Accepting "growing slowness"
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2016
As a guy in his mid-60s was pulling me along on last night's mid-week run from the store, I was acutely aware of my barking quads (because of my track workout the prior evening and 20 tough miles on the weekend), the high humidity and heat, and that "this pace was a little too much" for me. I hung in for most of the way, in part because of principle (he was only a few years younger and why couldn't I keep up?) and also because we were having a great conversation about our passions and commitments.
Looking at my splits, I see mile times that five or 10 years ago I would have considered to be slow, easy running. Alas, mother time and my physical problems of last year have reduced my speed. I am slowly getting faster because I have upped my training and am back to regular track workouts and tempo runs, but how much these key workouts will lift my pace and how long this will take is not obvious.
Yet, as my running buddies and I have oft discussed, speed is relative. Every long-term runner has to face a decline in speed, not necessarily straight-line with age, but however the growing slowness is meted out, mile times (and times at other distances) inevitably decline. I and others try to fool ourselves by training more or carrying less weight or running smarter - but we will not run faster than we could have and maybe did in earlier days. Hence, as my friend Rich once said, "I'm going for for my monthly PR."
Nonetheless, the effects of aging on performance are well documented. According to the Sports Science Institute, "Runners will continue to perform at levels close to their personal best into their late 30s and early 40s; performance then declines at a rate of approximately 2% per year through age 80. Swimming, which like running places a premium on cardiovascular strength, shows a similar regression from best performance times as an athlete ages." Better news is that “a lot of the deterioration we see with aging can be attributed to a more sedentary lifestyle instead of aging itself," according to the author of a study published by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. And Mike Schultz writes for Training Peaks that "a study done on masters runners between the ages of 50 and 82 years of age, who continued to compete on a regular basis over a 10-year period of time, showed less declines in VO2 max compared to their non-competitive counterparts. Studies also show that a slight decline in VO2 max may be countered by the ability to deal with greater amounts of lactic acid, an advantage found to exist in older runners."
I think a mark of maturity for an athlete - in my world a runner or triathlete or biker or swimmer - is to come to terms with getting slower. Our brains are programmed with our past bests, for me mile run times in the 6 minute range, 56 mile bike legs at 23 mph and Ironman swims in little over an hour. We need to adapt to the circumstances of aging - as we do as competitors to weather and hills and illness and sleep and diet. We need to take into account our reduced capabilities.
My upcoming book on strategic decision making delves into the psychological, social and other factors we need to hurdle to make good decisions. An underlying problem in moving forward and accepting our "growing slowness" is that we get anchored by the past. We discount evidence that disputes our strongly held view of ourselves. We avoid the "bad news" that in terms of our potential capacity we are not what we were and won't ever be a world class athlete (or, in the case of several of my coaches, won't be one again). We find it difficult to self assess, and usually give ourselves the benefit of the doubt rather than face stark reality.
It gets more complicated, in that as humans we have egocentric bias: We remember the past as better than it was. (People routinely think they attained better grades in school than the evidence supports.) We tend to hold our past accomplishments in high esteem, remembering them in a glowing haze of rosy retrospection. (Because we have our logs and race results that speak truth, perhaps we overestimate what we accomplished less so than people continuing in other endeavors where black and white metrics are not provided, but the texture of our memories still tend to highlight the peak and end of the experience rather than the "not so good" parts in between.)
We are cursed with a conservatism that makes us reluctant to revise our view of ourselves when faced with new evidence. We hold our potential for greater athletic accomplishments as a cherished belief that is hard to abandon. Further, we fear that acknowledging our reduced capacity endorses a continuing decline into the future. Our fast finishes, personal records, medals and podium results define us, so giving them up is very difficult.
The good news I see in my work to explicate how to make better decisions is that we need not be disconsolate about our decline. We have healthy ways to deal with it.
Reframe. Reframing is a wonderful tool. Look at our situation from a different angle! However much speed and strength and capacity we might lose, we are still running or swimming or biking while others are not. We are still "doing the work" and getting the physical and psychological benefits. Centers for Disease Control survey data reported in an article on senior running in The Atlantic confirm that we need to give ourselves a pat on the back: "Roughly one-third of Americans over the age of 65 are considered physically active, compared to around 80 percent of the general population."
Be in the moment. By being in the present, the past matters less. We are not burdened by the "sunk cost" of irretrievable past success and can invest ourselves in what's in front of us. It's healthy to focus on how I feel right now, on this run, in the gorgeous outdoors, to find the joy of matching strides and breathing with others, to lay down the miles.
Focus on current gains. Humans tend to try to avert further losses rather than risk failure by tackling opportunities. We can overcome being anchored by what we once had by focusing on vying with age group competition facing the same decline that we face. Our peers offer us a more level playing field than our past. For me, it's not about staring at the impossibility of besting my best 5K time. Rather, it's addressing the here and now of whether I can keep up with Tim on Saturday's long training run on the B&A Trail or make the full distance with Tom in our next Wednesday night run in Eastport. That's tangible and forward looking.
Look to the future. There's great value to mixing "in the moment" enjoyment with pursuit of realistic but challenging longer term goals. Research shows that just focusing on current feedback can lead to "myopic loss aversion," which means less risk taking. I'm not necessarily endorsing high-risk endeavors, but it's proven that we only grow and adapt when we are stressed and face change. In our athletic world, an audacious goal race laid out there for us to train for can bring out the best in us and deliver great physical and psychic gains.
When we face the reality of the watch, the distance and the competition in present rather than past terms, we can find the mindset that originally led us to our past successes. The reality of today's results may still smack us in the face, but they then reset our benchmarks for the future. Through continued training and dedication, we can get ourselves back into that space where we ask more of ourselves and achieve more at our state of life - in real-time terms - than we might have thought possible.
