Training Considerations for Master Athletes

Joe: What I usually hear is, “I’m really good at going slow already. I want to get good at going fast.” So, they want to go out and do fast workouts and become faster. It’s hard to explain to them that that’s not the way it works. You don’t become faster by just by doing fast workouts. You actually become slower by doing that.

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Steve: A lot of coaching books tend to age out of usefulness within just a few years of publication, but Joe Friel’s books are one of the exceptions. The Cyclist Training Bible is in its fifth edition. The Triathlete’s Training Bible has trained generations of athletes, many of whom never met a coach, and his book that he’s been working on recently, and what we’re going to be talking about today, Fast After 50, first published in 2015. And by the time you hear this will have just been released in its second edition. The second edition is in a way the last 10 years of Joe’s homework. He’s still training, still coaching, still revising his own thinking kind of in real time, like real coaches often do. And he went back as he’s done before and looked honestly, what he got right, what he didn’t, what the science has settled in between, as sometimes happens. And what I want our listeners to know before we start is that Joe, I think, for me, is one of the few people in endurance coaching who has stayed genuinely curious for an entire long and fruitful career. And he’s one that has always been careful with his words, just as he is careful with his athletes. He thinks before he speaks. He cares about getting it right. he’s a passionate educator writer and is I’ve learned so much from him through his books and vicariously through all the work that he’s done, and I think a lot of what good endurance coaching looks like today in 2026 traces back one way or another to Joe Friel’s work. Welcome, Joe to the Apolosley podcast

Joe: Very kind of you, Steve. I don’t usually get such flowering introductions. Very kind.

Steve: Well, you should, so how do I get to start with the obvious question: how old are you now, and you’re writing as 50

Joe: I’m 82. Yeah, I’m 82.

Steve: You’re 82, and you’ve just published a second edition of Fast After 50. What has changed for you personally with how you I don’t know if we call it at our you know, I’m not. I’m 55. I almost don’t call it training anymore. What is the difference between how you train now and how you trained in 2015?

Joe: Um, well we’re talking about 10-plus years ago. Things have really changed dramatically. It’s really hard to draw a line and say, you know when did this thing happen because these things have been going on for changing a little bit over the many many many years so it’s they’re not like sudden changes that take place but there have

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: been some sudden changes a couple of them is if you go back to 20 actually this book was written in 2012 and it hit the first the first edition came out in 2013 then they published a second second version or second publishing and it was 2015 so it’s been it’s been around for a while and I suppose the thing that really marks my life during that period of time was a crash I had on my bike. And in 2013, January 24th, 2014, actually, I had a crash, which was life-changing. And I haven’t raced since then. I still train. I don’t think of training as much anymore as I do just lifestyle stuff. But that dramatically changed things I could do and could not do. I broke seven bones, concussion, blood clots in both legs. I was in the ICU for six days. And I had more problems. Frozen shoulder lasted for nine months. It was just a horrendous experience. So that one thing changed my life dramatically. Other than that, things have been rather calm in my life, going back to when I was a kid, when I was a teenager.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: So really, it’s been a long haul, but it’s all been a lot of fun for me anyway.

Steve: So what have you learned from being your own subject for the last 10-plus years?

Joe: Yeah, I’ve learned a lot. You know, I’ve learned up slower to adapt to training. I recall when I was much younger, I could feel the changes coming about in my training. I’d go for a workout or a run or a bike or a swim or whatever it may be. And if I’d been through a week or so of focused training, I could tell it. I could feel it. That doesn’t happen anymore. I never have any sensations that, yeah, I’m experiencing changes right now that indicate that I’m adapting to the training. Training, um that’s probably because i don’t really do things that are as as uh extreme anymore uh i’ve calmed down in my training, which i think is something we all do as we get

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: older is i i spend a lot more time doing base training than i did before and a lot less time doing high intensity training which i did a lot before so a lot of things have changed you know long list body weight has changed um you know more more body fat uh that’s which has become an issue for me just trying to make sure i keep it under control which i’ve done pretty well so far but it’s no way what i was uh 20 30 years ago as far as body weight uh power has changed you know my numbers are not what they used to be uh range of motion has changed flexibility has changed balance

Steve: Sure.

Joe: My life, everything changes. It’s amazing when you get to be this age how so many things in your life are different than they were 20 years ago.

