This is why you won't be a competitive masters guy if you run heavy miles all your life

Stiffness of tendons IS a good thing, but lack of plyability/recoil is not: that's what I think you get due to some mechnanism, such as with with scar tissue from the repetitive microtrauma, or other biochemical changes such as the diabetic process (the guy with the high carbs diet theory presents an interesting thought).

It's better to burn out

than to fade away.

Yeah, most of the guys crushing me in the age group now didn't run much in their 20s or 30s.

Wouldn't change a thing.

So far, no one has addressed how leg speed velocity plays into all this.

The thing that is not being said here is that many of the top masters runners in the country outside of a handful of guys (Meb, Lagat, Abdi, Kevin Castille) are only in that elite class because most of the true studs of their era just can't be bothered to train and race for what they perceive to be subpar times after having been at the pinnacle of their sport. It isn't that they cannot keep it going because their tendons and feet wont cooperate, it is that they choose not to. Look at what John Trautman did a few years ago - came back from out of nowhere, ran an indoor 4:12 or so for a masters record just to show he could, then walked away again.

As a masters runner whose relative standing has benefitted from this, I am not saying this to besmirch the accomplishment of those who are still getting after it through their 40s and beyond; but rather just getting a more likely explanation out there.

So what percentage of the top masters runners right now were top runners in college or ran at a near elite in their twenties?

How many runners that were very good in their twenties made a serious effort to train and race in their forties?

And of those, what percent were successful at placing high as a masters runner?

There will be outliers and anecdotal evidence of all types.

I'll speak for myself and say I was pretty good in my twenties but in my forties the drop has been big and there are more in my age group that seem to be better than me now that have slower lifetime PRs.

I know I don't train as much as them now but partly because I get hurt when I run too much now.

And that seems to be the theory of the OP. You only have so much running in your body. You can normally go hard when you are young or when you are old but it's rare to do both.

Did the guys who are beating you now take appreciable time off and then come back to the sport?

Started at 35 and at 42 I am running side by side or beating former DI all-americans, and guys who ran in multiple OTs.

I am under no illusion that I could have ever run a sub 29 min 10K like a couple of the guys I'm thinking of did. I doubt I could have ever run a sub 32.

Their bodies have taken a beating. We're all mid-high 16min 5kers now.

As usual the two factors are Genetics and Environment.

Can the aging runner with average genetics train hard without wearing out ?

IMO Yes they can. This could easily turn into yet another book on training ;)

I went and pulled the names of the top 10 American masters performers at Boston and looked up their races on Athlinks. Only 8 had data on there - not sure what happened to the other 2, but they had somewhat unusual names, so that might have complicated reporting of past results.

Of those 8 that I could find data on, 5 have pretty consistent racing histories over the course of their running careers. I don't think anyone would say that Meb, Abdi or Michael Wardian (despite not starting to run competitively until after college) haven't logged serious volume over the years. Clint Wells is a former University of Colorado runner who went 8:23 for the steeple and has raced pretty consistently over the years, although the race results seem to indicate some ebbs and flows in effort. Eric Loeffler also seems to have raced pretty consistently since graduating college (he ran competitively at a D2 school).

Of the other 3, one doesn't have any data before 2013, so either his profile is incomplete (his name Guillermo Pineda Morales, might have been reported in different ways over time), or, more likely based on the progression of his times, is that he came to the sport very late. The other two seem to fit squarely in the OPs "run early or late" approach as they both are or appear to be college runners who got away from the sport for a while and then came back to it.

So at least 5 out of 8 have been at it pretty hard for a pretty long time, and at least 2 and probably 3 out of 8 have fresh legs for someone in their 40s.

I agree with the OP and I think Noakes is right. I've been racing for decades but these days I get outsprinted by not just my peers but guys older than me. These I suspect are guys who took up running in their 40s/50s and so are still in their running 'prime'. I am convinced it is to do with the lack of 'bounce' in key places like the Achilles.

What would interest me is stats on percentage decline at say 400m by people who have raced all their adult life or since school. For example in my case 56s when I was younger and now its about 80s.

