Older and Slower, but Smarter and Stronger

I ran a 5k the other weekend. I know, this is hardly a “man bites dog” style introductory sentence: tens of thousands of us walk, jog or run such distances every single weekend of the year.

But bear with me. Partly for reasons of aging, at 62 I don’t do 5Ks so often anymore. I’ve come to see them as relative sprints, best suited for those with youthful legs and lungs. Still, they are a universal barometer, and I was curious what I could muster when recently in England, where entirely free, communal “Park Runs” are held all over the country at 9am on a Saturday. I felt good going into mine, and I did my utmost to put in a strong performance. The fact that I finished in a narrow cluster of lead runners in my 60-64-year-old age group, five of us crossing the line within 50 seconds of each other, suggests I succeeded.

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But that finish time could not mask the onslaught of time. With every passing birthday, I am gaining (or is that losing?) almost another minute on my 5k time. The same with cycling and swimming, anything aerobic that I’ve ever measured by pace. I would love to go faster. I no longer can. I’m older, and I’m slower.

Medical science as well as personal experience bears this out. Everything from our muscle mass to our eyesight to our bone density decreases with age, from as early as our 30th birthday.

But it hardly means that just because we’re now entitled to senior discounts, we need to cease our engagement in exercise. In fact, if we don’t want our bodies to give out on us, we must stay active and competitive. What’s more, there is no actual requirement for any of us to swap running for walking, road cycling for an e-bike, or skiing for snowshoes.

With every passing birthday, I am gaining (or is that losing?) almost another minute on my 5k time. The same with cycling and swimming, anything aerobic that I’ve ever measured by pace. I would love to go faster. I no longer can. I’m older, and I’m slower.

Quite the contrary. Older athletes tend to be smarter in how they go about things. They exhibit more stamina over longer distances. Alongside that increased endurance comes improved economy of output. So, while from a strictly physiological perspective our bodies may seem objectively weaker than they once were, taken together, these attributes make us stronger.

Further good news: it’s never too late to start on this path. Examples of later life success stories abound. Betty Jean (BJ) McHugh began running marathons at age 50, and four full decades later, the former nurse broke the world record for the 90-94 age group. (Her diet allowed for a glass of wine a night and ice cream whenever she felt like it.) Sister Madonna Buder, the “Iron Nun,” competed in her first Ironman at age 55. Two decades later she became the oldest woman ever to complete the iconic Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, and was still completing Ironman events into her 80s.

So was Hiromu Inada, who was 85when he finished the Kona Ironman in 2018. And just this spring, Giuseppe Damato of Italy, who only started running at age 73, shattered the world record in the men’s 90+ age category by finishing the Milan Marathon in four-and-a-half hours.

Of course, we can’t all be Ironmen or women, or break marathon age group records, and some people are just freaks of nature. But any of us could be a Bob Hayes, 89 at the time he was the subject of 2025’s short documentary, The Hard Way: Running, Aging and the Power of Perseverance. Exuding a love of life and the outdoors, the uplifting film shows him getting out to as many as thirty races a year, shuffled along by the active support of his running community.

I see this firsthand in my own running club, where a handful of male and female runners in their mid-70s frequently bring up the rear, in a positive—and positively grateful—manner that all of us benefit from witnessing. I’ve also seen it on the slopes, where I’ve skied alongside 90-year-olds who show no signs of quitting.

Just because we’re now entitled to senior discounts, we don’t need to cease our engagement in exercise. In fact, if we don’t want our bodies to give out on us, we must stay active and competitive. What’s more, there is no actual requirement for any of us to swap running for walking, road cycling for an e-bike, or skiing for snowshoes.

Any and every effort helps make us stronger in our older age. Jacqueline Hooton, a personal trainer turned the 60+ author of Strong: The Difinitive Self-Improvement Guide to Wellness and Active Ageing, cites a healthy heart as priority #1, and cardiovascular training as the obvious way to go about it. “Anything we’re doing to put our heart rate up, to get a bit of a sweat on, is going to support our cardiovascular health,” she explained on the “How to be 60” podcast, which focuses on women’s post-menopausal lifestyles. “I always say to people, if you’re not doing anything at all, get yourself out for a 20-minute brisk walk as a really good starting point.”

From my own perspective, I always advise anyone in middle age and up who sees me going strong and asks me how to start running, to “just run.” If you’ve not been a runner, a half-mile jog is your marathon. At least for today. Take a bow. Then give it a couple of weeks and you might go a mile. A few more weeks after that and maybe you’ll have your eye on your first 5k. Or not: it’s fine to keep it all recreational. (Just remember to scale back down in between scaling up. The general recommendation is to increase your mileage/workload only by about 10% every two-to-three weeks. The same in the gym, where strength training helps stave off that loss of muscle mass.)

