How To Perform Better With Age
We mean running, obviously. Honestly, you people
AROUND 45 MINUTES INTO the 2014 Boston Marathon, Meb Keflezighi broke free of the leading pack. To a man, the favourites let him go. They would not have seen the Eritrean-born US runner as much of a threat: a 38-yearold dropped by his main sponsor, Nike, three years earlier after they concluded his best days were behind him. His 23rd-place finish in the previous year’s New York City Marathon had seemed to confirm Nike’s judgment.
The TV crew covering the race must have felt the same. Even as Keflezighi extended his lead to over a minute, the director focused on the group behind, which included defending champion Lelisa Desisa. Keflezighi, meanwhile, was way out in front. With less than four miles to go, two Kenyans, 28-yearold Wilson Chebet and 29-year-old Frankline Chepkwony, gave chase. Shaving more than 20 seconds off their mile splits, they closed the gap to 30 seconds, then 20, then 10. With a little over a mile left, Chebet was a mere 6.2 seconds behind.
But watching on TV — by now they’d cottoned on — Keflezighi’s coach Bob Larsen read the body language of the two runners: Chebet’s ragged and pained, Keflezighi’s compact and linear. ‘I said, “I think Meb’s going to hold them off,”’ he recalls. Moments later, Keflezighi glanced over his shoulder and saw what Larsen had seen. He pumped his fist, crossed himself and, in a new personal best of 2:08:37, became the oldest man in more than 80 years to breast the tape in Boston.
In doing so, he also became part of one the most interesting stories in sport, especially for those who’d rather participate than watch and who also have a few miles on the clock. We have entered a golden age for older athletes. Across the elite sports world, individuals are attaining new career heights at ages that only a generation ago would have been considered geriatric. To name just a few: Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, Cristiano Ronaldo, Jo Pavey and Shalane Flanagan. And it’s not just the pros. A recent study found new records are being set at an accelerating pace in Masters athletics. In mass races, participation is growing fastest in the over-50s age brackets and good-for-age qualifying times are tumbling.
In researching my book Play on: How to Get Better with Age (Penguin), I interviewed dozens of professional and Olympic athletes and their coaches, doctors, nutritionists and trainers, as well as the sports scientists who study them. I went inside elite performance centres and anti-ageing clinics; I saw how sports surgeons are extending careers with new surgical techniques and biological therapies that use the body’s cells as the instrument of repair. I saw breakthrough technologies that can predict injuries, how a revolution in physical-conditioning strategies is adding years to athletes’ careers, and how specific cognitive habits allow those athletes to reach new performance heights long after what used to be called “peak age.”
As sports science races into the future, it sends back dispatch after dispatch full of welcome news for older athletes. Peering into the world of the elites gives us a glimpse into the reality the rest of us will soon be living: one study on medical innovations found a 17-year lag between the time a new technique is pioneered and the time it filters down to the general population.
But what’s most exciting isn’t the gadgetry or the biotech miracles just over the horizon; it’s the knowledge we can already harness today. Thanks to decades of research and practice, sports scientists have a new understanding of how to optimise performance at
any age, the principles of which we can all grasp and put to use. Here are a few of the lessons I learned spending time with Meb Keflezighi and others who are upending our notions about what older athletes are capable of.
FRESH IS THE NEW FIT
AT THE HEART OF SPORT’S longevity revolution is a newfound appreciation for the importance of balancing fitness with freshness. The idea of building recovery into a training programme isn’t entirely new, of course, but in many sports and for many athletes the more-is-more ethos has endured: the fittest athlete will prevail, so don’t let anyone outwork you in the gym or on the practice track.
That remained the case until around 15 years ago, when maverick coaches such as Raymond Verheijen at Manchester City and Gregg Popovich at the San Antonio Spurs basketball team in the US started advocating giving healthy players, especially older ones, more time off to help them avoid the long-term build-up of fatigue. ‘If you are extremely fit but also extremely tired, your performance will be shit,’ says Verheijen. Under their regimes, injuries fell and older stars such as Craig Bellamy and Tim Duncan experienced late-career surges. Coaches everywhere took note.
