has been a citizen for a decade. He’s won an Olympic bronze and an Olympic silver. This past summer in London, he almost tripped on the final turn; he came in fourth, but had a shot at gold. The fastest mile he ever ran was twelve years ago. The fastest two-mile was this past weekend. Watch the finals of the 2004 Olympics, as he runs, almost in stride, down the last straightaway with Hicham El Guerrouj, who is still the world-record holder in the event. El Guerrouj, who is the same age as Lagat, retired after those Olympics.

What explains his longevity? One obvious explanation is that he doesn’t train very hard, at least in the way that “hard” is defined by serious runners. Lagat takes a day off every week, and he takes five weeks off every fall. At his peak, he runs about sixty-five miles a week. When he talks about his training, he sounds relaxed. Cam Levins, who came in third on Saturday night, recently ran a hundred and ninety miles in a week. Lagat does run his workouts hard, and he has perfect form. As the runners looped around the Armory, everyone else looked a little bit off at one point or another. Their shoulders sagged, their heads bobbed, they seemed slightly asymmetrical. Watch how still this cheetah keeps its head as it runs. Now watch Lagat.

Running smoothly, and taking time off, surely helps keep Lagat injury-free, and much of one’s success in running is cumulative. It takes time to recover from getting hurt, and running injuries often lead to more running injuries. Hurt your right hamstring one year, and you may alter your stride and hurt your left knee the next year. It’s not impossible that drugs are involved in Lagat’s success; he was briefly tainted by a positive test for E.P.O., in 2003, though further testing of another sample he gave after that meet cleared him. Since then, he has tested clean.

Why do athletes decline? In some sports, it’s the result of weakened hand-eye coördination. In others, it’s because of repeated blows to the body. Success in Lagat’s main event, though, depends mainly on something called VO 2 max, which is the amount of oxygen that your body can get to the blood at a moment of maximum effort. Genetics play a role, as does training. What’s interesting about VO 2 max, however, is that it doesn’t really decline with age—if you continue to train hard. According to a scientific paper by Michael Joyner, who maintains a fascinating blog about athletic performance, the VO 2 max of sedentary adults drops by about ten per cent a decade, beginning at about age thirty. For people who train consistently, however, much of this decline is blunted. Running may kill you; it may hurt you; it may bore you; it may make you boring. But it can help you from feeling older.

So why do so many people, and so many runners, slow down after they turn thirty? Injuries, of course. And then there’s life. “It is possible,” Joyner writes, “that, even among the most competitive runners, there might be an age-related decline in the frequency, intensity, and duration of training due to a combination of the inevitable reduction in physiological factors along with orthopedic or motivational considerations.” In other words, we have kids, and we get lazy.

Lagat has children—he carried them around the track after winning on Saturday. But he keeps going, perhaps because of the time he takes off. Or maybe it’s because of his attitude. He always seems composed. He congratulates the people he loses to and the people he beats. He shared a victory lap this weekend with Edward Cheserek, another immigrant from Kenya who had just set the American high-school record in the two-mile.

In his attitude, Lagat resembles another ageless wonder of this city. “His manner-free style and classic, near-consummate effectiveness maintained and seemed at one with the absorbing slowness and inner complexity of the game.” That’s Roger Angell writing about Mariano Rivera. But it could just as easily be about Bernard Lagat.

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Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, has written about Olympic track, running and Lance Armstrong’s lies, and Paul Ryan’s marathoning.

Photograph by Malcolm Gladwell.