How to tweak your triathlon training or marathon training for peak performance as you get older

Age catches up with every endurance athlete sooner or later. You can only get faster for so long before the physiological processes of aging start to slow you down by reducing your aerobic capacity, muscle power, muscle recovery capabilities, and so forth. The good news is that there are several things you can do that will extend the getting-faster phase of your life as an endurance athlete and delay the beginning of the getting-slower phase. Here are five of them.

Set the bar high. Endurance athletes get faster by trying to go faster—specifically, by aiming to eclipse their best performances of the past. Making a conscious commitment to pursue this type of goal naturally leads to a whole host of subsequent decisions—how you train, how you fuel your body, how you allow for muscle recovery—that will collectively raise your performance level. So even as you get older, specifically setting out to race faster, then preparing accordingly, will most likely lead to peak performance.

Learn from experience. Each endurance athlete is an experiment of one. The training recipe that works best for one athlete may not work best for another. One of the most potent means to keep improving as an endurance athlete is to figure out which training methods work best for you and increase their presence in your training, while minimizing and discarding those practices that do not work as well. For example, you might observe that your triathlon performance improves most rapidly when you keep your overall triathlon training volume down and focus on doing lots of high-intensity intervals and tempo work. Once you’ve made this discovery, you can eliminate wasteful “junk miles” from your training and concentrate on high-intensity training to maximize your rate of improvement.

Build your foundation—then make changes. The foundation of endurance fitness is twofold. One component is raw endurance and the other component is pure speed. When you begin participating in endurance sports, it is best to focus on doing long, slow training to build endurance along with very short, fast efforts to increase speed. But as you develop as an endurance athlete, the focus of your training should shift away from raw endurance and sprint work toward race-specific intervals and threshold work. In this way you will continually build upon the work you have done in the past and keep your development moving forward even as you age.

Do the little things. The workouts you do are only one piece of the performance puzzle. Other pieces include little things such as strength training for strength maintenance, injury prevention, and optimal body composition; eating right and supplementing with sports nutrition products such as ARX to support good health and peak performance; and getting regular sports massages to promote muscle recovery. Younger endurance athletes tend not to do the little things, in part because their youth allows them to “get away with” inattention to general health, muscle recovery, and injury prevention. But the older we get, the less we can get away with. Start doing the little things today to gain a competitive advantage over those who don’t.

Move up. Endurance fitness has various components, not all of which peak and begin sliding at the same point in the arc of life. Speed tends to peak before intensive endurance (which is fatigue resistance in efforts lasting less than one hour), and intensive endurance tends to peak before raw endurance. So what many endurance athletes do to remain competitive as they age is to periodically increase their primary race distance. In other words, if you can’t beat ’em, move up!