What was then controversial is fast becoming conventional wisdom. You can see the legacy of Popovich and Verheijen in the sensor-packed devices Premier League players now wear at training sessions to monitor their training loads and alert coaches when they’re in danger of being overworked. You can hear it in the testimony of Roger Federer, who credited his return to No. 1 in the pro rankings at the age of 36 in early 2018 to a pared-back schedule of tournament play, and Desiree Linden, who says taking seven full months off training in 2017 was what primed her to win the 2018 Boston Marathon at the age of 34.
It’s not something that necessarily comes naturally. Even we recreational runners have grown up with the ‘no pain, no gain’ mantra and tend to possess a drive towards going harder for longer. You can amplify that for the elites: ‘One of the hardest things to do for an elite athlete is take a day off,’ says Keflezighi. ‘We’re so motivated, so driven by routine. We like to go, go, go.’ But he says becoming attuned to when a day off would benefit him more than an extra training session was a big part of what helped him win his biggest race at the age of 38.
Learning how to gauge your recovery starts with listening closely to your body’s signals: do you feel sore, sluggish, heavy? But you can supplement that feedback with hard data from wearable devices – such as the GPS watch you use for training – that measure your resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV). A resting heart
‘We have entered a golden age for older athletes’
rate more than a few beats per minute above your average can be a warning sign that you’re overtraining, need more sleep or are getting run-down; while low HRV is an indicator of central nervous system fatigue, which is associated with compromised performance and elevated injury risk.
You also need to fully embrace a shift in mindset: we used to think that having a champion’s discipline meant being the last one to leave the gym or the track; now we know it often means being the first. And the idea that outworking everyone else is the key to long-term success is now dismissed by many experts. In his younger days, basketball superstar Kobe Bryant was famed for his so-called ‘blackout workouts’, when he lifted weights until he passed out. But his longtime trainer, Tim Difrancesco, says it was learning to avoid overdoing it that got Bryant through his second decade at the top of professional basketball. ‘Approach your workouts with a “live to train another day” attitude instead of a “train until you puke” attitude,’ says Difrancesco.
Hilary Stellingwerff, a middledistance runner who competed for Canada in the Olympic Summer Games in Rio at the age of 34, recalls the time she trained with a group of world-class Kenyan runners on a recovery day. She found it difficult to stay with the pack – because they were running so slowly. They were employing polarisation, a training concept advanced by the Norwegian researcher Stephen Seiler.
In a polarised programme, about 80 per cent of the workouts are done at ultra-low intensity. How low? Consider that Eliud Kipchoge, who set his 2018 marathon world record at an average pace of 4:38 min/mile, clocks an astonishingly sedate 9:40 min/mile on recovery days. It means going so slow you might feel as if you haven’t worked out at all. The other 20 per cent of sessions are done at the highest possible intensity. Hilary’s husband, Trent Stellingwerff, is one of Canada’s top sports scientists. He explains the theory behind polarised training: ‘As a coach, you’re always dealing with three inputs. What’s the stimulus and adaptation I’m looking for out of this workout? What’s the recovery profile? And what’s the residual? That is, how often do I need to do this?’
Most athletes, pro and amateur alike, don’t think enough about these inputs. As a result, Stellingwerff says, they go harder than they should on their easy days and build up unnecessary fatigue that they carry into their hard workouts, which prevents them from going all-out. By polarising her workouts, a runner like Hilary Stellingwerff avoids falling into this mushy middle. She can build up the aerobic capacity she needs for 5K races while staying fresh enough to do the two to four intense workouts per week that improve her top-end speed.
With age, the imperative to polarise grows stronger at both ends of the spectrum. Older runners typically take longer to recover from intense efforts. The micotrauma caused by hard training takes longer to heal, which makes it that much more important to avoid adding to that fatigue in between tough sessions by working too hard on easy/recovery days. Meanwhile, interval workouts are the most important tool for resisting the agerelated decline in VO2 max, says Mayo Clinic researcher Dr Michael Joyner.
SHOCK AND MORE
WHEN ELITE OLDER athletes continue to excel past their sports’ peak age, it’s not just because they train efficiently and manage the build-up of fatigue. They also train intelligently, in ways that separate desirable training stresses from undesirable ones – the ones that cause chronic injuries. For Keflezighi, that means supplementing his runs with sessions on the Elliptigo, an outdoor bicycle that looks like a rolling elliptical machine and is powered by a running action. It allows him to replace some of his road work with training that doesn’t subject his cartilage, bones and ligaments to the same repetitive impact forces.
