Training Smarter Past 50

I’ve seen many runners 50 and over continuing to do what they’ve always done, and when that stops working, they often feel frustrated and believe the solution lies in doing more—more miles, more speed work, more of something. But more may not be the solution.

Let’s take Joanna, a 55-year-old who is training for a marathon: She has trained through many marathon cycles, but this time she feels like she’s working harder even though her paces keep dropping. In frustration, she tries to run more and faster. She begins feeling deep fatigue and watches as her easy pace becomes more difficult to run. As she continues to push harder, she digs herself into a deeper and deeper hole. Her times are slow, her body begins to hurt, her heart rate both at rest and when active rises, she feels irritable, her sleep is a mess, and she feels like she’ll never feel strong again. She wonders: Is this just part of getting old?

Next, we have Joe, a new runner. He’s 58 and has a few pounds to lose, but he’s generally healthy and wants to stay that way. He starts running two miles a day, four to five days a week. He’s vexed because he can’t seem to run any farther or faster, and his shins and knees are starting to hurt. He just doesn’t know what to do next. He wonders: Is it just too late to start running?

The solution for both runners is better, smarter training. Smart training begins with listening to your body. Of course, a good training plan is key, but if you aren’t listening to your body, then you end up injured, exhausted, plateaued, and ready to give up in disgust. Too many people believe you need to beat your body into submission if you want to get fitter, stronger, and faster. You can thank Friedrich Nietzsche—who famously said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”—for encouraging this self-destructive tendency. Maybe this applies to some things, but when you approach training this way all the time, it will certainly leave you a broken mess.

So, what should you be listening to? Let’s take a look.

Resting Heart Rate
To start, you should be monitoring your resting heart rate. Every runner should know what their resting heart rate generally is, within a few points. This is your heart rate when you first wake up, but it’s also good to know where your heart rate typically settles when you’re just sitting and relaxing. If you notice your heart rate is a bit higher for a few days, it will benefit you to take some extra recovery time. This doesn’t necessarily mean complete rest, but you need to back off both volume and effort. If you catch this early, it’s quite easy to resolve. But if it’s been going on for a while, then you’ve dug your hole deeper, and it will take more time to get out.

Sleep Quality and Quantity
Notice the quality and quantity of your sleep. One of the ironies about sleep is that often your sleep becomes poor when you are the most fatigued: you have trouble falling asleep, you wake up often and can’t get back to sleep, and you wake up in the morning still feeling exhausted. Sleep disturbances often arise due to deep systemic fatigue. Often, doing less helps improve your sleep.

Persistent Aches and Pains
Notice how your muscles feel. Some runners erroneously believe they should always feel sore. Many think that if you’re sore all the time, then you’re getting strong. Unfortunately, that’s not how this works. Yes, you will be sore after some runs or strength work. But the key to getting stronger is allowing your body the chance to repair following a stress. If you’re always sore, that’s your body saying you are doing too much of something.

Slowing Paces
If you’re running at the same effort but your paces are inexplicably slowing, that’s your body telling you that you’re doing something wrong. Most runners run just a little too fast too often. This leads to frustrating plateaus and chronic overuse injuries.

As you get older, you need to be even more attentive to your body. You also need to be more vigilant about self-care, both physical and mental. Adding gentle mobility work, restorative bodywork such as massage, purposeful cross-training, or even a good old hot bath can do the body good. When I was much younger, I would try to run through anything. Today when I feel something isn’t quite right, I’ll take an extra easy day, go for a swim, or have a massage. I don’t want to lose time and consistency to an injury and nipping it in the bud is by far the smartest thing to do.

With all this in mind nothing is more important to your running than consistency. You want to stay healthy. Injuries interrupt training. Being in pain all the time, even if you can run, just isn’t fun. What is fun is feeling good and strong and able to do what you want to do.

Older runners may bring a mental advantage to their training and racing. Chances are that you have gained some mental tenacity through the trials and tribulations of life. You see in ultra-long-distance events that older runners fair very well against their younger, faster, and physically stronger competitors, often because they have the mental toughness that these grueling efforts demand.

Running also serves a social function. If you run with people or in a race, you connect with an active community that supports and inspires you. It’s good to be around those with whom you share passions. With more older runners sticking with running and many more joining the ranks, you have even more people to share your passion with.

While running is not the only activity that can bring these benefits, there are certain aspects inherent to running that make them easier to attain: I don’t need a team. I can go at my own pace. I can choose my own goal, be that a 100-metre sprint or a 100-mile endurance run. I can run anywhere—road, trail, treadmill, even a pool. I can run on my schedule. Running is an autonomous activity.

But I believe running is more than an activity, exercise, or a workout. Running can also help you tune into yourself, your environment, your dreams, your pain, your ambitions, your hopes. Running gives you an opportunity to discover and exercise your greatness from where you are right now. 

Extract from Running Past 50 by Caolan MacMahon (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2025). Edited and reprinted with permission
of www.Canada.HumanKinetics.com.

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Are Runners Over 50 More Prone to Injury?

The answer is maybe, maybe not. A lot depends on how recovery is balanced with training—and life—stresses. As you age, your bones tend to get smaller and less dense. Why? It’s believed that as you get older, you absorb less calcium and vitamin D, which are crucial to bone health. But the Utah paradigm and Wolff’s law* suggest that it is not just calcium and vitamin D at issue—what matters even before all that is the stress on the bone. What kind of stress? Specifically, it is the stress caused by muscles pulling on opposite ends of the bone. Impact is one thing, but it’s the actual pull of the muscle on the bone that provides the stimulus for calcium uptake. You can consume all the calcium in the world and still have weak bones if you do not stress them. Without the stress calcium
will not go into your bones. Period.

Wolff’s law and the Utah paradigm are both models that explain how bones adapt to mechanical forces.

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