MATT FITZGERALD – Runner’s Tribe

Matt Fitzgerald is an acclaimed endurance sports coach, nutritionist, and author. His many books include The Endurance Diet80/20 Running, and How Bad Do You Want It? 

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On January, 22, 2020, five days after thirty-eight year old Sara Hall set a new American record of 1:07:15 for the half marathon, Women’s Running magazine published an article titled “Sara Hall Shares 7 Keys to Her Longevity of Excellence.” For your convenience, I have copied the article’s section headings, which neatly summarize Hall’s secrets, and pasted them here:

“Immersing herself in the love of running”
“Being relentlessly resilient”
“Embracing imperfection”
“Trusting and adapting in training”
“Keeping the faith”
“Focusing on a full life”
“Turning disappointment into teaching moments”

There’s a lot of wisdom packed in these few phrases, but do they constitute a complete recipe for “longevity of excellence”? Of course not, as I’m sure Hall herself would agree. One additional nugget of advice I would offer to aging endurance athletes is this: Assume nothing. By this I mean that you must not assume you will slow down, or your training capacity will decrease, as you get older. Just keep chugging along as though you are immune to the laws of nature that affect other aging athletes and see what happens.

I first heard this advice many years ago from Dave Scott, the legendary six-time Ironman world champion. When Scott was twenty-eight he told his girlfriend Linda Buchanan that he wanted to be even fitter at forty than he was then. Well, he got his wish. In 1994, three months shy of his forty-first birthday, Scott narrowly missed winning a seventh Ironman title, finishing a close second to thirty-year-old Greg Welch. “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.”

Dave Scott IM1996 Finish

Psychologists have demonstrated that expectations of all kinds tend to be self-fulfilling. It’s not surprising, then, that athletes like Dave Scott, who performs as well after forty as they did before, tend to share a defiant attitude toward the aging process. Some even talk about aging as an advantage. “The more you age, the more you’re getting stronger,” said twenty-seven-time world record-breaker Haile Gebrselassie at a press conference before the 2010 New York City Marathon, when he was officially thirty-seven years old but probably closer to forty-one. “I still feel like age of twenty.” Alas, Gebrselassie wound up DNF’ing the next day, but three years later he was still winning major races, including the Vienna Half Marathon.

Let’s be clear: Age is more than just a number. It is an inexorable biological process ending in death. Athletes who extend their peak performance years into their forties by virtue of high expectations are not defying the laws of nature. If it were not physically possible to set an American record at thirty-eight, Sara Hall would not have done so. In continuing to improve as they approach middle age, the Sara Halls of the world are merely exploiting a possibility that exists in all of us.

This was shown in a recent study by researchers at Germany’s Martin Luther University. The purpose of the study was to identify differences in how older and younger athletes tolerate and recover from high-intensity interval training. Two groups of twelve well-trained cyclists and triathletes, one with an average age of twenty-four and the other with an average age of forty-seven, completed a series of HIIT sessions. During and after each workout, a variety of physiological measurements were taken in an effort to assess how stressful the interval set was for the individual and how quickly the athlete recovered. For example, the researchers looked at the rate at which lactate was cleared from the bloodstream during recovery intervals. They found no differences between the two groups in any of these measurements, leading them to conclude (in language so bloodlessly scientific it’s almost self-parodying), “[I]t seems that the trainability of the organism is maintained.”

Findings like this one suggest that, for athletes over forty who experience a marked decline in performance, the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak. This was certainly Dave Scott’s take, as he explained in the above-referenced conversation: “I think it comes back to how hungry you are in your workouts and how intense you are in your workouts. I coach regular folks. I have thirty-year-old’s, forty-year-old’s, fifty-year-old’s, sixty-year-old’s. . . The intensity of the workouts drops off as people age. They allow it to.”

I’m no Dave Scott or Haile Gebrselassie or Sara Hall, but I am living proof that mere mortals too can extend their peak performance years into their forties if they let the chatter about age go in one ear and out the other. Having raced my first Ironman at thirty-one, I completed my fastest Ironman at forty-eight. Having raced my first marathon at twenty-eight, I completed my fastest marathon at forty-six. And having raced my first 10K at twelve, I completed my fastest one at forty-nine. I repeat: Assume nothing!

6 COMMENTS

  1. Hmmm… very delightfully readable, but not very convincing.

    A suggestion as an imperative “Assume Nothing” is a tad too contradictory, even for Uber-open-minded amateurs like me.

    Also I trust we can agree that describing athletes by age-groups might be very misleading: a 60-y-old former Olympian could very well have a huge performance and skill “advantage” over a late-starting, recreational athlete in his late 20s who suddenly starts to get serious after a “laid-back” youth… no?

    Your own personal data is impressive and for sure inspiring.

    But maybe, in the very polyfactorial world of sports – where age is one of the (important) variables like genes, talent, access, culture and reward incentives just to mention the first that come to mind, to be imperatively determined to make no assumptions, might even risk becoming counter productive.
    And maybe a little too detached to the immense progress in recent decades in the fields of Sports Science and Medicine.

    Still, from this 58-y-old “Forever” lover of sport and an active lifestyle, thank you for sharing your thoughts, and for the encouraging drill “assume nothing” drill. I find more constructive avoiding expectations. Cheers and thank you, corrado giambalvo

    • I think rather than comparing yourself to others what I get from this is you can still reach your own potential and improve your performance into your 40’s, 50’s etc whatever that maybe! What holds people back is the limits they put on themselves.

  2. A conclusion I got to regarding this topic – you have to, I rather say, ought to listen to your body and adapt as you go along. You mught never hit a PB in a mile when you’re aged, but you can in Marathon. Body wears, that’s true. However, if trained consistently, human boundaries of mere 5 min mile, 16 min 5K, 35 min 10K, 1:20 min HM or 3 hour Marathon is achievable in every age at least to 60, but with appropriate and specific training.

  3. One thing that is not mentioned is wisdom. How much does a more mature understanding of training, the experience of getting it wrong and the evolution in training principles that have taken place over the course of our aging process helped us perform better in later years?

  4. I like this topic, good article. Curious as how this same logic applies across different sports, such as sprinting (different energy system entirely from distance/ironmans).

    I think it’s also important to mention training age, not just biological age because as you age in training years, the training plan must be more calculated to preserve the body. For optimal performance, the mindset, heart/will, and physical body all need to align. Sometimes, we genuinely have the mindset and the drive, but the body can’t keep up (overtraining, chronic/acute injuries, etc).

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