workouts as you get older?

almost Masters wrote:

I’m assuming I won’t be able to handle 10x800 or 5x1600m in five years unless I slow down and/or take extra rest. I think I’ll be doing 6-8x800 or 3-4x1600 and find that’s enough.

I will start by bumping this. I am in my thirties and figuring this out as I go, too.

That said, I think you're on the right track with this thinking. Definitely, you will need to decrease the total distance of the workouts, or at some point you won't be recovering all week :)

I would continue to orient the efforts to where your race paces are at various distances. So, if those workouts are at 10k pace, that will slow over the years from maybe 5:00/mile now to 5:30/mile in your 50s if you maintain well. But it will be a similar stimulus, hitting your various energy systems (such that they are in the future) the same way your workout paces do now.

I wouldn't adjust the interval length or rest so much, because that will really change the effect of the workout. (Unless you stay in the sport so long that your 10k is nearing an hour and effectively a tempo pace, but let's stick to the next couple of decades; I am talking about 40s-50s, not 70s-80s.)

Finally, back to recovery, that has been the hardest lesson for me. I used to do three hard workouts a week and have to hold back on my daily runs because I would always feel good. Now two is plenty, I am more often sluggish on runs in between, and I have to be pretty careful to recover right and be ready to benefit from the next hard workout. From most of my reading and talking with fast masters, those who are still achieving a lot are the ones still working out hard, even if just twice (or once!) a week, not those who decrease the intensity and rely on volume. (Ed Whitlock aside!)

Let's hear it, masters athletes and coaches!

47 yrs old, in the sport most of it. I ran in HS and D1...

About 2 years ago I got a coach and he had me really start mixing things up and it worked out well for me. Sometime you need a fresh set of eyes on something (even when something is working) to move to another level, or just to freshen things up.

At some point all distance running boils down to is volume & intensity, and balancing out those two factors into work that will produce a good result on race day. So yeah, some weeks it's a standard 12x4 or 6x8 or 5xKs,... but now I work into them rather than just busting @ss from rep #1. So my AV pace for the workout may be the "goal" but the first 2 maybe slower the last few faster...

I've done a lot more long runs that incorporate some tempo and fast finishes too.

There's an eye on the total volume for the week, but it's not the sole focus of the week.

I don't do the same type of work every week. Too often I was in the mode of Tue, has to be track day, Th need a tempo or hills... things just had gotten a bit stale.

bump

15 or so years ago had a good sit down with a successful fmr DI coach who had also been a top masters runner (low 4:20s mile/low 15 5K) in the day. His suggestion was almost counter intuitive but could be boiled down quite simply.

Break away from classic interval type training and focus on things like consistency/aerobic base, tempos and surges. Leave your best running for the races, not the workouts where you run hard for a few minutes and then get a break. You won't recover from hard sessions well and will end up injured or stale for the races.

That advice has served me well as a masters runner.

Impressed with your marks as you approach masters territory. I will give this a think and try and get back. There is a weekly masters racing/training thread with some studs who post their weekly workouts and race times. Good place to start.

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=6651968

I am in my mid-60s now and a high 18s/ low 19s 5Ker these days. When I started back to consistent running training at age 40 I ran pretty typical mid-D interval workouts 2-3 times per week. Somewhere around age 48 I had to limit my interval workouts to no more than twice a week to recover adequately. Somewhere around age 55 I started getting various random leg injuries from the interval training, e.g. my first ever stress fracture, hamstring strain, calf strain, etc. I took a year of easy running at about 45 mpw to get everything healed up and settled down. I read Lydiard's book, I looked at Ed Whitlock's training, I talked to Coach Larsen and Coach Vigil. Since then I have been doing almost all threshold work for my quality days, with some strides and a couple of times a year of 4-5 weeks of once-a-week interval workouts. Coach Larsen, in particular, emphasized that with his highly successful Grossmont teams, the Toads and UCLA teams, that he had his runners doing a lot of threshold work because it gave them large volumes of quality running with a very low risk of injury compared to intervals. Avoiding injury in quality training generally becomes the limiting factor for best fitness for older runners like me.