Stronger, Faster, Older

An argument against acting your age as an endurance athlete.

Last week I brought on a new athlete—new to me, I should say, but hardly new to running. At 58, Scott has been a runner for 47 years and is coming back from a long, pandemic-related slump. During our onboarding call, he asked me about my approach to training older runners.

“I don’t have one,” I told him. “I treat every athlete the same, by which I mean I treat each athlete as an individual. I make no assumptions about what a particular athlete can or can’t do because of their age.”

Scott didn’t know it, but in making this remark I was loosely paraphrasing the legendary boxer Jack Johnson, who in 1910 became the first world heavyweight champion. Born and raised in South Texas in the Jim Crow era, Johnson—like all African Americans of that era—was the victim of vicious systemic racism, to which he had a unique response: He ignored it. In one of his several autobiographies, Johnson wrote, “I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist.”

In One Ear and Out the Other

Endurance athletes who achieve great things in middle age and beyond exhibit a similar attitude toward aging. One such athlete is six-time Ironman world champion Dave Scott, who came out of retirement at age 40 to finish second in Kona and returned two years later to take fifth, closing with the second-fastest marathon of the day (2:45:20).

“I didn’t feel like there were any boundaries,” Scott told me years later. “I was constantly reminded of how old I was, but those comments went in one ear and out the other.”

To be clear, Scott was not denying the reality of aging and its effects on an athlete’s body, nor am I. We just believe it’s a mistake to form assumptions about its effects on any individual, and far wiser to plow ahead as always (like Jack Johnson renting in a segregated white area of Bakersfield, California), bending to reality as necessary along the way.

“I think it comes back to how hungry you are in your workouts and how intense you are in your workouts,” Scott explained to me. “The intensity of the workouts drops off as people age. They allow it to.”

I’ve seen this often in my own coaching. Older athletes come to me having made all kinds of concessions to age in their training based merely on the expectation that they can’t do what they used to and without any real proof that they can’t. And according to science, these expectations are often wrong.

According to Science

A 2010 study by researchers at the University of Western Ontario, for example, investigated the time course of adaptations to endurance training in older subjects (average age 68) and younger subjects (average age 23) who were previously untrained. For 12 weeks, both groups completed three stationary bike rides per week and markers of cardiovascular fitness were tracked. Although VO₂max was initially lower in the older subjects, it increased substantially more in these individuals: 31 percent compared to 18 percent for the young’uns.

So much for the idea that older athletes aren’t as responsive to training.

More recently, scientists at Martin Luther University tracked recovery metrics in highly trained older subjects (average age 47) and younger subjects (average age 24) after a series of high-intensity interval workouts. The authors of the study reported that, “No significant differences were found in average lactate concentration, peak and average power, fatigue (%), %HR_max, RER [respiratory exchange ratio], RPE, and TQR [total quality recovery scale] values between the groups,” concluding that, “The findings of this study indicate that recovery following HIIT does not differ between the two age groups.”

So much for the idea that older athletes don’t recover as well.

Again, I’m not denying that the aging process imposes new limitations on athletes. That’s why we have age divisions at races and age-adjusted performance calculators. My point is merely that there is nothing to be gained and a lot to be lost by treating age-related limitations as categorically different from other limitations.

We’re All Limited

Throughout my adult running career, I’ve been susceptible to tendon injuries. That’s a limiter. I’ve also always been prone to overreaching when I try to do more than a little VO₂max training. That’s a limiter. Since 2020 I’ve struggled with long COVID. That’s a limiter. And at 54, I am limited by my age in ways I wasn’t when I was 34.

All athletes, regardless of age, have certain limiters. For me, as both an athlete and a coach, the training process is all about working with, around, and through a given athlete’s current limiters to gain fitness. Therefore nothing much changes just because an athlete has passed some round-number birthday. I might still end up making one or more classic age-related adjustments to the athlete’s training, such as spacing out key workouts a little more, but I don’t make such adjustments proactively on the assumption that the athlete is too old to keep benefitting from the methods that brought them success before their birthday.

No Boundaries

I started training for the Javelina Jundred 100K early last year, my fitness level had fallen all the way back to zero, thanks to long COVID. I was truly starting over. Sixteen months (and a few setbacks) later, I’m drastically fitter, but like Dave Scott I’m not putting any boundaries on how fit I can ultimately get.

Last week I ran six times for a total of 55 miles with back-to-back 16-milers on the weekend and a set of 8 x 400 meters at vVO₂max during the week. That’s a lot less than I used to do, but it’s a lot more than I was doing a year ago, and I see no indication that I can’t do a lot more in the months ahead. It’s true that I woke up this morning, 24 hours after my second 16-miler, with some post-exertional malaise, but that’s a disease-related limiter and not at all age-related. Whatever hard limits I have at this stage of my journey will reveal themselves in time. Until then, in the spirit of Jack Johnson, I will pretend they don’t exist.

And I’ll do the same with my “new” athlete, Scott, and his “limits”.