An introduction to the joys of late-life running, inspired by my book, The Race Against Time (but with lots of extra, topical material) and published by the excellent AW magazine – better known to most as Athletics Weekly.
AW, 11 April 2023
I HAVE BEEN been have been interested in running for much of my longish life: not just doing it but watching it and soaking up its rich traditions. Yet I was almost 60 before I discovered Ed Whitlock. I had never heard of Olga Kotelko, either, at that point; or of Earl Fee; or of a host of other giants of early 21st century track and field – multiple world record-holders and champions – whose golden athletic years coincided with my own period of greatest interest in the sport.
Why not? Because I wasn’t watching. Year after year, athletes such as Charles Allie, Guido Müller, Nicole Alexis, Angela Copson, Gene Dykes, Caroline Powell, Clare Elms, Tommy Hughes, Yoko Nakono and Mariko Yugeta would push back the boundaries of human possibility. And year after year I missed them.
I wish I hadn’t, but prejudice blinded me. They were the wrong age. I knew that masters athletics existed, but I assumed, as most people do, that it was a lacklustre affair: a sad, second-best niche for people who couldn’t think of anything else to do when they grew too old for proper athletics.
Then I encountered the reality.
My journey of discovery began uncomfortably, four or five years ago, when a much less illustrious running career – my own – seemed to be grinding to a halt. I had been vaguely noticing for years that I was getting slower, but I hadn’t given it much thought. Then, in my late fifties, my physical decline began to trouble me. I wasn’t just slower and weaker. I was a shadow of the runner I used to be.
I had less bounce, less stride length, worse balance, less lung-power, less range of motion and much less resistance to injury. I seemed short of courage, too, or even basic enthusiasm. All the things that had once made me a moderately good runner were draining away.
Time passed and the cycle of decline reinforced itself. The lay-offs for injury grew longer, from each one I came back a little weaker and, as a result, more susceptible to other, seemingly random injuries.
“There isn’t really a reason,” said the physio who treated my torn calf. “It’s just age.”
My morning run, which for years I had thought of as my daily treat, began to feel like an ordeal. And what made it worse was that all this coincided (as it does for many runners) with a stage in life when there are all too many other reasons to think of yourself as being on life’s scrapheap.
I’m sure I’m not the only middle-aged athlete to have sunk into something approaching a mid-life crisis as I wrestled with the miserable thought that my running days might be over. But then, much to my surprise, I found a way forward.
Surveys suggest that there are around 1.25 million regular runners in the UK who are over 40. Eighty per cent will stop running before they reach retirement age. That’s not because they don’t like running. It’s just that the ageing process doesn’t like runners. The older we get, the more of a struggle our sport becomes. Most of us end up admitting defeat.
But being an ex-runner isn’t much fun either, so I resolved to find out what I could about the 20 per cent; and about the even smaller minority who continue to run, happily and healthily, until they are far into their seventies and eighties and, in a few cases, beyond.
My curiosity developed into a long, sprawling quest for the secrets of late-life running, which brought me into contact with a bewildering range of experts and enthusiasts – scientists, coaches, runners, medics – from many countries.
I spoke to champions and joggers, sprinters and distance runners, recent ex-Olympians and bright- eyed centenarian novices. Where possible I ran with them, too. Each offered their own special insights into how runners can overcome the challenges of later life, and their cumulative effect was to persuade me that I could overcome them too.
Eventually I tried to distil the most valuable lessons into a book: The Race Against Time. But the main thing they taught me can be stated in half a sentence: it’s worth it. The gift of being a runner is too precious to be surrendered lightly.
As for practical details: runners thrive in later life for many reasons. Some are just lucky: unscathed by major injury or illness and, possibly, genetically predisposed to age slowly.
Some have been running all their lives; others barely ran at all before middle age; a few started later still. Many of the best were keen young runners who quit for a decade or two, then started again. What they all have in common is that, these days, they really have to work at it – because ageing, whoever you are, makes running harder.
Between the ages of 40 and 70 – to over-simplify a vast and complex field – we can expect to lose around a quarter of our lung power and muscle power. Maximal heart rate and VO2 max also decline precipitously; our sense of balance worsens; ligaments, tendons and bones become more fragile; joints lose their range of motion; and we struggle to absorb the nutrients we need. And that’s before you factor in all the general, life-specific wear-and-tear that most of us accumulate as the decades go by. No wonder so many people chuck it in.