To be clear, I am nothing exceptional. I was a chubby kid, not a sporty one. And while in my late teens and 20s I began playing more soccer than I watched, my number of post-match pints didn’t change. Upon moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the late 1990s as a new dad, I gave up on the outdoor soccer and though I jogged aimlessly round Prospect Park three times a week I preferred putting on the pounds as dinners switched, out of parental necessity, from nouveau cuisine meals in hip restaurants to home cooking with free second helpings.

Yet I would also watch the parade of humanity that is the New York City Marathon flow past the bottom of our street every November and think to myself, “I’d like to experience that.” (Admittedly, the runners were still only at mile 8 out of 26; I may not have felt the same way had I been watching them from the Bronx.) In 2002, at the age of 38, I did indeed run that New York marathon, stopping for a minute at my street corner to greet my cheering young family and neighbors in the process. It was a moment to treasure.

I had a good day, and figured I might be cut out for this long-distance lark after all. I had visions of qualifying for the Boston Marathon next time out; what I did not have was an understanding of the word “hubris.” My second marathon was a disaster, as were, to varying extents, my third, fourth and fifth. Sure, I finished them all, and bit-by-bit chipped away at my times, but I hadn’t developed the smarts to respect the course. Every time, I ended up hitting “the wall,”—a point, often around mile 20, when the body runs out of stored glycogen—walking the latter miles, and feeling deflated by what I therefore perceived as failure.

Even after we exchanged Brooklyn for the Catskills and I took to the hills (quite literally), becoming an active and avid trail runner, I failed to learn from my road marathon experiences and merely repeated them on the iconic 30k Escarpment Trail Run. Though my times were reasonably good on paper, my performances were far from consistent; unable to pace myself properly, I would find myself knocked flat by one part of the course or another, every single year.

Finally, things clicked. In my late 40s, consistency of training and competing allied with an improvement in patience and pacing; the gradual accumulation of long miles resulted in increased stamina; and the years of modest gains and occasional pitfalls—and literal faceplants—all made me mentally and physically stronger.

It was then, right around my half-century, far later than conventional wisdom would have us assume, that I peaked in my performances at all distances from the marathon on downwards—culminating in 2017, at age 51, by breaking the four-hour barrier on that Escarpment Trail Run, an achievement that meant all the more to me for the fact that it means nothing to almost everyone else.

The next year I was back over the four-hour mark; the slowdown had well and truly begun.

If it proved sobering to realize that I would never be as fast as I once was, the sense of inner strength I had gained from scaling those peaks spurred me instead to run better, and, like many people I know, to go longer. I took on my first ultra-marathons, and though such events come with guaranteed periods of self-doubt and even some self-loathing, us older folk are better equipped to handle them. We don’t go out of “the gate” fast as if everything in life is a sprint, because we have been around long enough to learn that it isn’t. And at the point that younger participants are worn out, worn down and left with little prior experience to draw upon, us seniors know to dig in, recall past painful endeavors, and perhaps hum little mantras to ourselves as we claw through the miles and the hours. (It also helps to smile and laugh with the race volunteers and other competitors; we choose to be out there after all!)

If it proved sobering to realize that I would never be as fast as I once was, the sense of inner strength I had gained from scaling those Catskills peaks spurred me instead to run better, and, like many people I know, to go longer.

Even those who once won epic, iconic races have learned these lessons. The champion British ultra-marathoner Damian Hall summarized his Irish compatriot Eon Keith (from an interview included in the former’s new book Run Forever: The Secrets to Becoming an Ageless Athlete) as follows: “Everything about my races is better—except my speed. Issues that would really trouble me before, like foot problems or sleep deprivation, I’m on top of them now, I know how to deal with them.” Keith now takes photos as he goes, talks more with his fellow competitors. Besides, there are always age awards for those with the competitive spirit—and age-graded entry requirements for the Boston Marathon, which I finally qualified for in those peak late 40s, and ended up running three times before the qualifying times tightened beyond my capabilities.

That’s okay. Few of us are in it to win it. And those of us who stay out there even as we slip down the pack know the tradeoff, that study after study shows how continued exercise into our old age makes us happier as well as healthier. According to Hall in Run Forever, even everyday joggers slash their risk of cardiovascular death— “the world’s biggest killer”— by 45 to 70%.

That exercise does not have to be athletic: Jacqueline Hooton cites her clients’ and readers’ desires as wanting to walk a pet dog, to be able to lift a case onto a luggage rack, or even to shake a rug on the dance floor. Our generation has been blessed with all manner of medical advances that have enabled us to live longer. It’s within our own capabilities to live those extra years stronger.

Tony Fletcher is an author, musician, traveler, and runner who writes and podcasts about writing, music, travel, and falling over. Check out his Substack newsletter, Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith.

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