I'm 56. About eight months ago I downloaded the Kindle version of Matt Fitzgerald's book, Brain Training for Runners, and started doing some of the stretches he recommends to counteract the effects of living on our kiesters. The stretches I do regularly are the spider stretch and the lunge stretch. I do them before and after running.
I like the results so far. I am indeed getting a lot of the old bounce back in my stride. Feels great. I've even returned to the track to do intervals twice/week, so far with no negative effects other than the expected achy hamstrings.
It probably also helped that I identified and corrected a major biomechanical mistake I'd been making for decades.
In short, I had gotten lazy over the years and picked up a bad habit of contracting the pelvic muscles on my left side when my left foot came in contact with the ground. This prolonged the stance phase of my left leg and tilted the left side of my pelvis upward, causing my right foot to over-supinate, which in turn caused years of agonizing achilles tendonitis, almost always on the right side.
That's gone away.
I'm also doing all my training and racing in minimal shoes -- the Nike Free 3.0s, the New Balance Minimus Trail (also wear it on the road and track), and the Asics Excaliber. Love 'em all. I don't keep a log, but I think I'm generally hitting 50-55 mpw, including one moderately hard 12-miler and two or three days/week on the track. I run once/day, six to seven days/week.
I ran my second race in five years the other day at a turkey trot, notching a 19:44 for 5K. Nothing to write home about, but a decent start. I'm hoping the times will come done fairly quickly now that I'm able to run intervals again. My aerobic capacity is OK, I think, but my speed and speed-endurance are laughable. So I'm working to gradually bring down my times in 200-meter repeats. We'll see.
More importantly, though, I am enjoying running quite a bit, even at 56, and still get that bouncy-floating feeling on most of my runs. Better than sex? I hate to admit it, but the older I get, the more I lean toward Yes.