Yet things can be done to slow the physiological slide. For example: more resistance work, to counter muscle wastage; more balance work, to boost our deteriorating nervous systems; more recovery time; more focus on fuelling. Patience and persistence
are required; so is thought. But that’s what you sign up for when you decide that, as a runner, you’re not going to take ageing lying down.
There’s no point pretending it’s easy. But, to repeat myself, it’s worth it. You still deteriorate, but it’s slower. And the simple rediscovery that you can still, through your own efforts, make a difference, making yourself a better runner than you would otherwise have been, can feel like a huge morale boost.
This is crucial, because age-related decline often reflects something else, too: the fact that, as we age, we stop believing. We’re too old to run fast, we tell ourselves, so our training dwindles to half-hearted plodding. Even that doesn’t protect us from post-training soreness, so we ease off further. We’re too weak to run hard, we tell ourselves. We grow weaker still. And the weaker and more tentative we become, the more often we’re injured.
But age-appropriate training allows us to take back a degree of control. We can’t stop the clock but we can take responsibility, thinking about how to make things better rather than brooding on what we’ve lost. And once we reject self-pity, we tend to realise how much more we could easily be doing.
“Sometimes you think: ‘I’m getting older – I can’t run’,” said Jo Pavey, 49-year-old age-group world record-holder for 10,000m (W35) and 5000m (W40) and five-time Olympian. “But if you think, ‘Right, what training have I been doing in the last three months?’ – maybe you haven’t really done that much. So don’t you think that if you were young you’d be running badly as well?”
Jo’s advice inspired me to get back into speed training: proper, lung-busting, stomach-churning interval sessions like the ones I used to do when I was young. It felt strangely transgressive at first: surely it wasn’t appropriate for a man in his early sixties to be pushing himself so visibly into such intense physical distress?
But the more I did it, the more I realised that, whatever my age, I was still the same runner I had always been: not especially good, but capable, if I tried, of improvement. And the more that sank in, and the harder I worked, the better I felt. I had developed a habit of looking back regretfully (“This used to be easier…”, “I used to be faster…”), but now I was looking forward again. My sense of possibility had come back. Never mind that I was a shadow of the runner I used to be. I was thinking about the runner I hoped to become.
This was a liberating breakthrough, because in recent years, I realised, I had been self-limiting: boxing myself in with self-fulfilling preconceptions about older runners being lesser runners, objects of pity or ridicule. Now I saw how absurd this was.
There is nothing “embarrassing” about being old and slow. Age is just one more challenge, one more arbitrary sporting handicap: invisible but no less real than a hurdle or a hill. It makes running tougher. It means that it takes you longer to cover a given distance. But it doesn’t make the challenge less real or demanding, or less worthwhile. Running is running, whatever your age.
In this context, it is empowering to watch the elite of masters athletics. Their times are slower than the ones your read about on the sports pages, but they are no less extraordinary. The gap between what they can achieve on the track and what an ordinary, fit, keen recreational runner could achieve is still mind-boggling, and the stories of the superstars’ struggles with the absolute limits of physical possibility are no less dramatic, and no less inspiring. When Ed Whitlock – a British-born Canadian who died in 2017 – first set his sights on becoming the first man over 70 to run a sub three-hour marathon, he described it as “the poor man’s four-minute mile”.
It was an apt comparison, because the seductively neat goal seemed at once tantalisingly attainable and, in practice, impossibly difficult.
Whitlock, who set dozens of other masters records, made several unsuccessful attempts before finally breaking through the three-hour barrier when he was 72; then broke it twice more. His second success – 2:54:48 when he was 73 – was described by the New York Times as “the greatest marathon ever run” once age had been taken into account.
They may have been right, and although a couple of others have now followed in Whitlock’s footsteps (one of whom, 71-year-old Dutchman Jo Schoonbroodt, recently reduced Whitlock’s iconic world record to 2:54:19), it is Whitlock’s pioneering breakthrough that echoes through the ages, just as Roger Bannister’s does.
Meanwhile, the Irish runner Tommy Hughes has repeatedly come within seconds of becoming the first man over 60 to break 2:30 for the same distance, despite some terrible luck with coronavirus in the three years since his 60th birthday.
