How should training change after 40?
Masters Running
Less than people fear, and differently than people expect. The training does not need to get easier. It needs to get smarter about recovery.
The short answer
After 40, keep the same training principles but change four things: allow more recovery between hard sessions (often 72 hours rather than 48), make strength training non-negotiable, protect your easy days more strictly, and get more of your volume onto soft surfaces. Keep the intensity — dropping the hard work is the most common and most costly mistake masters runners make. Volume can usually stay where it is. What changes is the spacing, not the content.
What actually changes with age
Three things, and it helps to be clear about which is which.
Recovery slows. This is the big one and it is well established. The same session takes longer to absorb at 45 than it did at 25. Not dramatically longer, but enough that a Tuesday–Thursday–Saturday hard pattern that worked fine at 30 stops working at 45.
Tissue tolerance falls. Tendon and muscle become slightly less resilient and slightly slower to repair. This is the mechanism behind the calf, Achilles and hamstring problems that seem to arrive out of nowhere in your forties.
Maximum capacity declines gradually. VO2max and maximum heart rate drift down. The rate is slow — and, crucially, it is substantially slower in people who keep training hard than in people who do not.
What does not change much: your ability to build aerobic fitness, your ability to improve running economy, your ability to get stronger, and — for most people coming to structured training later — your capacity to improve enormously simply because you have never trained properly before.
The four changes worth making
1. Space the hard sessions further apart
The most important change. Two quality sessions a week, with three days between them rather than two.
The classic Tuesday–Saturday pattern I use with most athletes works particularly well here: 72 hours between hard efforts, the long run on Sunday, and genuinely easy running in between.
If you are finding two sessions plus a long run too much, drop to one quality session a week rather than making both of them easier. A properly hard session once a week beats two moderate ones — that is the principle that matters most in masters training.
2. Strength training becomes non-negotiable
At 25 you can get away without it. At 45 you cannot, and at 55 it is arguably the most important thing in your week after the running itself.
Twice a week, heavy, low repetitions, with an emphasis on single-leg work and — especially — the lower leg. Both straight-leg and bent-knee calf raises, off a step, loaded. Muscle mass and tendon quality both decline with age unless you load them, and loading them is entirely within your control.
3. Protect easy days properly
Masters runners tend to have a narrower band between "too easy to be useful" and "too hard to recover from". The margin for a 6-out-of-10 easy run is smaller than it was.
Run easy days genuinely easy. In Wellington, that means walking the steepest pitches if the route demands it, and it means running on effort rather than trying to hold the pace you ran five years ago.
4. Get onto softer surfaces
Shift as much easy volume as you reasonably can onto grass, trail or gravel. Trelissick Park, Polhill, the Botanic Gardens, the town belt, any sports field. The training effect is identical and the mechanical cost is lower.
Coach's note
The mistake I see most in masters runners is not overtraining. It is quietly getting softer — the intervals become a bit less sharp, the tempo becomes a steady run, the long run becomes a jog, and within a year everything is being done at one moderate pace. That is the fastest route to slowing down there is. Keep the hard sessions genuinely hard and the easy days genuinely easy. If something has to give, give up frequency, not intensity. Lara is a good example of what is possible over a long horizon — she finished Spartathlon in 2015 and is going back for it again, and that kind of longevity comes from consistency and sensible recovery, not from backing off.
What should stay the same
Volume. Most masters runners can hold the same weekly volume they always did. It is intensity distribution and recovery that need managing, not total kilometres.
Intensity. Threshold work, intervals, hill reps — all of it belongs in a masters programme. The evidence on maintaining high-intensity work into older age is clear, and it is the single best defence against the age-related decline everyone is worried about.
The long run. Still the foundation. It may need to be run slightly slower and it may need an extra easy day after it, but it stays.
Ambition. Masters runners routinely set personal bests. Especially those who came to the sport later.
A masters week that works
- Monday: Easy 40–50 min, soft surface if possible
- Tuesday: Quality — 5 x 6 min at threshold, 90 sec float. Strength in the evening.
- Wednesday: Easy 40 min, or cross-train
- Thursday: Easy 45 min + strides
- Friday: Rest, or 30 min very easy. Strength.
- Saturday: Quality — hills, or reps at 5km pace
- Sunday: Long run, easy
Note the 72 hours between Tuesday and Saturday, and the two clear recovery days. That structure is the whole adjustment.
Warm-ups get longer
Not optional any more. Fifteen to twenty minutes of easy running, some dynamic mobility, and four to six strides before any hard session.
Most masters running injuries happen in the first two repetitions of a session, and a proper warm-up removes most of that risk for the cost of ten minutes.
Listen differently
The useful signals change. Waking heart rate creeping up, sleep quality falling away, a session that feels much harder than the pace suggests, a niggle that takes four days rather than one to settle — these are the early indicators, and at 45 they are worth acting on faster than they were at 25.
Acting on them usually means one or two easy days, not a fortnight off. Fitness does not disappear in a week, and the cost of an extra easy day is far lower than the cost of a six-week injury.
The honest encouragement
The decline curve for well-trained runners is much shallower than the general population's, and much shallower than most people fear. Plenty of runners are still improving in their late forties, and a great many run their best times after 40 simply because it is the first time they have trained properly.
Something is going to slow down eventually. It does not have to be this year, and it will slow down more slowly if you keep doing the hard work rather than backing away from it.