Steve: Mm.

Joe: I look back at those just thinking those were, you know, at the time I thought I was an old guy when I was 20 years ago, 60 years old. Now I look back at it and think, man, all the things I could do back then that I can’t do now, there’s been a gigantic change take place in these last 20 years. So the list of things that have gone on with my training over the decades are gigantic, quite honestly.

Steve: Okay. Okay. What was the moment when you decided that this particular book needed another edition?

Joe: Yeah, well, I’ve been around aging athletes for a long time, 50-plus athletes. Around them almost daily. Sometimes I train with them. I talk with them frequently. I’ve coached them. And one thing I noticed that was taking place that was different from when I first wrote this book, back in 2012, what I saw was lots and lots of older athletes doing long, slow distance training. That was their focus was long, slow distance. So I wrote that book to try to promote with the idea they need to do some high intensity training also to maintain this, this, this broader range of what we would call fitness.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Now I’m seeing just the opposite in the last several years. What I’ve seen is athletes are doing a lot more high intensity, including the older athletes, 50 plus. And there’s too many of them doing, there are many athletes who are doing way too much high intensity and not nearly enough low intensity. So this book is more focused on that way of looking at training as opposed to what I did with the original book back in 2012.

Steve: Mm hmm. And that was just sort of a slow dawning of like observation of noticing what people were talking about and how they were showing up to train or work out, or what the questions they’re asking you.

Joe: Yes, that’s exactly right. But, you know, I often train with athletes who are older athletes, and I get feedback from them on how their training is going and what they’re doing and so forth.

Steve: Hmm.

Joe: And I get email questions from clients all the time. People contact me who I don’t know anything at all about, who has questions also. And all this stuff is leading me in the same direction. if they were doing way too much high intensity and putting too much emphasis on it and were not spending enough time working on their low-intensity training, their base training.

Steve: Yeah.

Joe: That was lacking. So this book became very highly focused on that topic.

Steve: Yeah. And so you’re making the case for older athletes to do sufficient or more, however we want to frame that base training.

Joe: Yeah, much more base training. I think what it comes down to is people… don’t really grasp the importance of base training, what all it does for them physiologically. I always get the same thing when I say to somebody, you know, you’d be pretty long, slow distance. What I usually hear is I’m really good at going slow already. I want to get good at going fast. So they want to go out and do fast workouts to become faster. And it’s hard to explain to them that that’s not the way it works. You don’t become fast by just by doing fast workouts, you actually come slower by doing that. You’ve got to build this aerobic base as your platform to put all this high-intensity training on top of. So that’s become kind of my mantra for the last three or four years, I guess. I find myself talking more about that subject than probably any other subject I deal with with athletes. So that became the focus of the book also.

Steve: I’m curious what your go-to analogy or teaching the paradigm or like, you communicate that you know i i’m i’m in the same boat like this is you know going back to training for the new alpinism which is you know 15 years old and that was the same thing the whole premise of that book was in in many ways talking about what you’re just talking about what is what is the story you tell uh do you tell it through physiology do you tell it through yeah what do

Joe: my usual way of explaining this is to start with an athlete an example as i did in the book this newest edition of the book i take examples of athletes and how they train you know age-wise world-class athletes uh people who own world’s records in their age groups and what they do in training they just don’t go out and hammer themselves every day they do lots of base training They build this aerobic base. So I try to start off by using examples. Here are people who are very much like you in some ways, age-wise, very much like you. And here’s how they train. This is what makes them as good as they are. then i go back if that doesn’t get me far enough and i go to physiology this is what happens to your physiology when you do a lot of long a lot of base type training lower intestine training what happens and sometimes you just cannot make your point sometimes people are just so resistant to this concept that there’s no use in even trying you just kind of give up after a while but for the most part i can i can get people to understand that it’s important the question is will they continue after they’ve tried it for a few days? They might say, okay, Joe said, well, go out and do some, you know, some long, easy workouts to build this aerobic base. And they do that for three or four days. And they say, well, I’m bored. So I need to get some high intensity. And so they start doing high intensity. Or they say, I don’t have time. You know, I’m saying, you know, you need to put in a huge chunk of your time to working on your base fitness.

Steve: Yep.

