Thinking and believing that you're old and slow.

 


Good question. I'm 44 and have been at endurance sports since about age 12. So about 32 years. In that time I'm not sure I've gone more than about a week without some kind of endurance workout or race. Usually daily. (Been fortunate to have avoided serious injury and illness thus far). I'd be sort of lost without it.

One thing that keeps me fresh is that I've changed up sports a few times. I was a pure runner from about 12 to 22. Then a rower from 22 to 32. Triathlete from 32 to 38. And a pure cyclist since. So I've put a solid decade into each sport, the moved on.

So at cycling I'm still hitting (and beating!) my numbers - though I expect that to change sometime soon. I'm sure if I went back and tried to beat my high school mile time, or my collegiate rowing 2K time, I'd be in a world of shit. But I don't try! There is a season, turn, turn, turn...

But I think the real answer is that I take value from every aspect of endurance sports. Social camaraderie benefits (married a rower), scientific, technological, the exploration of the natural world, the structure it brings to daily life. I'm fiercely competitive, and love the purity of competition, but I'm not speaking in cliche when saying it's about the process and not the results.

I have zero worries that I may not want to keep going. My worry is about the time when there is no sport left that I'll be able to do. But if it's 5K charity walks in my 90's, I'm going to the asshole with the Garmin Forerunner 9000xt trying to beat the other 2 90 year-olds, who may not even be aware that a race is on.

Wanting to still feel special. Don't we all want to feel special? At least part of keeping me racing. I'm also happy to help out those better than me feel special too.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

to riff on this, believing that you're no longer trainable. Instead, despite reason and experience, you optimistically believe that this, that, or the other regime will reverse the downward slope and it will begin to tick upward again.

Am a huge proponent of this program.

I'm slow. Always have been. But what keeps me going is that there a people like this out there: http://www.cyclingweekly.com/...g-in-your-80s-217853. Brain is a top bloke too.

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Developing aero, fit and other fun stuff at Red is Faster

One interesting thing I have noticed as I observe sport is that as you get older and older, in at least the pro ranks, it seems that athletes carry more and more niggles, which lead to more and more compensations, which lead to more and more niggles. Eventually, I think a lot of athletes, realize, that the niggles are slowing them down thru the lack of training that can be done, not necessarily that they still couldn't go faster, but that lack of training then catches up. I think bio-mechanics end up being huge.

I know one of the people I most desire to sit down with and pick the brain of would have to be Cam Brown. I don't think people give him enough credit for how long he has been able to last.

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Great question. I am 52. Bad athlete in college, went thru sedentary / focus on life period from 30 to early 40's. Back into the active lifecycle sometime in early 40's. I am highly competitive (mostly against myself), probably a bit addictive in personality, truly love the "feeling" I get from a workout and truly enjoy the social aspect of endurance sports. Maybe the biggest reason of all is our lives are filled with competing demands for our time and attention and while I truly enjoy my job and cannot think of life without my wife and family, I absolutely need the intense, deeply selfish personal attention I get for myself while working out, this is what keeps me going. The racing is simply the celebration of everything leading up to it.

(As I get older, recovery from hard efforts takes a lot longer. I can still go hard but I just have to be very patient with the recovery.)

No matter what you do, lung elasticity will decline, strength will decline, tendons and ligaments will tighten and you WIll slow down. Training will help you maintain strength and speed much longer, but you will still slow down. This is the beauty of age groups which become much more important as you age.

I'm 60 this year, life long endurance athlete, first triathlon in 1980; why do it when I'm so miserably slow compared to my 20s? Because I still enjoy the training, the competition, and the feeling of fitness compared to my sedentary peers. I lost a friend at work this week from cardiac arrest...same age as me, but not an athlete. Whenever that happens my wife tells me to get my ass right back out there. The other thing that keeps me going is the intrinsic reward of being among a very small percentage of people who can do long course at this age. The 60+ age groups at an IM account for about 2% or less of the entire field. Most of the people in the 40s and 50s who think they will still have the desire or ability to do an ironman in their 60s or 70s are engaging in wishful thinking and the stats prove that.

Good response! What's kept me going (I'm stopped right now) is that it is so darn hard to start up again. A body in motion needs to stay in motion lest it rust! It took me a good 12 weeks of 2 and 3 a days to get myself back to the level of fitness that I like to maintain from my first cancer surgery and now I'm sidelined again from a second cancer (different) surgery. I want to maintain this lifestyle because I crave the fitness but age and disease is making it a challenge. I hope to be a part of that "experienced" 2% that toes the line this year and in years to come. Wear sunscreen people!

Because for me, qualifying for Kona has become a test of longevity.

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Not everything is as it seems -Mr. Miyagi

OK, clearly a flip answer, but still. Yes there's a mental aspect but it's disingenuous to pretend that's all there is to it. I'm 63 and doing vastly better than most of my contemporaries and much better than I would have expected at my age. I recently went skiing with a teammate from my high school ski team, we were about the same ability level back then, but now I ski circles around him. But I'm still a lot slower than I was 30 years ago and have a couple of chronic physical issues that could potentially derail my fitness at any time. A lot of people give it up not because of lack of mental fortitude but due to chronic injuries that take them out of the game.

