“Fast After 50: How to Race Strong for the Rest of Your Life” by Joe Friel
Paperback, 336 pages
Published 2015 by VeloPress
ISBN-10 : 1937715264 | ISBN-13 : 978-1937715267
Date Finished: December 22, 2014
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
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If I remember correctly, I received an advanced copy of this book. These were the first notes I could find in EverNote as I go back to post book notes, from 2014. I was still in my thirties then, but ultrarunning had made me feel much much older, so I got a lot out of this book.
My Notes:
Keep age increases from being reflected in performance decreases.
Lifestyle & training can't be separated.
With aging, change is necessary.
Aging = decreasing aerobic capacity, increase body fat & shrinking muscles .
“We didn’t evolve for more than two million years to sit in front of a TV eating potato chips and contracting lifestyle diseases. Humans were meant to be active, to move vigorously and strenuously—just as you do as an athlete. Our prehistoric ancestors did that for eons. They really had no other choice. Fitness was a condition of survival.
The symptoms of aging that concern athletes include:
- Aerobic capacity (VO2max) declines.
- Maximal heart rate is reduced.
- The volume of blood pumped with each heartbeat decreases.
- Muscle fibers are lost, resulting in decreased muscle mass and less strength.
- Aerobic enzymes in the muscles become less effective and abundant.
- Blood volume is reduced.
We can also see that in the age groups from 50 to 59, there is a slightly more rapid decrease in performance (the times get slower, as indicated by rising chart lines). The decrease is most obvious in swimming and Ironman triathlon. We can also see women’s performance tend to decline faster than men’s, especially in marathon running and Ironman triathlon.
Before the 1970s, it was common for runners to avoid training on the weekends. My how things have changed!
Age is probably the greatest determiner of how frequently we can repeat such workouts, because recovery slows as the birthday candles pile onto the cake.
In our society, and even among athletes, there is a common belief that growing old is fraught with devastating and unavoidable changes that are out of control. The best you can hope for is to keep them at bay as long as possible by taking handfuls of pills every day.
That is to say, old athletes had telomeres that were 13 percent longer than those of their sedentary peers. Telomere length was directly related to activity level. Even though science can’t explain why, exercise slows aging by keeping your telomeres young. And where your telomeres go, so go you. Once again we see that exercise is, indeed, powerful medicine.
The big three aging limiters: Decreased aerobic capacity, Increasing body fat, shrinking muscles.
World-class endurance athletes, both male and female, typically have V02Max values in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with females registering about 10 percent lower than males. That means these top-end athletes consume 60 to 80 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute.
How high can you get your aerobic capacity? Your V02Max potential is largely dependent on who your parents are. This is a conclusion based on classic research showing that identical twins have nearly identical aerobic capacities. It means you have a genetic ceiling, but don’t get hung up on that—so does everyone. Instead, focus on the task at hand, which is to strive in your training to achieve a V02Max as close to your maximal potential as possible.
As we saw in the earlier aerobic-capacity discussion, measuring the oxygen you use during exercise is the way in which we measure how much energy is expended, since both oxygen and stored fuel (primarily fat or glycogen) are needed to power your muscles.
Age also effects economy. Children are not as economical as adults, but as they age, their economy improves. In a similar way, the longer you’ve been seriously training in your sport, the more economical you are likely to have become. That’s largely due to the body adapting in order to conserve energy.
Biomechanics experts have shown that every additional 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of running-shoe weight increase the oxygen cost of running by somewhere between 1 and 2 percent.
Of the 3, they tell us that the most common marker of age-related performance decline is aerobic capacity… Scientists generally consider this the most likely culprit for decrease in performance as we age.
The loss of muscle is due largely to a decrease in hormone production that parallels the fate of your muscles. By age 40, testosterone production is beginning to drop, contributing to significant losses of muscle in men. In women, estrogen also takes a nosedive with a similar (though not as great) change in women’s muscles.
A motor unit is a group of muscle fibers activated by a single nerve.
Apparently, exercise does not maintain muscles unless they are strenuously trained. Use it or lose it.
My take on all of it is this: The primary cause of the decline in muscle with aging is most likely lack of use—an increasingly sedentary lifestyle as we get older.
