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The Science of Aging and RunningWhy your body slows and what you can do about itBy Richard A. LovettAs featured in the November 2009 issue of Running Times MagazineLast spring, fresh into a new masters age group, I ran a 5K. Nothing unusual in that; I'd run spring 5Ks the year before... and the year before that ... for quite a few years. The surprise was that I was 45 seconds faster than I'd been inany recent year. Age-graded, it was a massive PR.Short course, I thought, but a couple weeks later, I did it again, then twicemore. Friends were wondering about my training. "What are you doingdifferently?" they asked.When I went back and looked at my training logs, the answer was surprising:I'd cut back my mileage. I'd done it simply because I was busy,but as the winter progressed, my speed workouts had responded. Formasters runners, less is often more.Aging, like injuries, is one of those things most of us prefer to deny. "It'llnever happen to me," goes the common decree. But, as a non-runningfriend once said about her graying hair, "Consider the alternative." Eventually,we're all either going to become masters runners ... or not be runners.The options are limited.Internet fountain-of-youth claims notwithstanding, the passage of yearsdoes indeed affect athletic performance. Last summer, the American Collegeof Sports Medicine published a depressing litany of time's tolls: decliningVO2 max, reduced strength, increased body fat, reduced lacticacid clearance, declining bone density and more. Not to mention heartdisease, diabetes, arthritis and declining mental acuity. Put these togetherand, according to data compiled by World Masters Athletics, runnersslow about 7 percent per decade in their 40s, 50s, and 60s (andmore quickly after that).The better we understand this process, the easier it is to beat the aging curve. Even if we merely reduce the rate atwhich the years affect our speed, that's a victory -- the runner's version of aging gracefully.But it doesn't take a total revision of training philosophy. "You don't have to do a lot different," says Flagstaff, Ariz., coachand exercise physiologist Greg McMillan, himself a masters runner. "The physiological reactions in the body and the adaptationsyou want to get are the same." In other words, we merely have to modify how we do things, not what we do.For workout-addicted runners, that's good news.VO2 MaxOne indisputable effect of aging is declining aerobic horsepower. Classically, this is measured via VO2 max, your maximumrate of oxygen usage per unit of body weight. For sedentary people, VO2 max typically declines by about 10 percentper decade after age 30. For athletes who keep in training, the rate of decline can often be held to about half that.Most runners associate this with reduced cardiac capacity. With age, there is a steady fall in the number of receptors inyour heart muscle listening to the nervous system's signals telling it how fast to beat. As the heart becomes increasinglydeaf to these messages, its maximum rate drops about one beat per minute each year. There also appears to be a declinein the heart's intrinsic ability to beat quickly. "It's not so much that the heart can't beat as quickly, though that'sprobably true," says Benjamin Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Presbyterian Hospitalin Dallas, Texas. "The heart can't relax as quickly. Out of all the factors that are probably an inevitable part of aging andnot modifiable by training patterns, this is it. Our data have shown that masters athletes have youthful, compliant --'stretchy'-- hearts that fill well at low pressures. However, no amount of training was able to prevent the slowing of relaxation."Many people simply presume that this decline in heart rate is the cause of age-related VO2 max decline. But the realityappears to be considerably more complex. What counts is the ability of the heart to pump blood, and that's comprised oftwo factors: heart rate and stroke volume (the amount of blood pumped with each beat). In a 2001 study that didn't getPage 21