Joe: and what they say is well i’ve only got four days a week i can train i can only train for an hour to an hour and a half a day so what does that mean what do i do do i just do four days of an hour and a half a day long slow distance all the time never do high intensity or you know how do i balance this out and so they start bringing up all their issues which time is usually the most common issue let’s go ahead and talk about that with them what you know how can we how can we take advantage of your situation to make you more fit by getting in more long, slow distance, more low intensity.

Steve: You know you think after you’d written enough books joe that they would actually just take you for your word right

Joe: It doesn’t work that easily.

Steve: is there some areas where you know as we’ve talked about this on this podcast a lot where The the practice of training and coaching and racing typically leads the science. We figure out through just sort of iteration at scale what worked. And as you said, we’ve pretty much exhausted all the different ways that you can train for endurance. And we’ve all landed in the same place. This is the way to be graded as an endurance athlete. And then the science comes around and starts to explain more and more pieces of it. Is there anything in that part of the story that has moved since you wrote the first version of this book in 2012?

Joe: Well, things are always changing, um, especially when it comes to training, um, you know, we can look back at things that we were talking about back then, and some of those things remain constant, like aerobic capacity. You know, we still talk about aerobic capacity, you know, 10, 15 years ago. That concept has not changed at all. That’s pretty much what we still accept. What I think has changed a little bit about this is that there’s more emphasis on how you can maintain or even improve aerobic capacity with long, slow distance. Low-intensity training can improve it. It doesn’t just have to be high intensity. So that’s usually the debate topic I get involved with athletes is, well, how do you improve VO2? But the concept itself is still there. And athletes pretty much understand what it’s all about as far as how do we measure it and what does it mean to have a high VO2 max and what happens to it over time, what happens to it as we age. That’s pretty much understood. But there are new things coming around, which are always kind of exciting. Right now, one of the biggest topics is durability. How can we continue to put out at a relatively high output very, very late in an athletic event? You know, like two or three hours into an event, how can you still be putting out at a very high, at a high intensity, high effort? And that’s a very interesting topic, which I’m reading a lot about right now because there’s new stuff coming out on it every few months or something new that comes out in the research. And it’s just a fascinating topic.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that has been really interesting. becoming more and more frequent. The last, I don’t know, I think I first noticed it only a year or so ago. And now it seems like it’s just like, it’s just on the words on everybody’s lips these days. What, you know, for a lot of our athletes aren’t running a race to win. And frankly, most of us aren’t. So how do you think about that? What is the training work actually for? Yeah, the journey is to make us a better person, a better athlete, and a better person.

Joe: um you know, it’s a lifestyle is what it is and the older you become the more important that idea also becomes. When we’re young um we tend to see training and sport as being a part of our lifestyle but it’s not entirely our lifestyle as we get older they begin to they merge more and they become one. You know, I, I, I’m not doing this. I’m not going out and ride my bike on a daily basis just so I can do a race. I’m doing this because this is what I do for my, this is my life. This is what I do. It’s part of, it’s part of being a person is to,

Steve: Mm.

Joe: is to move. And I’d like to do that. And my wife and I, we go for, you know,

Steve: Mm.

Joe: an hour-or-more walk every morning. It’s the same thing. It’s not, it’s not exercise. It’s not a workout. It’s just life. That’s what I do. And I think that’s,

Steve: Mm.

Joe: I like to see athletes take more of that kind of way of seeing the world. It’s a lifestyle matter. It’s not strictly a competition matter. It’s not just being able to win races or place well,

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: or I have a good, a good performance. It’s also just who I am. And this is what I, what I enjoy doing. And because of that, it’s, it’s, it’s actually very healthy for us. It’s very good not only for our lifespan, but also for our healthspan. Um, how long we can,

Steve: Right. Yeah, right. You know, and everything you’re saying touches on identity, too. Like it’s, you know, like you said, it’s how you are as a person and how you show up.

Joe: we can remain healthy into our, um, older years.

Steve: It’s who you spend time with, which actually is who you become your friends or are your friends. It’s what’s on your calendar. And it also turns out to trickle down to your physiology and what your physiology looks like as well. So it’s quite the vertically integrated way of looking at it. I like that a lot.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s also good for those who are younger to be able to put it, to give an example of how life should be lived. as we get older. We’re no longer teenagers. You know, we may work out like teenagers do, at least in terms of our enthusiasm about it. We’re not teenagers anymore. But there’s,

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: we can see this change that takes place in life and how important that is to our family, our children, you know, being a good example for your children of how to live your life you can do and exercise is part of that. Children who grew up in a family where the parents are very, who work out a lot as a part of their lifestyle exercise, if you want to call it that makes the children think in terms of the same sort of thing for them.

