How Long Can Improvement Be Expected? (Read 141 times)

Sheehan was a runner who quit after his college running days.

doing his later years he had only ran 3 days a week

I remember someone commenting on here that new runners can expect to see improvement for 10 years with consistent training.  I'm wondering when aging could change this dynamic.

 

I started in February 2019 and have noticed steady improvement.  But I'm 48.  Can I expect to improve through my late 50s?  I note the example of George Sheehan who started in his mid 40s and I believe that he made his marathon PR at just over age 60.  His times for shorter distances seemed to also improve at least well into his 50s.

 

I think my 8 years of avid cycling gave me a head start so I wasn't truly starting at zero at age 47.

 

Around this time last year I was running tempo runs at around 7:30/mile and now they are closer to 7:00/mile.  I expect the next year will probably not bring as much improvement but I don't know.  My ultimate goal is to beat my 10K time of 41:15 from when I was 18.  That was a race whereas my fastest 10K tempo so far was 43:49.

 

Thanks.

This could probably be another philosophical debate - because nobody knows, there will be bunch of anecdotal evidence but it's just impossible to give you an exact answer I think. Too many unknown factors - how you train, your genetics, your injury history, your motivation, list goes on and on and on. I personally know a lot of runners - some of them in their late 50s and some of them in early 60s - and they run sub 2:40 marathons and and 2:4x marathons. A lot of people mention 10 years of improvement after you start but imho it's a BS, what is the definition of improvement? In absolute numbers? I would disagree - imho, running 2:45 at 55 yo is an improvement comparing to running 2:40 at age of 40, for example. I mostly see results correlated to what training person does for all ages.

Of course everyone’s different, so I guess all you’ll get is anecdotal information. Based on mine, I see no reason you can’t continue to improve. I started running in my mid-40s; first marathon was in 2012 (age 47), although did not start racing 5k/10k distances till 2014 (age 49). Last year at 54 I set PRs at every distance from 5k to marathon. Turned 55 a few weeks ago; if I could race right now, I’d likely PR any distance. I know my improvement curve will bend the other direction sooner rather than later, but you should have plenty of time ahead of you. For the 10k example - I ran my first in 2014 at 45:46; my PR last fall was 41:53. 

One caveat - you have talked about lower mileage training, although I don’t recall the details. Since 2014, I have been between 2300 and 2800 miles per year (with the exception of one injury-plagued year). I am no training expert, but I credit my steady improvement at least in part to the continued accumulated mileage. YMMV.

My anecdotal evidence - I started at 46. Broke 39 minutes 10K 18 months later and was steadily improving towards 50 and a half years old of age - getting to 37 minutes 10K. 18 minutes 5K , 1:21 half marathon and 2:48 marathon. But I was at 100 miles per week training plan for some time by then. Then I was laid off from my favorite job and took 3 years of "training only in the fall for CIM" approach. No improvements obviously in those 3 years - only big setbacks with lack of mileage training, though I still was able to run sub 3 marathons (barely). Now, after, looks like, I've got a stable job and with covid and working from home situation I have more time and desire to train, I am nailing 100 miles weeks again, but I will be 55 yo in July and will see if I can say "you still might improve 10 years later" Not clear if we are able to run any races soon, so, maybe I will have to take a time trial on some certified course - this should be good enough for the situation, I guess...

Thanks everyone for the fascinating responses.  I'm very much into stats and I enjoy poring over my own and those of others as well.

I found it particularly interesting that according to the age grade calculator my recent tempo run time of 43:49 for the 10K was actually a better performance than the 41:15 at age 18. That does make sense when I think about it as I had only been running for about 3 months before that race when I was 18.  In addition to 15 months of running now, I had all those years of cycling beforehand.

I plugged in my 5K race time from last summer of 20:18 and it came up as an age graded performance of 71.02 and that was after only 6 months of running.  I'm taking that to mean that I have further potential for the 10K distance.

As for external factors, my motivation level is very high but I'm trying to err on the side of injury prevention so have been increasing my distances very gradually.  I'm not sure when racing will be available again but I may try to go all out on my 10K course to simulate a race.  I pushed quite hard on that last tempo but not at 100%.  The course is great in that there are no places where I would have to wait for traffic or any other obstacles.  I measured it both on my bike with its wired computer and using ridewithgps and the results matched so I'm confident about the accuracy of the distance (6.21 miles to be exact).

Hearing the anecdotal evidence that was provided was very encouraging!

My personal experience is that performance for the shorter events where speed is more of a factor deteriorates first, but with training I was able to maintain the times I ran in my early 20s into my mid-30s for 800m to 2M.  I began to see 10K and HM times slow in my 40s.  It's hard to judge after that because of changes in my training and a big drop in mileage.  Nonetheless, increases in training can counterbalance the aging factor, as a step up in training when I turned 60 brought me the best times I had run in 3-5 years.

I remember someone commenting on here that new runners can expect to see improvement for 10 years with consistent training.  I'm wondering when aging could change this dynamic.

 

I started in February 2019 and have noticed steady improvement.  But I'm 48.  Can I expect to improve through my late 50s?

It may sound trite but but it depends. It depends mostly on how much you ramp up your training, and how gradually. You have a ton of upside still--you're not coming anywhere near your genetic potential--and you have a window to run some fast times. I've been at this a while and I know a lot of runners and the ones who were able to run PR's into their late 50's were simply the ones who started late and ramped up gradually. The fact that you never trained hard at running in your 20's and 30's means you don't have to compete against the times you would have run then. So yeah, you can keep running PR's into your 50's as long as you don't train too hard in the next 2-3 years and set times that are so good that the affects of aging will overcome your ability to keep improving. You're running low mileage and barely scratching the surface. It's a matter of what your goals are. If your goal is to run PRs into your late 50's you can do it if you just keep your improvement slow enough. If your goal is to see how fast you can possibly get, then your best bet is to train hard for the next 2-3 years.

I used to scoff at the 10 year window but that turned out to be relatively accurate for me. I started running at age 30 but it took me a couple years of fits and starts to ramp up to where I would call what I was doing "training." At age 34 I had a breakout year and ran big PRs at every distance from 5k to 20 miles. I would have also run a huge PR at the marathon if it hadn't been in the 80's at Boston that year. Then I had a couple down years where I didn't train much. At age 36 I got back after it and a couple years later I was back to PR shape--took down the marathon and stayed roughly in that same fitness range all the way until about age 44-45 (I ran a lifetime PR for 5k at age 44) when injuries started to pile up. I wouldn't say I ever trained as hard as I possibly could have--running was never more than the 3rd or 4th priority in my life, but I put in an honest effort in the margins of a life I deemed worth having. If you add it up I trained relatively hard from age 32-34, then again from age 36-44. So I had about 10 years of decent training spread over 12 years, before I started to see my fitness drop off noticeably. Both times that I got "PR fit", I made most of the gains in the first 2 years or so of decently hard training. After that the gains came much harder. I've seen a similar scenario play out for lots of other runners too.

Decently hard training for me was in the 3000 mile per year range. Hitting 300 mile months when I was getting ready to race and never dropping under 200 miles per month for years on end even in the offseason or when recovering.