50+ Masters Training and Racing Open Forum

M66 here, running for 47 years, but with long breaks because of several medical operations (permanent titanium screw in my heel and other problems ...).

But I have a problem knowing my individual heartrates.

My resting heartrate is 37 says my garmin and also my cardiologist. Most formulas calculate my max hr at around 165 - 175 and my lthr at maybe around 155. So if I put this in my garmin device and do some intense hill repeats or sprints I easily achieve 190 or once even 211 ... but dr. google says the max hr cannot be exceeded.

So may I ask you to show me your max hr and lthr and age and if you also can exceed it if you "want" to.

If I let my max hr at 211 in my garmin forerunner all my normal running is of course in low aerob and mostly unproductive.

M65.7 here... Lifetime runner.

Resting HR these days is 38-39. My max HR on Dec 19 when I time trialed a treadmill 5K in 18:02, was 167. Avg HR for the run was 158. I absolutely felt like I was redlining the last few minutes. No. I couldn't have nor would I wanted to see if there was anymore there. I think I can safely say 167 is my max!

Fwiw... . HR for my normal easy'ish pace of 8:00/mi is around 128. Low 7:00s pace it rises to the mid 140s. Speed work under 6:00 pace is in the mid 150s.

I use a Garmin 735XT with a chest strap. Garmin says my current vo2 max is 56

Dave

M67.5 here. Last time when I estimated my HR max was at final 500 m during a hard HM the previous summer at 86F. I specially initiated a sort of a final kick to reach the max though there was no other reason for that. It was 162. My HR at rest is 45-46. HR at the 8 min/mi pace is similar to that of RacerDB - about 128.

Another good training week for me. 56 miles of run/walk for the week. For the last 4 weeks I have gotten my hills long run in every weekend. I started at 8.5mi at 10:29/mi and yesterday I did 10mi at 8:53/mi. (my post-age 60 PR from about 10yrs ago on this loop is 7:47/mi). I'm planning one more hard week this week, and then drop to about 60% of my average mileage for the week before my St. Pat's Day 5k.

Good running to all!

Last year in early April I ran my fastest marathon in a few years, and I would like to go a little faster in one in May or June. I did some pretty good cross training in February last year, but wanted to do a little more this year. A little more turned out to be a tenth of a mile more on the elliptical, 200 more meters rowing, and 200 more steps on the stair climbing machine. OK, so that's very little more, but it counts. I also biked about 20 miles more, but ran about 20 miles less than last year, but more speed work running this year. I hope to do a few more shorter races this year, so a little more fast stuff, hills, and weight training the legs right now.

I'm in my 50s and started about 6 years ago. Running about 80-90 km/week, lifting weights every week, and still hitting PBs but it's definitely much much harder now. Run solo and prefer it that way.

Since many of you are in the 65+ club now, what do you wish you knew back in your early 50s that you know now? What things have been the best at keeping you going strong? What has not worked?

I'm already looking ahead to the end of PBs and getting my brain to look at age grades and try to focus on the process rather than the outcome or race times.

71 years old

50th year of dedicated training

My body is completely destroyed ( lower back/knees)

going over 400 hobbling miles for the year soon.

69 y/o - 53 years running and racing a 70-75km a week

My suggestions/advice:

- Be kind to yourself. You are likely still be able to push yourself and put in decent efforts, but performances will inventively decline. Be ready for that.

-Daily core and body weight exercises (planks, birddogs, bicycle crunches, etc.) with good form havebeen essential for me .

- Embrace "Hard Easy Hard" or "Hard Easy Easy Hard". Your need the recover will likely increase.

- Some strides 4-6? on easy days at the end of runs for me are helpful and productive.

- It is okay to go slow on easy days - especially long runs.

- Niggles? Back off a bit - it takes longer for us geezers to recover. Better to skip one hard workout or even a race than to wind up missing several.

-Gauge your progress and journey against your own standards.

-Race or at least time trial on a somewhat regular basis. Even very 'low key' fun runs or park runs for me are helpful. They replace hard tempo runs and give me the chance to try out different shoes strategies, etc.

-Lastly, and most importantly enjoy your journey.

Good luck....

65+ club here (F67). I haven't PRd at any standard distance since my 30s. Until age 61 I was running regularly and undergoing the expected gradual decline in performance. At 61 the wheels came off with some inflammatory autoimmune disease (4 different diagnoses, still unsure whether any of them were right), which left me barely able to get out of bed. I was so stiff and awkward that I fell while walking and broke my shoulder. Shortly after recovering from that I acquired runner's (walker's) dystonia which nearly shut down even walking for a while. But I just kept working at it, gradually recovered the ability to walk, and the autoimmune stuff settled down after a couple of years and I was able to start jogging a little. Six years later I'm back to running (jogging) 40-60 mpw and "racing" up to half-marathons, but I never recovered anything like my former speed. At age 61 I was running 23:xx for 5K and about 1:50 for the half-marathon, and now I'm at 28:xx for 5K and about 2:05 for the HM.

Lessons? I had already given up on PRs long before age 50, but now it's just a matter of trying to keep moving and compete only against my age group (even age graded I'm a lot slower than before). I'm just grateful to be able to run at all and to be basically healthy now, despite the decline in athletic performance. I've also developed a very strong skepticism of the medical profession. I recovered from both my autoimmune disease and runner's dystonia without any of the recommended drugs. (Even my broken shoulder healed with no intervention beyond the initial ER visit, although I was mighty grateful to the ER doc who manipulated the severely displaced arm back into position.)