If he succeeds, as I believe he still could, he will also become the first person to have broken the two-and-a-half hour barrier in five consecutive decades, from his twenties to his sixties. The fact that Eliud Kipchoge could run a marathon nearly half-an-hour faster would not diminish such an achievement in any way. Both men are pushing at the furthest limits of what is physiologically possible, armed with once-in-a-generation talent, tireless and intelligent training, and a heroic capacity to endure pain. To value one but not the other would make no sense at all.
There are similar dramas, and similarly awe-inspiring achievements, in most masters age groups. You need to familiarise yourself with the norms and records for different ages – or better still have a go yourself. But once you have a sense of how much extra difficulty each extra year imposes at different distances, you can appreciate the champions of masters for the athletic giants they are.
Last year alone, a 35-year-old woman (Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce) ran 100m in 10.62; a 45-year-old man (Germany’s Alexander Kosenkow) ran 200m in 21.65; a 45-year-old woman (Irish- born Australian Sinead Diver) ran a marathon in 2:21:34; a 52-year-old woman (Great Britain & Northern Ireland’s Sally Cooke) ran 400m in 57.55; a 62-year-old woman (France’s Nicole Alexis) ran 200m in 27.78 and 100m in 13.20; a 65-year-old man (Great Britain & Northern Ireland’s Alastair Walker) ran 10km in 34:32; a 75-year-old woman (Great Britain & Northern Ireland’s Angela Copson) ran 800m in 3:07.19, 1500m in 6:20.93 and 5000m in 22:53.55; an 80-year-old man (Japan’s Katsutoshi Nakamura) ran 100m in 14.24; an 86-year-old woman (Great Britain & Northern Ireland’s Anne Martin) ran a 2000m steeplechase – with 18 hurdles and five water-jumps – in 16:55.73; and a 90-year-old man (Australia’s David Carr) did the same in 12:26.57.
The numbers may mean little if you don’t follow masters. When you do, you realise that these are records as extreme as anything you might see at the Olympics – the only fundamental difference being that those who set them are rarely household names.
For ordinary recreational late-life runners like me, meanwhile, such exploits are as empowering as they are inspiring. We have no chance of emulating them, yet they give us permission to set our sights a little higher, fuelling our ambitions and giving focus to our low-level striving – just as the great Olympic moments did when we were young.
The achievements of the late-life elite also demonstrate an important truth: that the limits of athletic performance when you’re past your prime lie much further back than conventional thinking suggests.
Growing older can easily rob us of our sense of possibility, as runners and as people. We become so accustomed to the sensations of physical decline – and to society’s expectations of decline – that we stop believing in the possibility of improvement.
But speak to any keen masters athlete and they’ll tell you that, whatever your age, you can, if you put your mind to it, make yourself a much better runner through dedicated, patient, age-appropriate training than you would be if you surrender to apathy or, at best, just carry on grimly doing the same old stuff.
Alan Carter, former M80 long hurdles world champion and current British 200m record-holder in his new age-group, M85, is a case in point. Growing up in London’s East End, Alan was a decent club runner in his teens and twenties but “drifted away” in his early thirties because he didn’t want to “embarrass” himself by becoming the oldest and slowest in the club.
Two decades later, he discovered masters athletics, decided to have a go, and was shocked by how slow he was relative to the most experienced masters. So he started working hard – seriously hard – and slowly improved.
“My first 200m race, when I was 51, I did in 26.9. But when I was 55 I did 25.6.” (Age alone should have added nearly a second to his time, so this is a bigger improvement than it seems.)
He went to his first world championships when he was 58 and he hoped that the next time he would get beyond the heats. But instead, in his early sixties, he found himself slowing down again. “I pushed myself harder and harder, but it just didn’t happen. I’d be putting in more reps, over a longer period of time, feeling knackered, and going back the next day, and I’d come away thinking ‘Ah, that’s done me good!’ And then I’d go and race, and I’d got slower.”
The turning-point came in 2017, when Alan hoped to compete in the 400m at the world championships in Riccione, Italy. He had just turned 70, and he reckoned that, if he could break 70 seconds, he would stand a good chance of at least getting past the heats. Yet when he tested himself in an open race in Bedford a few months before the championships he felt so bad he could barely finish – and was horrified to record a time of 84 seconds.
Something had to change, fast. So he started reading a book his son had given him for Christmas: The Complete Guide to Running: How to be a Champion from 9 to 90, by the great Canadian Masters athlete, Earl Fee.
