It was Joe Friel’s book Fast After 50 that inspired me to become a coach. The book begins with a convincing argument why remaining active is important to health – something echoed by my doctor at every annual physical – and more specifically how important it is for that activity to include a regular dose of high intensity work. I was already active, so that was covered. What inspired me were the numerous convincing arguments Friel presented on why staying active is in so many ways the fountain of youth.
After making his case concerning the health benefits of exercise, Friel goes on to describe how to train. Honestly, having read his The Triathlete’s Bible, The Cyclist’s Bible, and Going Long, I didn’t pay much attention to this part at first. I thought it was just another book about training. Only it isn’t. It took me a while, but eventually I understood that what Friel has done is create a method to manage periodization. Pure genius!
His process will work for just about any endurance athlete, but the best part is that it offers useful insights for senior athletes. It was his system that made me realize that if I started there and blended in what I had learned from other sources – most notably Stephen Seiler’s 80/20 polarized training method, I had the basis for what seemed to me a different kind of coaching service, one designed specifically for senior athletes.
A few years later, around the time I was approaching seventy, I asked Mr. Friel if he had considered another volume. Fast After 70, perhaps. He replied that he had discussed such a project with his publisher, but they turned him down saying the market was too small. We both had a good laugh over that. I will point out that he did go on to write and record The Art of Coaching, which is hosted on the FastTalk Labs website. A must watch if you are a coach.
Over the last decade, whenever I asked myself why I keep working at triathlon, the answer has been “Because I still can.” That became my “why.”Now that I am seventy-five and have dealt with several serious health issues, most notably cancer, I find myself wondering how much longer I can make that claim. Then I realized that the same questions and doubts must affect many senior athletes.
My question, then, is this: Is there a tipping point at which it becomes impossible to develop the physical ability to have a successful performance? That we reach a point at which we train as much as our body can endure yet make little if any progress.
When are we old?
Let’s begin with a simple question. What is “senior?”
Achieving the rank of senior does not happen at a specific age, say, like being old enough to drive a car, or have a beer. And, it’s not like graduating from high school, or advancing in military rank. It just happens, slowly, with a few milestones along the way.
Promoters of endurance sports have a propensity for spotlighting high performing senior athletes. Take for example Hiromu Inada. At age 86 this man has the distinction of being the oldest person to finish the Ironman World Championship at Kona. At 92 he just finished Ironman 70.3 Cairns. Truly an inspiration. Is he an example of what is possible by paying attention to diet, exercise, and recovery? Or, like elite athletes in general, is he an outlier? Should other senior athletes give any thought to following his example?
For our purpose, let’s define seniors as anyone over 50. But, as I pointed out, there is no definitive point at which a person qualifies as a senior. To quote Joe Friel, "Age is only an issue when you use it as an excuse." The tipping point I refer to in the title is where no amount of training can produce a successful long course endurance race result. We’ll leave the definition of success to the individual. It could be as challenging as winning your age group, or as simple as just finishing.
The Honolulu Marathon is fairly unique in allowing runners to take as long as they need to finish, whereas most marathons impose cutoff times. The same is true for most ultrarunning events, and is one hundred percent true for Ironman races. Besides cutoff times, long endurance events can take an athlete to exhaustion, so that their race ends voluntarily rather than by taking too long. I will focus this discussion on Ironman events, as those are where my interest is currently focused, but I think it applies to any endurance sport.
Basics
Now let's cover a few basics, just so that we are on the same page. We’ll begin with the basics of why we train.
A successful race result requires physical development spread over time. You can’t go from a couch potato to running a marathon in a few weeks, no matter how hard you train. Long course events require years of gradual physical development.
Training is packaged as focused activities, typically called workouts, designed to improve skill, force production, or endurance. Swimming, like golf, is highly skill based. Pedaling a bike up a steep mountain or sprinting for the finish demands good force production. Every triathlon demands excellent endurance. Development of these three attributes - skill, force production, and endurance - is accomplished by way of carefully designed workouts.
If we could exercise as much as we wanted to I would not be writing this piece,and you would not be reading it. The reason we cannot exercise as much as we want to is that workouts create fatigue. Simply put, the training process revolves around physical exercise, rest, and high quality nutrition. It is during periods of rest, and especially sleep, that the body responds to the stress created during workouts by rebuilding tissue using nutrients from the food we eat. More powerful muscles, stronger bones, stronger and more flexible tendons and ligaments – these are the adaptations we are hoping to accomplish, along with more efficient movements.