Steve: Yeah.

Joe: You know, this is what people do. This is the way the child sees it. My parents go out, and they do a run every morning or a bike ride or a swim or whatever it may be. They do something every day like that. That’s just what people do. So they grew up with an idea that this is what being a human means, is movement. and a lot of families don’t have that. I didn’t grow up with that at all. My parents were from a different age group altogether, you know, from a different way of seeing the world from back in the 1920s and 1930s and they had no, there was no way they were ever going to do anything that had to do with exercise or even just movement. They tended to avoid any kind think at all like that. And it kind of showed up in their lives, how their later lives became because of that way of seeing the world. So there’s a lot we can do as parents, as examples for anybody really in our community, people we know about how to live a life which is meaningful and beneficial. And this is one way of doing that. This is what we all should be doing.

Steve: yeah what do you say to that listener to that that athlete who just had their first look i can’t keep up anymore moment how do you uh talk them through that what’s the what’s the frame for that person.

Joe: well the starting place is to find out why maybe there may be a good reason why they can’t keep up you know that’s not really has to do with fitness perhaps maybe it has something to do with the lifestyle you know how to get enough are you getting enough sleep what’s nutrition like have you had any are you injured um is there i coached one guy many many years ago who’s he wanted to do marathon that was his focus he wanted to do a marathon and his wife thought it was silly and she would give him a hard time every time he talked about running so he wound up changing his lifestyle what he would do is he’d get up very early on a Sunday morning, like at four o’clock in the morning before she woke up and go out and get his run in. So he’d come back and spend the morning with her in a normal, what she saw as being a normal way of living. And that, for me, was really eye-opening that there are people out there who can make it really difficult for you to be focused on what you’re trying to do, which is a part of who you are. This guy, as much as he wanted to do as well, his primary focus was trying to qualify for Boston. He did not qualify. And I think the reason why is because he just did not have enough support. His wife was not supportive of him.

Steve: Hmm.

Joe: And that really held him back. It wasn’t physiologically holding him back. It was psychologically holding him back. And that’s a part of having a good life is making sure you’re,

Steve: Hmm.

Joe: not only is your body coming into shape, but also your mind is coming into shape. Your way of seeing the world is coming into shape. And I think that’s very, very important for us, for all of us as we age up, is to make sure we’re doing things that wind up making us models for other people.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, this harkens to so many conversations we have as a coaching team about coaching the whole athlete which is exactly what you talked about like what what not just what is your training volume or your intensity distribution, but what is your sleep, like what is your family support like? That can be a huge one yeah absolutely

Joe: yeah and are you enjoying it are you enjoying doing this you know if you’re not enjoying it there’s something wrong we need to figure out if you are enjoying great you know just kind of spread the word

Steve: yeah i think that joy is an interesting concept i’ve thought about that quite a bit in terms of an athlete’s training week you know and how how to as a coach myself how to include joy in the athlete’s week like do and how is that a is that especially with certain athletes maybe there’s some that are so focused on being the best at what they’re doing they don’t that’s that’s they don’t they almost don’t want that but for a lot of athletes i feel like that’s something important is that something you feel like is becomes more important with athletes over 50 or how do you think about that idea

Joe: Yeah, I like to see athletes, especially those who have experience, learn how to coach themselves.

Steve: yeah

Joe: And because of that, they become not only better athletes, but better people, because then they can help other people. who’s got an interesting way of coaching, what he does, he doesn’t lay out a training plan for the athlete on a weekly basis. What he does is give the athlete a list of workouts to do that week. And the athlete decides when they’re going to do them. So now what happens is the athlete has ownership of the training plan. Of course, what the coach does is give some guidelines on best ways to manipulate training. But that’s kind of early on. And once we’ve got this athlete how we can balance training, let them take a part of ownership of what they do. I’ve always thought that was a cool idea what he was doing. I never did that. I don’t really coach people on one-on-one coaching like that anymore. But if I did, I would try that with some athletes to see if they could actually coach themselves, which I think is what would be really good if they wind up in a place where an athlete can coach themselves. They’re not dependent on somebody else to tell them how and when and where and why, they can do a lot of that for themselves, which takes it beyond your coaching to them becoming a better person.

