It is important to consider that people have different intellectual strengths at different ages. In my teens and twenties computation was my strength and I would happily grind away on page after page of calculations eighteen hours a day, weeks at a time. In fifty five and that doesn't happen anymore. So I do feel I have lost a degree of mental nimbleness and speed. On the other hand I am a better communicator and educator now than when I was young. Someone wrote that age can bring a certain cunningness to solving problems.
Another pertinent issue is whether you have previously been maintaining an active intellectual and maybe even scientific live. You may have important skills, knowledge and perspective you can leverage and transplant into mathematics. I went back to college in math in my fifties and the fact that I had spent twenty five intellectually active years in the software development industry gave me important competitive skills that had a dramatic impact in how well I did in certain math classes. I took an advanced differential equations class that used Mathematica. My background as a programmer and twenty years experience with Mathematica allowed me to attack homework problems quickly with a large variety of methods so that after one hour's work I would have a ten or twenty page Mathematica notebook dissecting the problem I could share with my class. A broad background in relevant areas, attacking a problem in a number of radically different ways, and being interested in communicating and educating others are all strengths I developed with age.