As we age, our bodies change in many ways. Some are quite visible. Grey hair or hair loss, wrinkled skin, and more belly fat are good examples. Well, maybe good is not the right word. Less visible, but more relevant to athletic performance, are physical changes brought about by changes in hormone levels. Let’s focus on three, the loss of muscle mass, the increase in insulin resistance, and a reduction in protein absorption. We could go on down a long list, but these are enough to make my case.
Perhaps the most essential benefit of exercise is an increase in skeletal muscle. Stress a muscle and the body will respond by making it stronger. Stress it for an extended period of time and its endurance properties will improve. These changes do not take place during exercise, but later, while we are resting.
Recovery
In Fast After 50, Friel addresses an issue commonly reported by senior athletes, the need for longer recovery time between hard workouts. His most striking suggestion is to abandon the seven day microcycle in favor of a nine day microcycle.
Workout frameworks are normally built around a seven day microcycle in order to fit well with everyday life. Swims on days the master’s club has access to the pool. Long rides on weekends when the club gets together. Using a nine day microcycle would mean that the day of the week certain workouts occur will keep changing. This may be less of an issue for seniors who have retired, but even then, access to resources like pools and gyms are unlikely to be that flexible.
The advantage of spreading three hard workouts over nine days as compared to seven days becomes increasingly obvious when trying to merge the periodization plan presented in Fast After 50 with Dr. Seiler’s 80/20 polarized method. To slow the aging process Friel recommends one very hard workout, one moderately hard workout, and one long duration workout per microcycle. A seven day cycle only allows one easy day between two of the hard days, whereas a nine day cycle always allows two easy days between hard days. Let’s not get bogged down in the weeds, but I will say that the degree of hardness does vary over time, a part of Friel’s brilliant periodization formula. Even so, the goal of 80/20 will slide towards 50/50 without some adjustments.
Like so many aspects of training, the idea that senior athletes require more recovery is not universally accepted. There are studies that show no significant metabolic difference in recovery between young and old athletes. But, these same studies report the older athletes ranking their fatigue, in terms of how they felt, significantly higher. If we accept the psychobiological model – and we should – the fact that an athlete feels fatigued is significant, whether or not there is any material basis for that feeling.
Hormones
Besides the exercise and recovery cycle, hormones play a critical role in determining how much muscle we retain. The hormone most responsible for muscle growth is testosterone. The story is more complicated in women, where estrogen and progesterone act to inhibit muscle growth. In general, as we age, our testosterone levels drop, which results in the loss of lean muscle mass. We get weaker. We slow down.
The best way to counteract this loss of muscle is strength training. Heavy lifting has been shown to significantly increase testosterone production, as well as retain muscle mass. Not enough to offset all of the effects of reduced testosterone levels, but it will slow the process. Triathletes, and their single sport cousins, should not follow a typical gym rat lifting program. Our goal is not to get pumped. Rather, we should target low rep, high load exercise.
Unfortunately, the interventions for insulin resistance and inhibited protein absorption are less straight forward. But, there are some dietary tricks you can use. Let’s start with insulin resistance.
As you probably already know, much of the food we athletes eat is carbohydrate, which is converted into sugar and used as fuel. What we call this sugar, and its exact structure, depends on where it is located. In the blood, it's called glucose. In muscle fibers and the liver, it’s glycogen. A glucose molecule cannot enter a muscle cell and become glycogen without some help. That help is provided by insulin.
When we are young, muscles in need of glycogen will eagerly take in whatever glucose is offered. As we age, our muscles become less and less willing to admit the glucose. The resulting rise in blood sugar causes our pancreas to release more insulin. Meanwhile, the body sees the excess glucose as a valuable asset to be stored away for a time when food is less abundant, and it is stored in fat cells.
The location of our fuel storage facilities is determined by the levels of sex hormones. Young women have fat stored in breasts and thighs, while young men have it spread more evenly throughout the body. As we age, the location is more focused on our belly. The infamous old man beer belly is not as much the result of beer drinking as the naturally occurring reduction in testosterone.
For as long as I can remember we have had two things pounded into our brains, that belly fat is bad, and to get rid of it we need to eat a restricted calorie diet. The first is maybe half true, but the second is totally false, especially for active people. At the risk of over simplifying a complex topic, what works is really simple:
Eat a well balanced diet that emphasizes fruits and vegetables.
Avoid carbohydrares with a high glycemic index (except while exercising).
Adjust mealtime carbohydrate consumption, more at breakfast, less at dinner.