“It was life-changing.” Oversimplifying only slightly, Alan boils down Fee’s weighty volume to three sentences: “From about the age of 55, and certainly beyond 60, your body can’t take the volume of training any more. But it can take intensity. So you stick with the intensity, but you reduce the volume.”
In Alan’s case, that meant having far more easy days than he was used to, and limiting his toughest track sessions to once a week. But those sessions really were tough. He started off doing two or three repetitions of 200m at sub-35 second speed – which in those days was well within his capability.
Then, each week, he would increase the distance of each rep by 20m, keeping the pace the same. That hurt, every time. But he could do it – just – and, week by week, the extra distance accumulated. Within 10 weeks he was up to 400m, and pretty much down to 70 seconds a time. He wasn’t yet a world-beater, but in Riccione he made three finals, at 400m, 200m and long (300m) hurdles.
That boost to his confidence has been driving him ever since. He won his first British gold (in long hurdles) in 2009. In 2012, encouraged by his friend and coach Nick Lauder, he won his first European gold, as an M75. In 2013, at Porto Alegre in Brazil, he won his first world gold, also as an M75; and in 2018, in Malaga, Spain, he won another, this time as an M80. And now, as an M85, he is hoping to remain fit and injury-free long enough to win a few more golds, and perhaps too to set his first world record – completing an extraordinary journey from also-ran to world best that began at a time of life when many runners are preparing to hang up their running shoes for good.
He has slowed down, obviously, and it has been a while since he last raced at 400m, let alone did so in fewer seconds than his age in years. But, even as an 85-year-old, he runs like a proper elite competitor. (I know: I’ve tried keeping up with him on the track.) And the British record he set last summer – 35.48 seconds for 200m – is impressive for an athlete whose main discipline is hurdling.
I’d be surprised if he came back empty-handed from this month’s World Masters Athletics Indoor Championships in Toruń, Poland, where he’s entered for the 200m (for which he topped the world rankings last year) and also hopes for a relay medal.
Whether or not he’ll get much recognition for it is a different matter. Generally, masters champions don’t. Yet I suspect that this may soon change, because attitudes are evolving. Running boomers like me are getting older in our thousands and encountering the harsh truths of ageing, and more and more of us are looking for ways to keep going. The examples of the great masters champions can help enormously with this: not because many of us will actually compete formally as masters ourselves but because, as Emil Zátopek observed long ago, runners need to run with dreams in their heads and hope in their hearts.
Older runners who achieve belief-defying things show us that running can still be a thrilling adventure, capable of producing spine-tingling moments of excitement, irrespective of the participants’ age.
Most of us could never come remotely close to matching the masters elite, any more than we could have matched the Olympians when we were younger. But the achievements of the best give us permission to dream and hope again. And this helps us get back into the life-enhancing habit of working hard to improve ourselves; of attempting things that may turn out to be beyond us; and perhaps also of discovering, occasionally, that we have more to give than we thought.
Another great Czech runner, the pioneering veteran Karel Matzner (who was still competing a few months before his death, aged 92, in November 2021) thought that running’s strange power to brighten the lives of those who do it was a key to the mystery of what keeps some runners going in later life. “A positive mental attitude helps you keep running,” he told me. “And running helps you have a positive mental attitude.”
Go to watch any masters athletics meeting – or, if you like, compete in one – and you’ll find it hard not to be swept up in the atmosphere of enthusiasm, exuberance and warmth. This is strange: you’d expect older runners to enjoy their sport less than younger runners, what with all the extra aches and pains and the relentless disappointments of declining absolute performance. Yet the hopelessness of our shared struggle against age somehow redoubles the positivity that people bring to the sport: the admiration that we also-rans feel for the champions and the encouragement the champions extend to the rest of us. When it comes to getting older, runners, of whatever standard, are all in it together.
And as more and more runners discover this, an upsurge in interest in masters athletics would not be at all surprising. I wasn’t the only recreational runner of my generation to be inspired in my twenties by the likes of Seb Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram.
Why should I be the only one to be inspired today by the examples of Carter, Copson, Walker, Alexis and the rest? In both cases, it’s a question of realising that perhaps you could make a little more of what talent you have; and, indeed, that you could make more of yourself and your life, simply by working to become the best runner you can possibly be. And that’s as powerful a discovery when you’re approaching retirement age as it is when you’re just starting out in life.
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