I also notice on Strava when I compare myself with my peers as defined by similar 5/10k times they smash me at the mile now, I'm talking about half a minute gap.

John Trautmann is not really a good example, because he took a LOT of time off between his heyday and his comeback. I think Meb's got it right with the Elliptego to preserve the spring in his legs. It would be interesting to hear how those other top guys who were great in their twenties went at it. Did they take some down years? are they balancing their running with low impact aerobics? And Michael Wardian, well...That guy is just a genetic freak, plain and simple. Also not an early entry to the elite running scene as far as I know, and his form of elite is a unique brand. He did not run competitively until after college.

It would be interesting to have Patti or Malmo weigh in on this from their own personal experience.

My point about Trautmann was not to use him as evidence that the elites can stay elite forever, but rather than there are many former elites who would still dominate the sport at the masters level if they felt compelled to bother. A counter to my position there is that 3 of the top 8 masters at Boston (including the top 2), were actually elites who stayed in the game.

You can explain away all of the contrary data points with anecdotes (Wardian may well be an outlier, but I would submit he (and his thousands upon thousands of miles) is still a data point. You cannot throw them out.

We don't really need to hypothesize about Meb and Abdi because of their bodies of work and Wardian is an open book of high volume.

Hard to tell about Wells - he was very likely a high volume guy in college given his Colorado pedigree and his high level of performance in the steeple (8:23), but there were definitely some stretches when he as running fairly slow (for him) that suggests that he may have had some less intense training periods. Loeffler seems to have followed a similar path. I would put both of those guys in the "consistent runners" categories.

The other guys were not household names, so there is more conjecture. Because two of those guys are regular posters here, I can tell you for a fact that one of them did very little from his mid 20s to his late 30s, and I can tell you based on some evidence, that another did lots of other things like skiing, cycling and rock climbing instead of logging lots of miles.

Just wow... wrote:I think Meb's got it right with the Elliptego to preserve the spring in his legs. And Michael Wardian, well...That guy is just a genetic freak. He did not run competitively until after college.

At age 77, I am running as well as ever, comparatively, and have been running around 30 miles a week, more or less, for 65 years. Started running seriously at around age 12-13. Never great (best was a hilly 5 mile in 27:30; at 71 ran 11 secs slower for 4 miles). But I never stopped through college, marines, road races and trail/hill races. Just anecdotal, but I have no evidence that running less would have made me better now. My experience tells me the more you run, short of ultra-madness, the better you run.

ggilder wrote:

Just wow... wrote:I think Meb's got it right with the Elliptego to preserve the spring in his legs. And Michael Wardian, well...That guy is just a genetic freak. He did not run competitively until after college.

At age 77, I am running as well as ever, comparatively, and have been running around 30 miles a week, more or less, for 65 years. Started running seriously at around age 12-13. Never great (best was a hilly 5 mile in 27:30; at 71 ran 11 secs slower for 4 miles). But I never stopped through college, marines, road races and trail/hill races. Just anecdotal, but I have no evidence that running less would have made me better now. My experience tells me the more you run, short of ultra-madness, the better you run.

That is an amazing resume of lifelong running that you have achieved, sir, and I applaud you for that. I do submit, however, that 30 miles/week is a moderate, or "healthy" level of running by most standards, as opposed to the folks I'm talking about, who were crushing 100+ mile weeks along with extremely intense workouts, consistently, in their younger years.

A counter to your argument is that of the many masters-aged, late starting runners, very few are in it competitively - they are just recreational runners. If more folks took it up with the seriousness that those guys you've mentioned are going at it, I suspect there would be a much denser population of new-to-running elite masters runners. The other thing is, people who got into it late in the game probably have a less natural talent, generally speaking. If they had the Meb-level of talent, they would have more likely been big time runners in high school or college.

I would not put Wardian in that category. He did not run high volume in his teens and early twenties. He really is a different situation.

I think Wardian fits in - the theory is that there are only so many miles in the legs, right? I don't think that there is much of a question that he has burned through those miles, even if the bulk of them came during a 15 year stretch.

Reasonable people can reach different conclusions, but it is an interesting thing to explore.