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Running After the Age of Fifty – A blog by Paul Jurasin

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Three Weeks to Go – Running the Rogue River Trail

0418150937~2With just 3 weeks to go before my wife Becky and my 3 day, 40 mile run down the Rogue River Trail in Oregon, it’s time to adjust our training strategy.  During the week while we’re working, we’ve been continuing a steady dose of daily short runs with one mid-week, mid length run of about 5 miles.  On weekends, we’ve been doing at least one long, very difficult run of about 14-15 miles on technical terrain and with 1500 – 2500 feet of elevation gain followed by a 9 or 10 mile run on the second weekend day.  This is great training, but we’re finding that the hard run is causing enough strain that the second run on the weekend is lacking in quality because we’re pretty beat up.  This level of training would probably have been OK in our 20s but I have to remind myself that we’re in our 50s.  Starting this weekend an adjustment is in order.

We will begin doing a long but easy run on Saturday of about 3 hours (roughly 15 miles) followed by another 2 hour easy run on Sunday.  The concept behind this change is that the time we spend on our feet during the long run will benefit our endurance without causing the physical damage to our bodies of the technical terrain with lots of climbing and descending.  The 2 hour Sunday will run will also give us a chance to practice running on slightly tired legs which will be likely on the 2nd and 3rd day of the Rogue River Run.  We also need some additional nutritional practice with gels during the run.   At this point Becky tends to use one gel every 45 minutes to keep her energy up while I either have one gel and the start or none at all.  Experimenting with more and less calories will help us to refine to the optimal level.  Everyone responds differently to training and nutrition so it’s not expected that we will both arrive at the same optimal levels.

Updates to come in a week or two!

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Run for Your Life

A recent study published in the August 2014 issue of The Journal of the American College of Cardiology seems to indicate that runners live longer than non-runners.  That seems like a pretty generalized statement, but the data from the study supports

Running

this.  It appears that even minimal running (5-10 minutes/day) provides significant reductions in mortality rates of 30% for all causes of death and 45% for cardiovascular causes.  The study also shows that those who run longer distances don’t have an advantage over those that run short distances.  In fact, based on a chart in the article, it appears that those who run more the 20 miles/wk or run 6 or more times per week have a slightly reduced benefit.

If we believe this study, which appears credible, being consistent about our running can provide us with the benefit of longevity.  It doesn’t matter how far we run, just that we do it.  Hmmm…. could be the tag line for running shoe company.

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Coming Back

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve written an article for the Grand Masters Running blog. Over 7 months, in fact. Sometimes life fills up all the mind space available.

I try to focus this blog on the challenges of 50+ year old runners and I have come to realize that some of our challenges have nothing to do with running at all. Once we get to that 50+ age group, many of our family members, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers and grandparents are at a point where they are struggling with end of life issues and this has an impact on us.

California Trail Running
California Trail Running

Shortly after I ran the Tucson Marathon in early December of 2013, my father’s health began to quickly decline. He had been fighting prostate cancer for a couple of years and the effects of the metastasis were finally becoming too much for him. For me, living and working more than half way across the country was difficult because I couldn’t visit him as much as I would have liked even though I flew from California to Michigan every few weeks between January and April when Dad passed away. During this time I ran a mile or two every morning but not much more. Thinking back, even though it was limited, I couldn’t tell you what I was doing with my free time during that time period. I can say that my brain had no capacity to write about running though.

Only in the last month or two have I felt like my running has been coming back. My wife and I have been increasing our trail running mileage by finding a new beautiful trail to run every weekend. Fortunately, on the central coast of California, this isn’t a difficult task. And… today for the first time since December, I am sitting in front of my computer feeling like I want to write about running again. So, because I love to do it, I will start writing about running at 50+ years old again.

More to come…..

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Over 50? How often can you run?

Although everyone is different, one of the primary things I’ve noticed as I get older is that I need more recovery time after a run to keep performing at a high level. I could go out and do detailed research on why that is, but for today I’ll just talk about personal experience.2012-04-06 15.31.14

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a 3-5 day per week runner with a long run and maybe a speed or track workout thrown in. This seemed to work well. Then back in November and December I decided to do an experiment and run every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas to see how that felt. I didn’t do any longer than usual runs. In fact, I ran shorter than normal on many days as my goal was only to run at least one mile every day. I extended my everyday run streak to 40 days and noticed progressive changes as the days piled up.  The first thing was that it began to take more time to warm up and feel loose.  The standard 7 or 8 minutes turned into 10 to 15 minutes.   On some days, I only felt loose for the last few minutes.  Also, as I got nearer to the end of my streak, I became continually slower and my legs never felt good.

Finally when the streak ended, I took about a week off from running.  My first run back was amazing!  My legs felt light and I was running minutes per mile faster than at the end of the streak.  The difference was dramatic.  It was obvious that to remain a runner in a sustainable way, a certain amount of rest and recovery time between runs, no matter how short, is needed.  My new experiment is to determine how much recovery time is optimal.  To little will be detrimental to performance and too much won’t provide enough activity to remain fit.  The fine tuning will continue forever, I expect…

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Do Runners Continue Running as they Age?

When I run in road races and look around at the participants, my gut tells me that there are plenty of runners in the 40 and older age range.  But, sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between a 39 and 46 year old.  I know I’ve seen some runners win awards in the 50-54 age group that I could swear were in their 30s by look and by speed.  So, I decided to do some research to see what the numbers really look like.

Running USA has compiled a mountain of runner statistics over many years and they provide some great information which is the basis of the analysis below.  In this initial view of race finisher data, I wanted to determine is the percentage of runners in races of various distances are in the Masters (40+) or older age groups.  Recent data when compared to older data should provide a hint as to whether runners continue to run when they get older or if they stop.

While there are many ways to examine the data, here’s what I found and what I think the results mean:

There were about 13,000,000 finishers in distance races in the USA in 2010.  That was a big 37% increase over 2005 and an even more impressive 50% increase over 2000.  During this time the % of Masters (40+) runners at the 5K, 10K, Half Marathon and Marathon remained stable at around 40% of the total with no more than a 2-3% variance over the 2000 to 2010 period.  Because the percentage difference between the number of finishers in the under 40 age range and the over 40 age range is relatively stable at about 10 – 12% higher for the younger group, it appears that over the last 10 years, as the overall number of runners has increased, so has the relative number of Masters runners.  An explanation for this is that as the younger group of runners age and move into the Masters age group they keep running and add to the previous set of Masters runners who also continue to compete in races as they move further in to Masters and Grand Masters age groups.

Another interesting data point that I found is that the largest percentage of Masters and older runners is in the Marathon at 46% of the total finishers in 2010.  This is contrasted by the 5K in which 39% of finishers were 40 and older, the lowest percentage when looking at the 5K, 10K, Half-Marathon and Marathon.  To be clear, the 5K had many more race finishers than any other race distance at 4.6 million, 1.8 million of them being 40 and older.  Whereas the Marathon had 507,000 overall finishers with 233,000 of them being over 40.  An explanation for this may be that as race distances become longer, fewer people are willing and able to prepare for them and tend to be more serious runners.  Therefore, as they age and move into the Masters category they continue to run the longer distance races.

There are many relationships to explore with this data.    A few questions initially come to mind;  Of the 13 million race finishers in 2010, how many of them ran more than one race?  What is the average number of races in which a runner competes in a year?  How many runners never race and therefore are not counted in the total number of runners?

Future discussions to come.

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