I’m not going to go into this topic any deeper here. My point is that as we age, the naturally occurring decline in hormone levels will result in changes to body composition, and that there are simple ways to reduce the impact, but no way to stop the decline.
Another hormone driven change that takes place as we age is a reduction in protein absorption. There are all sorts of recommendations for how much protein we should consume each day. The number depends as much on who you ask as it does your gender and training level. Let’s say you are advised to consume 175 grams of protein a day. What is missing from this equation is absorption. Yet that is what really counts. To put it simply, and perhaps over simplify, the older we get, the less efficient our bodies are at absorbing protein. The solution seems simple. Eat more protein. But getting it all in without puking can be a challenge.
Then there is the matter of the protein source, and here we face the storm of dietary fads and misinformation. Let’s begin from the position that nobody wants to eat enough meat and eggs to satisfy our protein requirement. The best way to pack in more is a liquid format made with protein powder. By far the most effective powders are based on milk, what are called whey-based protein. There are many other varieties that are plant based, using soy, or perhaps peas. The truth is, no plant-based powder is absorbed as well as whey-based protein powder. Sadly, too many athletes are burdened by the mistaken belief that plant-based protein is healthier.
Well, those are the basics. Exercise, hormones, insulin resistance, protein absorption all play a critical role in training, and normal changes due to aging will have a negative impact on results. There is a whole lot more to dig into if you like, but for now, let’s leave it at that.
The impact of illness
If you ever sit around and talk story with a group of athletes, sooner or later the conversation will turn to injuries. How many broken bones, and how they happened. Old people in particular will swap stories about illnesses and surgeries, from gallbladders to hernias to cancer. All of these will have a negative impact on performance. It is an unfortunate truth that the stress created by training makes us stronger, but the stress from injury and illness does not.
Cancer in particular can have a devastating impact on the body. Not just from the cancer, but even more so from the treatment. Radiation and chemo therapies cannot target only the cancerous cells. There is a lot of collateral damage. After treatment, after the attack on the body has ended, the body's reconstruction process will spring into action and repair the damage.
The immediate issue is time. The body can only do so much repair in a day. The stress/response training cycle still applies, only here the body is trying to replace vast numbers of damaged cells, far more than in a healthy body. We should expect that training produces less results. Even no improvement. There just aren’t enough resources to go around.
It would be great if all we had to do is be patient and keep at it until our fitness has returned. The truth is, our bodies will remember being over stressed and do everything possible to avoid that happening again. In athletic training we call this over training. Not to be confused with over reaching, which is simply a short period of exhaustion following an especially hard period of training, over training is the result of extended periods of high stress. Improvement stops. The athlete falls into the trap of believing that more and harder training is required. The hole gets deeper and deeper, until it reaches a point where it can take years to recover, if ever. The body remembers what that deep hole felt like and will refuse to go that deep again.
My thinking – let’s call it a hypothesis – is that the accumulation of hormone changes, injuries, and the impact of illness, particularly cancer, will combine to create a situation similar to over training. The rules of stress and recovery that produce improvements in performance no longer apply. The aging athlete reaches a point where even moderate training loads produce more fatigue than the athlete can absorb, even with maximized recovery protocols.
So far we have been looking at physical aspects of training. We cannot ignore the psychological aspect. The demands of training may reach a point at which the athlete’s motivation goes out the window. What I am saying is, there is a physical component, and a psychological component, and without motivation the body is unable to deliver.
If there is a tipping point it most likely is not a point but more like the way I describe aging. A slow, gradual process. What point there is will be the day the athlete decides the effort no longer produces a reward.
There is one ray of sunshine we should welcome. The subtitle of Friel’s book, Fast After 50, is How to race strong for the rest of your life. I like that “for the rest of your life” part. Maybe there is no tipping point. Setbacks and challenges, to be sure, but with thoughtful devotion perhaps we can overcome them. Maybe there is something to those old sports marketing slogans. Anything is possible. Just do it.
Epilog
This is not intended as an academic paper, more of an essay, but I do want to acknowledge some of the resources that I have drawn from. The individuals listed here are only the tip of the iceberg. Each has shared interviews with dozens of the best sports scientists and athletes in the world.
Joe Friel, Fast After 50 (book). The Art of Coaching (available on FastTalk Labs website).
Jason Koop, Training Essentials for Ultrarunning (book). KoopCast (podcast).
Stacy Sims, Roar (book).
Mikael Eriksson, That Triathlon Show (podcast).
Simon Ward, The High Performance Human Triathlon Podcast.
FastTalk Labs (website and podcast).