The first thing an ageing athlete loses is not endurance

Aerobic capacity fades slowly and power falls off a cliff, which means veterans are training the wrong quality almost universally.

A forty five year old who has run since university will usually tell you the endurance is still there and the legs have gone. He is describing the physiology accurately and then, almost always, training as though the opposite were true.

What declines with age is not uniform. Maximal oxygen uptake drops steadily and can be defended remarkably well with continued training. What falls faster is everything to do with rapid force production. The fast fibres shrink first and some are lost outright as the motor neurons supplying them die back, tendons stiffen in unhelpful ways, and the rate at which force can be developed drops well ahead of the capacity to sustain a moderate effort. A masters runner has usually kept most of his engine and lost a good part of his gearbox.

The training response to this is backwards nearly everywhere I look. Veterans add volume, cut the fast sessions because they are more injurious, and slowly become extremely well conditioned at one speed. It feels sensible. It accelerates precisely the decline that is causing the problem, because the fast fibres that are not recruited are the ones that disappear.

The correct medicine is heavy strength work and short, genuine sprinting, and the objection is obvious. Both are the highest risk activities available to an ageing body, and a torn calf at fifty costs three months rather than three weeks.

So do them properly rather than avoiding them. Short accelerations of thirty or forty metres on grass, off a rolling start, with long recoveries, introduced over months and not weeks. Heavy lifting with low repetitions, which is far safer than the moderate high rep grinding most people substitute for it because heavy work at low reps is done fresh and stops long before technique fails. Hill sprints, which give most of the neuromuscular stimulus with a fraction of the hamstring exposure.

The other consequence is about expectations, and it is the part veterans hate hearing. Recovery capacity declines before performance does. An athlete who could once train hard on consecutive days usually cannot, and the failure shows up not as fatigue but as a plateau that no amount of extra work shifts.

Train less often and harder. Most masters athletes do the reverse and then blame their age for the result.