after age 40 to stave off the effects of growing
older. Since most younger endurance athletes
take their strength and flexibility for granted
and do little strength training and stretching,
you can actually reverse the aging process to
some degree by doing these things and maintain
peak performance to age 40 and beyond.
Recently I asked six-time Hawaii Ironman
winner Dave Scott, now 56 and still very fast,
how he has managed to retain so much of his
youthful speed. He cited his lifelong commit-
ment to strength training as the single biggest
factor. Thanks to his frequent trips to the gym,
Scott says, “I’ve never had any of those issues
that other athletes have. I’ve never had low-back
pain; I’ve never had those little niggling things
that slow athletes down as they get older.”
It doesn’t take a huge time commitment to get
meaningful improvements from strength training
and flexibility improvements from stretching. Nor
does it require any special equipment. I advise busy
triathletes who wouldn’t strength train or stretch
otherwise to perform what I call “TV workouts”
three times a week. These consist of alternating
bodyweight strength exercises (single-leg squats,
push-ups, etc.) and stretches (toe touches, etc.)
that you can do in 20 minutes at home in front
of the TV before you go to bed.
Keep the passion alive.
It’s not all physical. The most successful
masters triathletes maintain a youthful zeal for
chasing goals and training hard that keeps them
young in the water, on the bike and on the run.
There’s nothing wrong with losing interest in
going fast as you get older and finding other
motivations to stay in the sport. But if you
like the idea of beating athletes who are young
enough to be your children, you’ll want to be
aware of your sources of motivation to train
and race hard and milk them for all they’re
worth. As they say, age is just a state of mind,
and passion denotes a young state of mind.
96 triathlete.com
october 2010
