Masters women and experienced coaches -- besides the drop off at menopause, how do women fare in their masters years? 40's in particular. Thank you.
Masters women and experienced coaches -- besides the drop off at menopause, how do women fare in their masters years? 40's in particular. Thank you.
The adults should be back from their ski trips now wrote:
Masters women and experienced coaches -- besides the drop off at menopause, how do women fare in their masters years? 40's in particular. Thank you.
I'm 47F. I set all of my lifetime PRs between 42 and 44 (but I started running in my mid-30s - likely my PRs would have been set far earlier in life had I started running in high school or before).
In my experience, as a woman ages, running-wise the first thing that diminishes is recovery - you have to take your easy runs a bit more carefully and space out workouts a bit further. As part of this too, you have to specialize a bit more.
You'll see women in their 40s who still run very fast miles and 5Ks, and women in their 40s who run very fast marathons, but there's not that much overlap between the two - less than you see with younger runners. I think that's because more recovery means less quality in a week, and so you have to really be selective about what you focus your quality on.
The next thing that diminishes is explosiveness. You can keep your strength up pretty well, but at some point power (moving strongly AND quickly) diminishes.
By observation, endurance and aerobic ability seem to last far longer.
The female masters in my area seem to maintain their times quite well through their 40s and did not have as significant a drop off as the men when getting north of 45. I have heard that men decline faster due to the loss of testosterone and that women fare better through their 40s. There may be some selection bias in what I have seen locally as the good female masters runners were very dedicated and did everything well (training, diet, etc.).
Copy. Thank you both.