Steve: Yeah, that becomes the coaching, right? Is them being able to knowing enough to be able to make all the decisions themselves.

Joe: Right.

Steve: And I also get that like crack a smile. I have one athlete right now who’s training for an ultra and actually like 10 days. And, you know, half the time he answers his own question. He knows exactly what to do or like, you know, and I’m just like, yep. You know, it’s like you’re you really, you know, like and encouraging that like you really are getting this figured out. You’re really understanding this. is the underlying thought and this is the right way you’re you’re thinking about this correctly and i think that’s that’s super he he’s he’s about done with me right like he’s not gonna need me much longer but that’s that’s a good progression that’s the natural way of these

Joe: Yes, kind of like graduation. situation. You’re kind of there as instructor, teacher, role model, a coach, and the athlete

Steve: yeah

Joe: because that winds up learning a lot about not only themselves, but what training is all about. How do you how does somebody go about training? And that’s one of the most valuable things we can do for for athletes as a coach.

Steve: So you touched earlier on intensity and the amount of low-intensity, long, slow distance-based building type work versus higher intensity. about sort of that 50 plus old age athlete, what is your kind of, I know there’s probably not a one size fits all answer to this, but how do you frame that discussion when you’re, once people have bought in and they’re gonna follow your advice, how do you talk about that and how do you have it change or do you have it change as they age?

Joe: yeah what i tell them about is doing something i call a five plus two training pattern five days a week you train easy and and one of those days may be a day off or even two of those days may be a day off but five days a week are easy and only two weeks or a week are hard two days a week are hard and those two days a week that are hard are separated by at least two days could be three days between them so we wind up with this pattern where it’s hard easy easy hard easy easy easy hard easy easy hard we keep this pattern going and i think it it gives the athletes some um uh some time to recover uh it takes the pressure off of them to uh to uh do hard training back to back especially. And it gives them this kind of sense of this is a way that I can build this low-intensity training platform, this aerobic base that we were talking about because now I can focus on it for at least five days a week.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: And I think that’s very valuable. So that’s the kind of pattern I use. Once I’ve got the personal events we can do this, that’s where we go next is five plus two.

Steve: Okay. It is one of those, where does strength training play into that?

Joe: going to be built in around the schedule. So let’s say the athlete is doing four days a week easy, two days a week hard, and one day a week is a day off. That’s a fairly typical plan.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: So this strength depends a bit on what time of the season we’re in. If it’s like pre-season, like we’re talking about before the base period even begins, if we’re talking about that period of time, which is going to be probably like October, maybe November for athletes, just think in terms of a calendar. What they’re going to be doing at that point is we’re going to put a little more emphasis on strength training. So we’re going to do some workouts that develop, and we’re going to start developing strength in a very gradual progression. So we’re going to start off with low weights, high reps, two to three times a week and we’re gradually going to increase the loads and decrease the reps. And that’s going to occur over this very early period of time before we even start doing serious aerobic training. The aerobic training will come later. That’s going to be more like a December, January sort of thing if you just think in terms of a calendar. So we’re going to start off by building some base strength and then we’re going to go to the very end of that. We’re going to move into something I call a max strength period, where the athlete eventually winds up doing heavier loads, lighter, fewer reps. And that becomes the focus of the training. Everything else is kind of like minor at this time. And then we start to transition into more of the base period with more endurance training. And so we cut back on strength training. Strength training becomes less important. We go into more of a maintenance mode now. And because of this, strength that has been gained as we’re building the aerobic platform for the base. And so that becomes the next stage of this whole idea. And so we go through this process where we gradually cut back on strength training and we gradually increase the aerobic training so we don’t wind up trying to do both of those at the same time. We wind up with the ability to have accomplished something and then maintain it as we go into more of the low-intensity type training becomes a part of the base period. Then we go into what I call a maintenance phase, strictly maintenance, in what I call the build period, which is the specific period. So now the athlete is doing lots of high-intensity, at least let’s call it race-intensity workouts, but still only two a week. and now strength training has moved back to a very minor role. Now we’re only just doing it like once a week and we’re using like two sets per workout and we’re just trying to maintain strength for a matter of just a few more weeks before we get into this peaking period for a couple of weeks and then do the competition, the race, if you will. And then depending on where the athlete is in their season, we may start all over again. or we take some time off. At that point, everything becomes very much up in the air as far as what’s going to happen next.

