Not long ago, a group of aging elite distance runners got together, and as they reminisced about old times, a familiar topic arose: No matter how much they train, no matter how much they push themselves, their best times are behind them.
Howard Nippert broached it first. He was running the other day, he told his friends, and feeling as if he was in the groove, feeling great, just flying along as he did in the old days. Then he made the mistake of looking at his watch. It was telling him something a lot different than what he was feeling.
“I know exactly how you feel,” said his friend, Steve Spence, who is 53. Both men are still great runners and had stellar running careers. Nippert, who is 50 and a running coach in Pearisburg, Va., was a world-class ultramarathoner and a former member of the United States track and field team. Spence, who won a bronze medal in the marathon at the world championships in 1991, coaches runners at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and still runs a mile race every year in less than five minutes. But, he laments, “I used to be able to run a marathon at that pace.”
No one can point to exactly why performance starts to decline with age. Is it that muscles weaken? But why would they when they are being used regularly in a sport? Is it that the heart can no longer pump as much blood? But why does that happen? Whatever the reason, the result is a trade-off between speed and endurance. If you want to go fast, you can’t keep up the pace the way you used to. If you want to go far, you can’t do it fast, says Hirofumi Tanaka, director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
The aging effect is inevitable, and now runners can even track what to expect. It is as if there was a time clock for aging, and unlike nonrunners — who have only things like wrinkles and gray hair to go by — runners have an exact schedule that will predict how their performance will decline.
That schedule is on the website of Ray Fair, a professor in the economics department at Yale, who was inspired to find the patterns of slowdowns when his own running performance began to decline. The result is a table. You can put in your best time ever for an event, say a 10-kilometer race, and how old you were when you ran it. The table then shows how fast you could have run it when you were younger and how fast you should be able to run it now and as you grow even older.
“Some say the site changed their life,” Fair said. “They know they will slow down as they grow older, but as long as they slow down as much as the site says they will, they are fine.”
As for Fair, he’s not as happy.
“I am not on my line,” he said. “I am worse than I should be but I am trying to get back.”
But even being on the line means not being what you were before, and that can be a hard adjustment for many former elite runners.
“I still run every day,” Nippert said, “but it’s a tough transition to just being just an everyday runner.”
Sometimes, as with Mary Decker Slaney and Doriane Coleman, elite middle distance runners, the end of a career starts insidiously with an injury from which their aging bodies just cannot recover.
Slaney, who is 57, ruptured her posterior tibial tendon in 1997. She had surgery to have it reconstructed and then tried to train, telling herself she could get back to the point where she had been.
“For a long time, I thought there was still a way to get better,” Slaney said. “But eventually you get to a point where you realize that is not happening. I couldn’t run, I could only jog and to me that was disheartening. But after about 10 years, I decided: O.K. I will jog because I can’t do anything else.”
She was saved, she said, when she discovered a sort of combination of elliptical cross-trainer and bicycle that she can use on the roads outside her home in Eugene, Ore. “It is the closest thing to running without actually running,” she said. “I got on one for the first time and within 10 minutes I knew I had to have one. I thought, Oh my God, I haven’t felt that way in a long time.”
Slaney still dreams of running, and she often dreams she is back on the starting line. Her dreams even include training again. “There is nothing to replicate the feeling of running,” she said.
Her friend Coleman, a law professor at Duke University, understands all too well. For her, the career-ending injury was a ruptured Achilles’ tendon.
“For many years I didn’t have a successful strategy to transition from being a runner where every run is a training run, every run has a purpose and you are constantly aware of time passing and distance passing,” she said. “That’s so ingrained.”
She kept trying to train, she said, but “it was making me insane.” Then she reasoned with herself. “I am 55 years old, for God’s sake,” she said she realized. “I don’t need to go on training runs anymore.”
But old habits are hard to break. Sometimes, Coleman says, when she is on a run, feeling good, “my brain goes into its old track and I think, ‘I can still do it.’ ”
On those days, she says, “I pick up the pace a little bit; I kind of forget my age.”
But she also has a strategy that has changed her life. She leaves her watch behind. Before she sets out on a run, Coleman looks at the clock. When she gets back, she glances at it again.
Then she tells herself, “Ballpark.”
An article last Wednesday about the effect of aging on elite runners misidentified the marathon at which Steve Spence won a bronze medal. It was the 1991 world championships, not the 1992 Olympics.