If the experiences of ultrarunners are demarcated by races, perhaps there is no more consistent one than the race against Father Time. In this event, there are no tailwinds, the climbs get steeper with each passing mile and the only relief from the competition can be found with deliberate actions taken by the participant. Improving into your 50s, 60s and 70s is a seemingly impossible task to take on, and every fall and winter I consult with athletes that want to do just that. They want to know if they can improve and if so, then how? Not everyone has the same answer and road map, but there are some common themes that prevail if you are looking to (potentially) get faster after 50.
Can you improve after 50?
I’m going to cut to the chase and simultaneously engage you to read the rest of the article. If you are over 50, you can still realize performance improvements. This does not mean that everyone will realize performance improvements, but provided that you were not an elite athlete in your 20s and 30s, it’s actually more probable than not that you can see improvement if you are deliberate about your training and lifestyle.
There are some common themes that prevail if you are looking to (potentially) get faster after 50.
Our coaching practice has perhaps the largest cohort of 50+ athletes, which is the most common age demographic that we see looking for coaching services. So much so, that each of our 15 ultramarathon coaches usually have over half of their athlete base in this demographic.
Change Your Perspective
After turning 50, you are playing the long game. Your goal should be to remain in the game in your mid-50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. This psychological shift is an important one because it facilitates the behavioral and training tactics that parallel it. When you realize that you are playing a longer game from a training perspective, three big themes emerge:
Prioritize protecting the fitness you have. As we age, our physiology is less adaptable, and pragmatically, athletes in their 50s and beyond know this. It’s harder to make the improvements they could when they were in their 30s, and easier to lose fitness in the off-season. To combat this, protect the fitness you have by intentionally designing your training with less dramatic swings in intensity and volume. Off-seasons are there, but shorter, and contain a minimum dose of exercise to prevent large declines. As you build into peak fitness, the volume jumps are smaller as you will typically be aiming at a lower peak and coming from a higher point of volume during the off-season.
Consistency trumps big impulses. With my elite athletes, I regularly design 2 and 3-day training blocks where the volume in those 2–3-day periods constitute more than 70% of their weekly volume. For example, if I have an athlete training 20 hours per week, I might have them do a 3-day training block where those three days are 15 hours total. Athletes over 50 have a harder time handling these abrupt swings in volume concentration. The theme I’ve noticed is that I usually cut these bigger volume impulses in half as compared to when they were in their 30s and 40s.
Lifestyle has a bigger impact (both positive and negative). Pulling an all-nighter at work? Traveling across time zones? Got the flu? Want to start strength training? All of these factors have a bigger impact when you’re in your 50s and beyond as compared to when you were younger. So, if you get sick, give yourself more time. If you want to start strength training, do so, but build up more gradually and take some run training off the schedule in the initial phases. Respect that the recovery and adaptation processes are less malleable than they were a couple decades earlier.
Risk Tolerance Changes
Another interesting aspect we have noticed when coaching athletes past their 50s is that their risk tolerances for training and racing change. Athletes are less keen to race frequently, take on races that might be outside of their fitness level and gradually shift towards events that are easier logistically with fewer environmental hazards (think of doing a large, well-supported race like the JFK 50 vs the Fat Dog 120). Even with strength training, we prescribe more exercises with machines and pair up athletes with personal trainers more frequently. Not all athletes experience this change in tolerance though it seems to be a trend. I have only encountered a few athletes whose risk tolerance for activity actually increases with age.
Changes in Motivating Factors
Younger athletes are preoccupied with crushing the local Strava segment, racking up vertical gain and comparing their performances week-to-week. They are more ego-driven and motivated externally versus internally. Older athletes can still have big outcome goals as well, but typically their perspective shifts toward the experiential. They want to experience the joy and challenge running and fitness bring vs the reward of seeing how much faster they were compared to previous years. As a result, athletes are motivated to train in a way that extends their lifespan so that they can enjoy the sport as much as they can for as long as they can.
Leave Fads in the Past
For athletes in their 50s and beyond, skip the latest diet or lifestyle hack that promises a quick fix to improve your fitness. It’s tempting to take a shortcut to lose weight, increase energy, rapid fat loss or whatever the promise might be, but the fact of the matter is that these fads have the potential to affect you negatively more than they would a younger version of yourself. So, skip the fasted workouts and the carnivore diet and instead, focus on high quality nutrition with adequate protein and carbohydrates.
Longevity Becomes the Performance Goal
There are many competitive runners near, or over, the age of 50. Just look at 48-year-old Ludovic Pommeret who won the 2024 Hardrock 100 in a course-record time. While performances like this are an anomaly, they do provide an example of how athletes can age and still perform at their best. Athletes over 50 want to run for the rest of their lives. The training enriches their health and extends their healthspan first, performance comes as a byproduct.
From a coaching perspective, this manifests as a shift toward year-round and generalized fitness and away from hyper-specific training blocks. While we still have athletes get specific fitness for certain events, that specificity does not have the same spotlight on it that it once did. For example, traveling to Silverton to run on the Hardrock 100 course becomes more about training at altitude and the experience than seeing the course (so feel free to cut out the boring parts like Camp Bird Road). However, keeping the consistency throughout the season and maintaining fitness throughout the year will keep older athletes ready for their next training block and beyond.
The author would like to thank Joe Friel and Jim Rutberg for the inspiration behind this article.