Running Into the Sunset

I’ve been running seriously, participating in endurance sports, for over 20 years now.  I’ve been able to observe myself age and the way it impacts my performance and enjoyment.  I’ve been able to observe others as well.  Some who seem to deny aging and some who seem to collapse into it.

What has been my experience?  What can we learn?  How can we squeeze the life from what we wake up with every day?  Because waking up is a gift.  Why not learn how to enjoy it and carpe the diem?

Some people will tell you that getting old is all in your head.  Or that you are only as old as you feel or as old as you act.  There are some kernels of truth in these statements. First, you never wake up and think, ‘that’s it today I’m old’.  It sneaks up on you.  It’s a gradual thing and you don’t notice the change.

You don’t feel different, but then you look in the mirror and see that you have aged.  It’s all relative.  When you were 20 you thought 30 was old.  When you were 30 you thought 40 was the end of the line.  Wen you get to 50 you think, ‘hey, 50 is pretty good, 60 is going to be really old’.  And so it goes.

My point is that there is a mental aspect to it.  I can’t tell you how much is mental and how much is physical.  I think my race paces have dropped by about a minute a mile in the last 10 years, but maybe that’s just because I believe they should?

You will often hear people cite the statistic that the average life expectancy used to be 30ish or less.  The impression is that before modern civilization people didn’t live that long.  Like aging is a new thing.  That’s not the case.

There is a problem with your statistics.  That average life expectancy is heavily weighted by the fact that many people never made it out of childhood.  That skews the average.  If you made it out of childhood you a had a good chance of living to 50 or 60 or 70.  Old age, it would seem, is old news.

What I have found with my training and racing is that the loss of performance is not linear.  It’s not a nice smooth curving that diminishes slowly over time.  You lose your performance ability in chunks.  I found that it is a series of peaks and valleys.

You go through years of steady performance and training then a major injury sets you back.  You never recover to the same peak you were at.  The aging process takes big chunks of performance out of these recoveries. You never climb completely out of the valleys.

I think a relatively new phenomenon is life-long athletes.  People used to compete when they were young in school, and then leave it behind.  It’s only in the last few decades that amateur athletes can continue training into their silver years.  We haven’t adapted to this dynamic as a society yet.

Another interesting trend I see is people entering the endurance lifestyle later in life.  Whether this is in the their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s or, like in Gene’s case, 60’s, these folks start fresh later in life.  The difference being that in today’s world they can find a cadre of serious athletes for support at any age.

From the people I’ve interacted with who have come to it later in life there are two types.  There are those who were athletes when they were younger and are returning after a long absence.  And there are those who are coming into it fresh.

Those who were athletes tend to improve faster.  They have less self-doubt and higher personal expectations.  In a sense they know what they are capable of.  They know what to expect.  They have a leg up.  And since they have rested their bodies for a couple decades they don’t have the wear and tear of the life-long athletes.

Those who start fresh seem to have a different assumption.  They are happy to be doing it.  They only slowly come to learn of their potential. They have to discover it.

One disturbing trend for me is that I see more sudden death in my cadre of serious amateur athletes.  These are the hardcore guys, and they are mostly guys, that drop dead in their 50’s or 60’s.  It usually a heart problem.  All I can really guess from this is that being in great shape isn’t any kind of cure-all defense against cardio vascular disease.

Which leads us to another difference of the aging athlete.  It’s not just about the act of training or showing up to race.  As you get older there is more maintenance required if you want to stay healthy. You need to develop good habits and nutrition.  You can’t get away with what you used to.

It is specific to the individual but many of us lower our volume and intensity to avoid injury.  You can train smarter and get most of the performance you used to get.  You can get 80% of your performance on a well disciplined 40 miles a week versus that 60 or 70 miles a week you could pull off in your earlier years.

You make reasoned, proactive trade offs to stay in the game.  At some point something fails and you end up on the bike or in the pool.  You find ways to get your fix without ending the game.

One of the positive things you get with age is experience.  You can’t buy experience.  You can only gain experience from living it.  This may not replace the physical ability but it smooths that over with a certain sanguinity.

Aging isn’t so bad.  There are always more things left to do than have been done.  As Dave McGilvray, who still, by the way, runs his age on his birthday every year, says, “Your favorite adventure is your next one!”