This is particularly important for older runners because cartilage, which acts as a shock-absorbing layer in our joints, wears down over time – particularly in the knees – and the cells that help it regenerate become less effective as we age. Though there is some good news: the same repetitive ground-contact forces that wear down cartilage also stimulate cells called chondrocytes, which can secrete more of it. The key is subjecting your body to the right amount of stress to get the positive effect without the negative consequences, and as we get older that means less impact.
For Stellingwerff, getting the balance of stresses right means doing some of her running on an Alterg treadmill, which uses air pressure to buoy her up slightly as she runs. Stellingwerff takes about 100,000 steps
in a typical training week. With every step she takes on the ground, she strikes with a force equivalent to four times her body mass. But on the Alterg, she can reduce that force by 10-20 per cent. And she can do it while maintaining her usual cadence.
If you don’t have £30,000 to drop on an anti-gravity treadmill, you can take some of the pounding out of your runs by doing more miles on softer surfaces such as grass or trail, a strategy Jo Pavey believes has been a big factor in her extraordinary longevity at the very top (see Forever Young, below). You should also embrace low-impact cross-training options such as the elliptical trainer and stationary bike, as most experts agree doing more cross-training means fewer injuries.
Along with shoe boxes of medals, long-term runners also tend to accumulate a list of injuries that reads like a physiotherapy training syllabus. And while we may think we’ve left them behind, those past issues may still be causing us problems. This is something injury-prevention and performance-enhancement specialist Dr Marcus Elliott seeks to combat at his cutting-edge P3 clinic in California. Using a ring of high-speed cameras he captures three-dimensional animations of athletes’ movements while ground sensors measure the forces they generate.
Elliott’s goal is to detect subtle movement patterns that suggest a past injury is manifesting itself in a way that’s decreasing the athlete’s efficiency and putting him or her at risk of more injuries down the line. ‘Getting these compensation patterns out of their systems, not letting them continue to fester or cause careerending injuries, is absolutely one of the keys to optimising athletes deep into their careers,’ says Elliott.
The science of predicting injuries is far from perfected, but more and more professional sports teams and athletes are now investing in systems like the ones at P3. For a lower-tech alternative, a physiotherapist can administer a functional-movement screen, a series of simple movement challenges – such as the squat, lunge and press-up – used to identify limitations in strength and range of motion that can be remedied before they lead to injuries. You can find a qualified practitioner certified to administer the tests in your area on functionalmovement.com. There are also apps, such as Spark Motion (sparkmotion.com) that you can use to film your movements for virtual analysis by a remote coach. And while a trained eye is always better, you may even be able to spot obvious problems with a self-assessment.
WATCH WHAT YOU EAT
MANY ELITE OLDER athletes attribute their longevity to changes in their diets. Whether you should follow their lead is another matter. Kirsty Coventry, an Olympic swimmer into her 30s, cut out genetically modified foods; one longtime NFL quarterback puts shots of his wife’s breast milk in his smoothies; and the evergreen Novak Djokovic has eaten a strict gluten-free diet ever since a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine convinced him he had an allergy by having him hold a piece of bread against his stomach.
American football quarterback Tom Brady – still one of the best at 41 – credits his longevity to the holistic guru Alex Guerrero, who believes certain foods promote inflammation by lowering the ph balance of the blood. Under his guidance, Brady avoids sugar, tomatoes, wheat, dairy, strawberries, mushrooms, iodised salt, coffee and most meats. ‘The athletes that we deal with notice a big difference when they cheat on our diet,’ says Guerrero.
Maybe so, but nutritionists say that’s probably because the foods that make up the bulk of Brady’s diet – green, leafy vegetables, root vegetables, cabbage, beans, avocado, squash — happen to be rich in all sorts of
‘Doing more crosstraining means fewer injuries’
nutrients. Alkalinity has nothing to do with it. In fact, according to Asker Jeukendrop, a top sports nutritionist and physiologist, athletes should be careful about overdosing on antioxidant foods that can suppress inflammation, like tart cherry juice. While the aches that come with getting older may cry out for soothing, habitually tamping them down with antioxidant-rich foods – or ibuprofen, for that matter – can exacerbate another symptom of ageing by interfering with the body’s natural response to training.