In other words, the older triathletes who raced at the shorter distance experienced less decline in performance than those doing the longer distance.
Of the physiological markers of fitness—aerobic capacity, lactate threshold, and economy—aerobic capacity is probably the greater determiner of performance as we age.
Train vigorously with high intensity and you’ll stave off a high rate of decline in performance as you age.
For the experienced endurance athletes, an exercise regimen based solely on LSD will do little to improve or even maintain your aerobic fitness status over the years.
I’m careful not to deceive myself by greedily overtraining because going hard has no value without proper recovery.
The next stage in the progression for those just getting back into high-intensity training is to move up to aerobic-capacity intervals. Start with 5 to 10 intervals of 30 to 60 seconds each with recoveries between them of the same duration, for a total of 5 minutes of intervals (e.g., 10x 30 sec or 5x 60 sec) above lactate threshold. The intensity at which you first begin to experience labored breathing. You should feel as if you are working quite hard on these aerobic-capacity intervals, but they aren’t quite an all-out effort.
They are also called "type I" fibers and are quite common in the sport-specific muscles of endurance athletes. In contrast, fast-twitch muscles are powerful but fatigue quite rapidly.
Some type I I fast twitch muscles can take on the endurance characteristics of our type I buddies.
The obvious conclusion we can draw from this pattern is that hard training only creates the potential for fitness. True fitness isn't realized until the athlete is allowed to rest and recover by reducing the training load for a few days.
For some, however, training may continue due to their addiction to the opium like chemicals the body releases during exercise – dopamine and endorphins.
Fortunately, the body has ways of forestalling the effects of overtraining. Fatigue is its best preventative tool. Exhaustion steadily increases with overtraining and becomes so great that getting out of bed in the morning is difficult.
For the serious athlete, regardless of age, the key question as the season progresses is: Am I becoming fitter and faster? That question will ultimately be answered when you race, of course, but by then it’s too late to do anything about it.
Heart rate alone, however, doesn’t tell you anything about performance, even if you know your training zones. The last place finisher may have exactly the same average heart rate and have been in the same zone as the race winner.
But because you are human and not a robot, the changes won’t always be for the better, even though your fitness is improving. There are simply too many variables that can’t be controlled in the daily life of a human.
There are several ways to gauge intensity: speed or pace, heart rate, power, and perceived exertion. Of these, the least effective is heart rate. Heart rate lags too much
What the athlete typically does when using a heart rate monitor with these intervals is to start much too fast in an attempt to get heart rate to rise quickly and then, once heart rate is up, slow down to stabilize it. This is just the opposite of what should be done in an interval workout.
… a runner may want to do this workout on a bike, as these two sports have been shown to be mutually compatible in terms of aerobic-capacity development.
Unfortunately, intervals done by running or cycling have been shown to be of no benefit to swimming.
One of the primary purposes of endurance training is to boost your body’s ability to use stored body fat for fuel instead of glycogen.
When you train frequently at your aerobic threshold, your slow-twitch muscles adapt by developing more capillaries. This in turn creates more delivery pathways for blood, and therefore oxygen and fuel. The fuel, in this case, is fat.
Your capability to primarily burn fat is dependent on several other factors, such as gender (women are more inclined to use fat than men), fitness (the greater the fitness, the more fat is used), and chronic diet.
As with most hormones, melatonin production decreases as you get older.
.. anabolic steroids. They also have a positive effect on other cellular properties that improve endurance performance; for example, they help build the capillary network for blood delivery to the muscles.
Men produce about 20 times as much testosterone as women, but women’s bodies are more sensitive to it. Since REM occurs late in a night’s sleep cycle, artificially shortening your sleep by awakening to an alarm clock may well diminish the release of these hormones, thus hindering full recovery.
Exogenous melatonin. The body responds by reducing or even halting its natural production of the targeted product, while possibly becoming less sensitive to it.
… it may help to know that “leptin” comes from the Greek term leptos, for “thin,” while ghrelin is an acronym derived from tis description as a growth hormone release-inducing peptide.
For some unknown reason, women produce more ghrelin than men do, regardless of their age.
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