As you get older your genes care about you less and less, it's just not worth the effort to keep the muscle mass and "other stuff" going in an older organism. If having a ton of old people around gave a competitive advantage to your clan or family then we'd age better. But those slackers in previous eons didn't stick with the program and we're stuck with aging at the rate we age.

I'm chasing lifetime PR's at 48, that's keeping me going for now.

You should be looking after your children and grandchildren instead of pursuing your own athletic adventures. If you have kids, you should be encouraging them to procreate, with as many different partners as possible to produce more genetic combinations and a greater chance of success. Taking that role will make you (and other old people) more valuable, from a natural selection perspective, than running around doing pointless races. As a result, old people will live longer and better.

As it stands now, your selfish pursuit of your own athletic goals is going to condemn future generations to even shorter lifespans and earlier decripitude!

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My latest book: "Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire" is on sale on Amazon and at other online and local booksellers

The fact that they have age groups

Ha ha you're logic is irrefutable :) But 4 billion years of evolution is ending with me, future generations are going to have to do it without my "contributions".

In addition to being FatandSlow, I am old - just a bit older than the Slowman. I was never an athlete. I am still getting faster!

The GBS quote comes to mind. We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing. Peter Pan is my hero. I'll never grow up!

I'd add that I have a personal theory that the closer one is to the pointy end of the field the harder the slowing process mental / emotional toll seems to be as they watch the front of the field swim, ride, or run away. I was never there so this is only an observation.

And yes 20+ years into this tri gig it is imperative to keep moving as it is much harder to get going again.

Note: Age will be 52 in May. Osteoarthritis is what's slowing me down...both knees and both hips. Makes it tough to get any consistency running at all. I have to be super careful to not overdo on the running side or something goes and then I'm down for 3-4 weeks waiting to heal. But, I'm not gonna quit because I love triathlon; I still enjoy all 3 sports and I still like to push myself. I doubt I'll ever go sub-13 hours at Ironman again, but as long as I can continue to swim well, bike well, and then survive the run, I'm gonna keep giving it my all.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

Isn't being an athlete all about dealing with loss?

A big problem that comes with aging is age related muscle loss. So that's probably a big part of it.

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Don't drown. Don't crash. Don't walk.

I am 53. For me tri is about social friendship and enjoying a healthy lifestyle. As a lifetime BOP, for me it was never about competing.

The reason why I think that I am slowing down is that recovering from hard fast sessions takes days instead of hours. So I either don't do them or I have days when I can only train lightly. The recovery time from long/slow sessions does not seem to have changed.

6 months ago I started doing more SBR weight work in the gym. Both my swimming and cycling speed has increased markedly, with a slight improvement in running. As we age we loose muscle mass, I think that weight resistance training is helping me maintain and perhaps grow muscle.

a very worthwhile question, its all too often just accepted that getting older means getting slower without questioning why, let alone whether it has to be that way.

the heart slows down because it is trying to pump through clogged and hardened arteries. that and because typically the older you get the less you stimulate your heart to maintain its capability. even athletes tend towards more endurance events as they age, partly cause and partly effect.

none of us actually look after ourselves as well as we could/should so there is a gradual full system degradation due to the combination of not eating and living as well as we could and pushing ourselves harder than we should.

basically the process as i understand it is that our DNA becomes weaker (corrupted by the crap absorbed from food, environment etc, stressed beyond tolerance by work, training, life) so each time a cell replicates, it does so with slightly less than perfect accuratecy and the new cell is slightly less effective than the one its replacing.

i believe the closer you get to taking ideal care of yourself the less your physical and mental capabilities will degrade over time. of course nobody can agree exactly what that ideal might mean, let alone a practical way of doing it. i think though most of us can acknowledge that we could do better

59 years old heading into my 33rd consecutive season as a Triathlete.

Many people have posted good reasons age slows you down. Here is one more....deteriorating muscle mass, burns less calories, causing weight gain, slowing you down. Same exercise level you did at 30 is tough at 60..(longer recovery, injury, blah, blah....) less volume or intensity...less calories burned, more weight gain....which slows you down. Even if you manage to keep your weight even from 30 to 60 years old you are likely made up of more fat less lean muscle mass.....more fat/less lean muscle=slower times.

Why do I keep going?....after my run/bike interval workout this past Saturday (using a trainer and a "soft" treadmill with Hokas) I thought to myself as I was cooling down from the hard effort...."I am still fucking out here giving it a go!"

After a concerted 6 month effort, I got my weight back down to what I was in my 20s ... wearing the same pants size too. But I had this same thought regarding lean muscle mass knowing that even though I lift weights now, I am definitely not as strong as I was back in the day; which has made me wonder whether at 60, the same body composition (presumably verified by DexaScan or such) would require a lower weight than it would at, say 25.