Something else for older runners to consider in our menu choices is that a phenomenon called anabolic resistance makes it harder for our bodies to turn food into muscle as we age. But increasing the amount of protein you consume can help combat the effects of sarcopenia, or age-related muscle loss. Jeukendrup recommends between 1.2g and 1.7g per kilogram of body weight, spaced out over the course of four to five small meals during the day.
There’s also strong evidence, much of it from the lab of researcher Keith Baar, that consuming collagen in the form of gelatin powder or bone broth can speed healing from tendon injuries and decrease post-workout muscle soreness. Finally, creatine monohydrate is the rare supplement that does what it’s supposed to: by improving muscular endurance and recovery during exercise, it supports faster strength gains – crucial for older athletes combating sarcopenia. Although not recommended for people with kidney problems, others can safely take five grams per day before or after exercise.
WISDOM OF EXPERIENCE
BECAUSE SUCCESS IN SPORT has historically skewed young, it’s easy to think about the traits we associate with youth — passion, optimism, a sense of invulnerability — and assume they translate into competitive advantages. In fact, the opposite is more often true. It’s the mental and emotional habits that accrue with time and experience that can lead to victory over the long run.
Consider passion. In the language of neuroscience, it’s known as emotional arousal and, in excess, it’s associated with awful moments of ‘choking’, bad decisions and meltdowns. Andy Lane, a professor of sports psychology at the University of Wolverhampton, has researched emotional regulation in athletes. As they age, he says, they typically experience fewer and lessintense ‘unwanted psychological states’ before and during their performances.
Some of that, Lane believes, comes down to how goal-setting changes with age. Older athletes are better at setting goals within their power to achieve, while younger athletes often set unrealistic ones, essentially setting themselves up for disappointment. It’s not just a matter of hurt feelings: one study involving cyclists who were shown false feedback that made it appear they were performing badly in a time trial suggested there may be a metabolic cost to negative emotions.
The importance of careful goal selection is magnified in older competitors, who can experience not just a loss of motivation, but a loss of identity when discovering they can no longer perform like they used to, says performance psychologist Don Kalkstein. One key strategy for avoiding that kind of downward spiral is to construct a hierarchy of goals for each performance. For Keflezighi, a typical race-day goal hierarchy goes: win; failing that, podium; failing that, set a personal best. In an event where factors out of his control put one goal out of reach – as in the London 2012 Olympic marathon, where a bottle mishap left him with midrace stomach cramps – Keflezighi finds he is able to seamlessly switch goals and lock into a new source of motivation. After falling far behind the frontrunners, he rallied to finish fourth in what he considers one of his top performances.
This combination of emotional stability and flexible goal-setting translates into consistency of effort, which is the recipe for having more opportunities for success. US elite marathoner Desiree Linden, for example, capitalised on an unexpected chance to win last year’s Boston Marathon at the age of 34 after icy rain forced many of her more-favoured competitors to ditch their plans.
THE FUN FACTOR
YOU WOULD ASSUME that the athletes who maintain elite status for decades are the ones who love what they do. But talk to sports psychologists and they’ll tell you there’s nothing easy about that idea. ‘We have this puritan work ethic — “work hard, work hard, work hard.” That can kill our joy,’ says Jim Afremow, a sports psychologist who has worked with professional and Olympic athletes.
Consider that one of the first filters that separates the youth athletes who become elite performers from those who don’t is the discipline to choose a life of grim sacrifice over one of easy gratification — to put in thousands of hours of practice, to eat and sleep in a regimented way, to break down every performance and try to understand what went wrong. There’s little room for playfulness or spontaneity. But if the ability to treat your sport like a roundthe-clock job is crucial to early success, the ability to nurture a spirit of delight despite all the forces threatening to extinguish it is equally vital later in a career. ‘The best athletes in the world work the hardest, but they also have the most fun,’ says Afremow.
The fun factor is also critical to all of us who look to put in mile after mile, year after year, in pursuit of our modest goals. ‘Fun is the critical element,’ says Jim Loehr, sports psychologist and cofounder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute. ‘If you’re playing solely to rack up titles and get as much money as you can, it’s kind of joyless. But if you’re doing this because it’s a vehicle for expressing who you are, with a sense of gratefulness and joy that pervades both winning and losing – if I sense that in an athlete, I don’t care what the sport, you know they’re going to hang around a very long time.’ Amen to that.
‘The best athletes in the world also have the most fun’