How Ageing Affects Running
If you do a search on the Internet for changes that happen as we age, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s all doom and gloom from your 40’s onwards. Let’s face it, we all know that we get weak and frail as we get older, right?
The Joy Of Getting Older
According to this article from the Mayo Clinic, apart from grey hair and wrinkles you can expect your blood vessels to stiffen, your bones to lose density and shrink, to become constipated and for you to become less interested in sex.
WebMD adds more fun to the mix by highlighting that we can also become urinary incontinent (we basically wet ourselves), which could be an interesting dilemma as the race porta toilets are occupied for longer with constipated runners not, well, running.
And there are literally millions of articles and posts (692 million returned search results when I ran the search) about how ageing affects your body and the joy of decrepitness you can expect from as early as your forties. Well beyond that? Sorry that you’re already experiencing a rapid physical and mental decline into the abyss of later life…
Ageing: A Bleak Picture
OK, so now that the common picture of ageing has been painted and you are imagining the worst that can happen, let’s see how this specifically impacts running. Oh, don’t worry, it really can do. But it’s not all negative, negative, negative: there is light at the end of the tunnel: not a heavenly light, but that will come eventually…
If we pick through the normal ageing process, we can highlight the areas that are most likely to impact on you as an non-elite runner (things get a little more interesting with elite level athletes). Just remember as you go through these though, there are ways of slowing this down and not quite, but almost, reversing them for a while at least – death is still inevitable at some point, at least at the time of writing:
Muscle Mass:
It is expected that in the decade between your 70th birthday and your 80th birthday, you will lose between 30% and 40% of your muscle mass.
The impact this has is to reduce the available strength you have for running, negatively affecting your power, speed and endurance. It can also impact joint stability, coordination and agility, and often increases fall risk.
Bones:
Your bones shrink in size and density, meaning that they are more likely to become brittle and susceptible to fractures and breakages. If you also factor in the loss in muscle mass, coordination and stability, your injury risk has jumped quite a few notches.
Vision:
Due to changes in different parts of your eyes, it can be more difficult to focus on objects when you are not moving. Add in a reduction in motor control and strength of the eye muscles, and you have less eye mobility (I bet you didn’t know that was a thing!), so you are also less able to focus on objects when you are running. This can get even worse once you start to involve a loss of internal balance system as we’ll see below. Then there is your peripheral or ambient vision. That can also decrease. So your peripheral awareness during trail events or mass participation events won’t provide your brain with as much accurate data as it used to, and this can lead to heightened threat levels which force your brain to slow you down. It can of course lead to you bumping into people or objects.
While I’m not pulling hearing out as an individual section, it does get affected as well. Even more reason to listen to the race director when they ask you not to wear headphones – if you can hear them of course.
Vestibular:
Your vestibular system is your inner ear system that is made up of those semicircular canals you probably learned in school biology but have long since forgotten about. This system detects where your head is in 3D space, forward and back acceleration/deceleration, as well as up and down movements. It helps your brain to complete a picture of where you are, how fast you are travelling and in what direction.
Integration:
Your movement (proprioceptive), vision and vestibular systems need to integrate well for you to run safely, fast and long. Tight and accurate integration helps reduce your injury risk and improve your performance. As you age, the integration between these systems can be affected and the more ‘mismatches’ between the information being passed to the brain by each system, the higher the threat levels and the more likely your brain is going to complain. For example, mismatches between your vestibular system and your visual system often lead to motion sickness – an age independent condition. As you age though, there is more opportunity for these mismatches to occur, and they can lead to all sorts of challenges.
A Brighter Future
Enough of the doom for now though, because you are already doing something that is either slowing down these aspects of ageing, or at least challenging them to a certain degree: you are running!
While some lifestyle factors can have a huge negative impact on your ageing process, exercise is one that heaps on the positivity. A lot of the content about ageing is trying to convince people to start exercising to help reduce the effect of ageing, but I don’t need to persuade you of that as you are already a runner.
I do feel though, I need to comfort you by letting you know that there are ways that can help you keep running for longer and enjoy it more – often performing better than you did in previous years.
For some of you who may be thinking that running is bad for you as you get older, especially as you read the horror story above, and are thinking about giving it up (perhaps from pressure from family or friends), maybe I do need to convince you (or them) that running is very, very good for you as you age.
All will become clear in the posts, articles and videos on this site and associated social media platforms.
I firmly believe you can Run Well Beyond your peers for decades to come – unless you’re already 100 and then perhaps only a decade and a bit…
I’ll leave you with this little fact: the current 5000m (5k) record on the track for a 75 year old lady is 20:54. Oh, and there are plenty of sub 3 hour marathon runners aged 70 plus.