Recently I swapped my planned Sunday workout – a run and long bike combo – for a hike with a group of co-workers. The planned bike was three and a half hours and the hike was advertised as four hours, so I thought it would be a good substitute, a welcome break from the swim-bike-run routine and some much-needed cross training. We hiked the Hawaii Loa Ridge Trail which features a fair bit of high step movements, quite different from my typical run. I was so glad I have been hitting the gym and flex sessions lately.
The group consisted of one very fit young man and three relatively fit women, one old guy (me) and one middle-aged and moderately fit woman. A wide range of ability, but all experienced hikers.
The group started out at a brisk walking pace, just above what I call comfortable. It wasn’t long until I was ten yards off the back and the middle-aged woman was even farther and steadily losing ground. I was hoping that the youngsters would soon discover that they had gone out too hard and slow down. When there was no sign of that, I decided to hang back and stay in touch with the woman behind me. I felt much better, although the vertical, technical parts were still a challenge.
When my partner decided to call it a day I was torn between staying with her and going ahead alone. She assured me she was fine, and we were in touch by phone, so she turned bash as I continued. I finally turned around at a point where I hoped I would finish before the group ahead returned. I miscalculated and had to wait a good thirty minutes for them to finish. I did run the runnable parts, which was fun. I felt great and could have kept going. I just didn’t want the young folks to have to wait for me to go to lunch.
This was a refreshing reminder that a high level of fitness does not only mean you are fast. Triathlon is an endurance sport. The key word there is endure. The loss of top-end performance with age is inevitable. Like gray hair and wrinkled skin, the impact of aging varies from person to person, but there is no escaping the loss of speed. Even though I could not keep pace with the younger folks, I was able to hike for over two hours and still feel perfectly fine.
I stick pretty close to Joe Friel’s formula as presented in his book, Fast After 50: Do two high intensity interval workouts each week, one being aerobic capacity and the other lactate threshold. Add one long endurance workout. The other four days are either short and easy, or nothing at all. Garnish with some strength and mobility work. The actual implementation is a bit more complicated, but this is the framework. Friel makes the case that senior athletes converge on long, easy rides. HIIT work props up the roof. It cannot prevent a sagging roof, but it can slow the loss.
We need to keep the inevitable loss of performance in mind so as not to get frustrated trying to keep up with the younger folks.
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Almost turned into a rescue mission
After the younger folk went on ahead a young lady from the group, not in this pic, lost her balance on the ridge and fell/slid/rolled down the hillside, about twenty feet, they say. Scratches and bruises. At lunch we kidded her about how close she came to being the lead story on the six o'clock news.