Can you race well when you get old?
This has been on my mind lately. As it always is when things feel good. My mind, and maybe yours, is never satisfied with settling for the status quo. It always has me thinking about ‘can I do more?’ and ‘how much can I do?’
In the sports world they talk about an athlete’s ceiling. This is a sporty way to estimate an athlete’s potential. How far can they go? That’s what has piqued my curiosity; what is my ceiling now?
And I am fully self-aware that my ceiling is pitifully low for some and unreachably high for others.
Potential is specific to the individual. The universe may have gifted you with genes that let you push yourself way past the norm and perform at a high level comparatively.
Each of us, each of our capabilities and potentials, exists on a bell curve of some sort. And, without doubt, most of us will fall in the middle of that curve somewhere – within the 80%.
It’s never been super useful to compare yourself to the athletes on either end of the bell curve – the outliers.
You’re probably somewhere in the middle.
Like me.
The question is how to get to your ceiling. How to get the best performance out of your machine. And I don’t think that question needs to change as you get older.
A mathy, proofy, long-winded way of saying that my individual experience is probably applicable to my cohort. Maybe more so than the examples they hold up as excelsior.
Excelsior is an interesting word. You comic nerds may have heard it used in the old Marvel universe in its Latin meaning – “Ever upward” – sort of a breathy, superhero striving term. That’s how I’m using it here. I feel the need to explain because it is an archaic word and can also mean the shaved wood packing material they used to use in shipping items. As in “it was packed in excelsior”.
Anyhow – I’ve been thinking about this topic recently because I’m getting older and I am just coming back from a major knee injury. And as I start to get comfortable pushing my machine ever upwards I wonder what the ceiling is.
Once the knee was strong enough for me to start running again I went through the mental pantomime of trying to convince myself that I was happy just to be back out there, doing what I do, out in the woods with the dog.
But, as things continued to go in a positive direction I started loading in some actual training. What is ‘actual training’ in my fevered little brain? It is effort, intensity and volume.
Rolling the tape back – I was injured in the beginning of 2020. Good timing, huh? I slowly let running go because it just hurt too much. I switched to biking and ended up biking across Massachusetts. But I let my running fitness go and I got out of shape. 100% out of shape.
And I let all thoughts of ceilings and competing again go. Because my current reality was I could not run. At all. And I made that secret pact with the universe that if I could just get out there again I would put all that striving aside and just be grateful. Just appreciate it. I mentally disconnected from the athletic striving as a form of self-protection.
Please, just let me run again and I promise to be good and try to do too much.
I kept trying to restart. To give up all my expectations. To run-walk. Anything to get out there again.
Eventually I could run moderately on flat surfaces without pain. I didn’t have to worry about too much volume or too much intensity because I was so out of shape I couldn’t do it anyway. Essentially, my fitness fell to the point where it was as much of a limiter as the balky knee.
But, slowly, with patience and consistency, I started again.
Started from scratch.
I have run three marathons since I started my recovery. The first was the Marine Corps marathon. I went through the motions of training, very carefully, getting in some miles, and a bit of tempo. But, never enough to run a comfortable race. I ended up walking for most of the 2nd half.
Next cycle I trained for Napa and had a good, even effort on very low training volume.
This year I put in a real training cycle for Mesa, but I went out too fast and blew up. I still did not have the fitness or the volume to race, or the fitness to overcome poor execution.
But I felt something in that training cycle. I felt strong. Flashes of the old fitness. The ability to hold that long tempo, to do the hard work. I was able to go deep into the pain cave, the dark place, and felt the fitness bounce as a result.
That’s something I haven’t felt in a long time.
The fitness bounce is when you push deep in intensity and volume and then recover to be stronger.
This is very encouraging. What it tells me, is that even at my age the process works the same.
If you put in the work, you get the results. I’ve been consistently training for 2-3 years since the injury, and I have a nice big base. The knee still complains a bit at times. I don’t recover as fast as I used to. But, I feel like if I can do the work I’ll get the results.
It’s like a universal truth. Do the work. Get the results.
It gets tricky when you’re older because you can’t force feed the volume to get that fitness. In the old days, when I was younger, I would just run 7 days a week and within 3 weeks I’d have my base back.
Now I’m only running 4 days a week so I give my body the recovery it needs. That schedule makes it hard to load 50 miles or more a week. And I think you need to get close to 50 miles, at least in a peak week, to close those last 6 miles of the race. To make the next step in fitness. That’s the inflection point for the marathon. That’s the volume that unlocks the race.
Another recovery related thing is I don’t think I can stack build weeks. I did that in the last cycle and it was really hard. I think the training waves need to basically be every-other week. So, hard week, easy week as opposed to what I used to do which was easy, medium, hard, stacked in 3-week waves.
And I need to find a way to get my long run volume up. At least to 20 miles. The rule of thumb coaches use is no more than 3 hours for your long run. And with my new, slower pace, that’s cutting it close for 20 miles.
If I look at that last race and ask ‘what would I need to take 20-30 minutes off the finish time?’
Well, I’d still need to get to the starting line healthy, which constrains how much intensity and volume I can do.
And I’d still need to execute better.
But I think the answer is ‘I need to get faster’. Which seems obvious, but not really. By getting faster I will be able to hold those faster paces more easily in the race. It’s not that I can’t run the pace I need, it’s that I can’t hold it. So I need to lower that bar so race pace is easier.
To me this means speedwork. Pure and simple speed work. Get the legs strong and fast so that they laugh off marathon pace.
The other thing those races told me was that I need more distance. I need to get up close to or past that 20 mile / 3 hour mark 2-3 times in the training cycle.
As it turns out I wrote a book about how to do this 10 years ago. I think I can follow that same plan, but adjust it for the reality of age. It would be a fun experiment.
So what did Chris do today? Chris signed up for the Beantown Marathon in September. It’s a flat loop course in a park near me. I’m going to eat my own dogfood. I’m going follow the MarathonBQ plan and see if I can’t drop my finish time to something I can be proud of.
Why not?
Give me something to talk about.
In summary:
I think that the training equation still works. If you can push yourself you’ll see the results. The tricky part is staying healthy through that push.
Let’s run an experiment.