Plan your last decade first
A longevity doctor argues you're training for the wrong finish line, and it isn't the one on your birthday cake.
Peter Attia calls it the marginal decade: whatever ten years come last, when the body has the least reserve and the smallest margin for error. Most people never plan for it. They notice it's arrived.
His fix is to work backward. Decide what you want to physically do at, say, 85 — carry a suitcase up stairs, get off the floor without hands, hike with a grandchild — and treat that as the target you're training toward for the next forty years, not something you'll figure out later. He calls this backcasting, and argues that forecasting from today's fitness almost always undershoots, because decline compounds quietly.
The centerpiece of his case is cardiorespiratory fitness, measured as VO2 max — roughly how efficiently your heart, lungs, and muscles deliver and use oxygen. Attia points to research showing it outpredicts blood pressure, cholesterol, even smoking status as a forecaster of how long people live.
Most health advice asks what you should do today. His question is stranger and harder to shake: what do you need to still be able to do at ninety, and have you started yet.