As I have gotten older, my running speed has gotten markedly slower, but I still like doing it so I’m going to keep at it. Here’s my question, I read different suggestions for how easy one should be running in terms of heart rate. When I look at my slogathon run in the hills today, a fair proportion was over 80% of my maximum heart rate. But it was also 10 minutes a mile or slower. I can take walk breaks on the hills to get my heart rate back down but my question is how do people maintain that appropriate heart rate when running is not much more than walking pace wise. Walking is certainly a worthwhile activity but I don’t see much translation to running and I doubt doing a bunch of walking would help me improve my fitness.
I don’t have any shame in running slow but it just seems like biomechanically there is a lower limit and I feel like I’m kind of approaching it.
That is a fair amount of the run. How did you feel? Did it feel hard?
It felt ok, but I’d be fine with easier, but it seems like at some point it’s just sort of walking.
I will take it easy up the hills and hopefully my running fitness will improve enough to get me out of this stage.
Interesting how some people age in running worse than others. In my 30’s and early 40s I could run 34 ish for 10k, but the floor fell out in my late 50s, in large part due to biomechanics
Why not give working on the biomechanics a try? Sure part is due to aging and perhaps not reversible. But I bet a fair amount is due to postural issues (i.e. shortened muscles due to sitting all day) and hence somewhat reversible.
Why not give working on the biomechanics a try? Sure part is due to aging and perhaps not reversible. But I bet a fair amount is due to postural issues (i.e. shortened muscles due to sitting all day) and hence somewhat reversible.
Sounds like a smart idea, tight hips and messed up feet play a part. My one great toe is all frozen up which doesn’t help matters much either.
That is a fair amount of the run. How did you feel? Did it feel hard?
It felt ok, but I’d be fine with easier, but it seems like at some point it’s just sort of walking.
I will take it easy up the hills and hopefully my running fitness will improve enough to get me out of this stage.
Interesting how some people age in running worse than others. In my 30’s and early 40s I could run 34 ish for 10k, but the floor fell out in my late 50s, in large part due to biomechanics
Cheezsus! 34 min 10ks in your 40s and then that big a dropoff in the 50s! I’m in my late 40s and NOT looking forward to that…
I just turned 60. I have friends older than me who have aged better as runners by a big margin. The bike held up somewhat better. I’ve been racing since the Reagan years, maybe it just adds up over time.
This whole variable aging in sport is interesting.
I was a totally lame endurance athlete in high school but I haven’t slowed down any since. It’s weird to now beat ex collegiate runners in races sometimes and these guys are training! Just couldn’t hang onto that speed into our age
I’m 62 and my moderate running place is now above 10 min/mi. My race pace for the recent 4 mile Turkey Trot was 7:20 per mile. I normally run 10 miles on hilly trails (for Ohio) both SA and SU and although I don’t wear a HRM I’m betting my HR gets near/above 80% regularly during those runs. I run another 20 miles during the week on the flats and have been able to stay healthy so I think if you’re not doing most or all of your runs in the hills and you’re staying healthy I think it’s OK to not worry about the spikes when you run the hills.
P.S. My pace during the Turkey Trot was slower than my pace in my marathon PR set 36 years ago.
I’m 62 and my moderate running place is now above 10 min/mi. My race pace for the recent 4 mile Turkey Trot was 7:20 per mile. I normally run 10 miles on hilly trails (for Ohio) both SA and SU and although I don’t wear a HRM I’m betting my HR gets near/above 80% regularly during those runs. I run another 20 miles during the week on the flats and have been able to stay healthy so I think if you’re not doing most or all of your runs in the hills and you’re staying healthy I think it’s OK to not worry about the spikes when you run the hills.
P.S. My pace during the Turkey Trot was slower than my pace in my marathon PR set 36 years ago.
I lived in Columbus in the late 80s and early 90s and raced all over the place, I’m sure we squared off a few times. I tried and failed to run 2.37 at Columbus over and over, a number of ugly 2.43s we’re as close as I got.
I think you organized a NY’s Day scramble I did in the early '90s at a park just south of Granville. I think there were 5 of us in the race. I The hilly trails I mentioned are the Denison U. Bioreserve.
That’s funny! We live down the street in this apartment and ran there all the time. My friends and I organized a running club called the low budget athletic club and got it permitted through the Athletics Congress so we could do college cross country races. We threw together a decent season of about a half dozen races. We did some big race down there Cincinnati and they had the quarter mile mark indicated, I looked down at my watch and it was 74 seconds and my friend and I were running at the absolute back of the pack at the time we just burst out laughing. That definitely improved my running though the marathon was always a bridge too far for me. I ran Charleston 15 miler a lot and the 15K in Cincinnati.