Mistakes I've made a few......

Biggest one.....Not fixing my calf and pf issues

The Cycle or just call my Sisyphus

Get Injured

Heal

Get fit

Start cranking up the hard stuff

Start feeling the beginning of calf and pf issues

Keep going hard so I could at least get in a good race or two

Get injured Run until the pain was constant

Back to heal mode.

Finally gave up mid 50s calf and pf "healed"

Restarted at 60, with a cautious attitude/approach. Still race a bit as I approach 70.

Still working on the calf / pf with moderate results but I never run in pain

I believe that running in pain really made the calf/pf stuff chronic....I Efed up! LOL!

I am in Charlie’s camp. The difference is my hurdle is hip impingement caused gluteus medius issues. Still out there after 60+ years.

I think a common thread to the discussions here is narrowing to things that work for the individual. Generally accepted middle of the road training works well before age 60. Then the individual infirmities of age force a change in focus. Those that adapt seem to fair the best. Herbert Spencer’s Law of Masters’ Long Distance Running, “survival via frustration tolerance.”

+ 1 to the posts above. I would pay much more attention to any sign of potential injury. In contrast to young days, these issues do not "evaporate" themselves and it takes plenty of time and effort to heal if you let them develop too far.

I agree with the above posters. As a serial overtrainer for most of my running life, I loved doing the hard mid-D interval work, and I generally would do too much as I got fitter and faster without doing enough base and recovery work. Then I'd get some overuse injury and try to nurse it along while continuing to train and race until I got to the point where it got worse and I had to take a break from training. Luckily, these were almost all soft tissue injuries that healed with a month or two of minimal exercise. I finally decided at age 55 that I would start training for health first and competitive fitness secondarily. Since then I have been much more consistent and run better from an age-graded standpoint.

I opened my 2026 racing with a local 5k yesterday. I was very happy with my 22:51 for 1st 75-79. I was hoping to be close to 22:30, and my time was in that ballpark. I split a rust buster first mile of 7:40, and then 7:12, 7:19. It felt like I have plenty of room for improvement, and a low 22 goal for Carlsbad in two weeks is realistic.

Good running to all!

Thanks for all the great replies.
So many impressive stories here and especially the return to running after long setbacks and injuries. That can't get any easier as you get older for sure.
Maybe the one comment I think might be most salient to me is..

Be kind to yourself

Running, it seems to me, like the vast majority of sports especially endurance sports, is framed around:

Goal of training = go faster

When the getting faster days end, which they will for everyone, think there must be an adjustment to:

Goal of training = something else.

Maybe it's, slow down 'less' or feel better or have more fun.

It won't be go faster, so that's definitely an adjustment and I think that's where the sage advice comes in:

Be kind to yourself

Getting a little better at that myself but have a long way to go. Plus it's easy to say when i still have some window, probably not too too long, of getting faster and in fact am in the middle of a block of training for a 5k.

Will keep reading here to see how others have already made that successful transition. Though I doubt I'm the only one who has high expectations and can be hard on themselves.

Thanks and happy, healthy running to all.

well said!

Happy Spring, everyone. Good week for me, as I'm sitting tied-for-4th in a 90+ person NCAA men's basketball tournament pool. I was nearly last in 2025, so the comeback is going well

also a good running week, highlights being 3:00 with 40:00 at marathon pace on Weds. and a half-marathon in 1:31:10 saturday (372nd OA, 1st AG). Course was kind of a Boston simulator in that we climbed a steep, fairly long hill that just about wiped me out (mile 8 slowest of the race by almost 40 sec), and then had to regroup for remaining 5 miles.

have a great week,

Dave

40 Miles (hobbling)

But am completely broken down. Still won’t quit though. 5 books into reading the complete works of William Faulkner in celebration of the sunsetting of a wonderful running career

Congrats on a nice HM, dhaaga. Boston prep seems to be going well.

I'm feeling frustrated today. I was supposed to run a HM this morning. But I attended an international conference in Denver the first part of this week, where I encountered thousands of people from all over the world in airports, airplanes, hotels, and the conference center. By the time I got home Thursday evening I had a scratchy throat and by yesterday I clearly had an upper respiratory infection. I don't feel too bad systemically, and I probably could have run a credible race today, but I didn't want to take the chance of turning a minor illness into a bad case of bronchitis by severely stressing my respiratory system while sick. I went to the expo yesterday and picked up my T-shirt and race jacket (which is really nice!), but today all I did was walk briskly for 5K.

I expect to be jogging within a day or two and training normally by the end of the week. I had planned for my next race to be another half-marathon in five weeks, but now I'm also eyeing a 10-mile race in three weeks, which would be a nice prep.

I hope not running today was being sensible rather than a wimp!

A little slow start to the week because of the weather, but just under 50 miles for the week again. I also got in my usual cross training, weights and some speed. I feel like I'm going hard, but I looked back to last year and I'm not doing as much as I did then. But that was leading up to my best marathon in a while, so still time to get ready for another good one. I need to take an easy week now for a 10 mile race next weekend. Then back at it for an early May marathon.

Question for the group:

what’s the oldest you’ve gotten where you still averaged that mpw for a year?

so @60 years old, running 3120 miles that year for instance.

Lookkng at my logs, I did it at 45, but not since (I’m now 50). On pace to do it this year but a long ways to go. Curious about others.