Steve: yeah yeah i mean here you’re just system, if you want to call it that, you know, maps very well to, you know, kind of the uphill athlete sort of standard thing. But we also recognize, you know, as you do, like, different people may need different things. But one of the things I’m hearing, and I want you to say that this is true or false, is that it’s been the one way I’ve thought about it with these with older athletes, including myself, is really getting them more comfortable with the idea that they can progress one capacity at a time and not to try to, you know, when we’re young, we can get better at lots of, you know, we can get fitter in multiple different sort of aspects of our fitness concurrently. And as we age, it’s like, now let’s work on strength and let’s like put that into maintenance as we’ll work on base. And that sounds like a little bit like what you’re talking

Joe: exactly right that’s exactly what i’m trying to do with the athlete is take them one step at a time we’re not going to take two steps at a time we’re going to take one step at a time make get some accomplishments in one area like strength before we move into trying to get one more thing added on which is aerobic fitness aerobic base and then we wind up doing more density of training, more high intensity, which culminates with an event. So there’s this long progression that we go through to get to this point. That can be very difficult for athletes to accept. They want to get to the hard stuff right away. Try to make that point in this book that patience is part of training. You’ve got to be patient.

Steve: yes absolutely yes and i i think that’s an important mental shift as well that’s actually can be framed in the positive is I I’ve often talked to these people that are in their 50s especially where they they’re so crestfallen they think that it’s all over and it’s like well no we just have to we just have to do things a little differently now you need to have like a little longer time frame uh be a little more patient as you put it we’re going to work on one thing at a time we’re not going to work on two things like we’re just gonna we’re just gonna shift some of And you can still get better and you can still get faster and still have more fun and still be, you know, out there with your friends and part of the community and doing these things. And yeah, like the personal record days might be over and that might be okay too. And there’s other reasons we still do this. So I like that framing a lot.

Joe: Yeah, very good point. You make some good points there about the idea of growing as an athlete by doing things in a way they’ve not done before and coming to accept that we’re not the same person we were 20 years ago.

Steve: Yeah.

Joe: And so patience is a big part of that. You can’t be impatient when you’re 55 years old. You’ve got to be able to accept that things don’t happen immediately anymore, that it’s going to take time.

Steve: Yeah. 100%.

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Steve: A lot of your work has been with cyclists and triathletes and runners. Curious to know is what translates cleanly to someone in this age bracket who’s training for an 8 000 meter peak or a hundred-kilometer trail race- where’s the and and frankly what doesn’t what doesn’t translate between your experiences with cyclists triathletes and runners versus, let’s call them, mountain athletes

Joe: Okay. Well, I’ve never coached a 100K athlete before. That’s usually a marathon is about as far as I’ve ever gone with athletes, with a few exceptions. I’ve, interestingly enough, coached, it was called endurance horse racers, which is an interesting sport. And there you’re dealing with people who are going to be on that horse or off the horse in some cases for several hours during the event, six, seven hours. So that’s an ultra event, but it’s not all on their own legs. Sometimes they’re on the horse’s legs, but they get off at various times. and that was an eye-opener for me to think in terms of long, very long events that take multiple hours. How do you train an athlete for something like that? Well, I’ve never trained a runner for an ultra run. The longest I’ve probably had trained an athlete is for an Ironman distance triathlon, which in some cases were taking 15 or 16 hours. I coached one guy who took almost 17 hours, which is the cutoff. and um you know it’s it’s a different it’s a different game it’s altogether different than coaching athletes who are doing much shorter events that can be done you know like a 5k or 10k running event that’s that’s really quite easy by comparison to trying to coach somebody for a 16 hour event or whatever the event may be when you get you know you get beyond about i don’t know five hours or so it starts becoming rather long um and that’s i’ve never had that experience except at war course with the Ironman people. And I found it very fun to work with them because I had to learn something new about when I first started coaching Ironman athletes, that was a whole new world for me because I’d been coaching much shorter events up until that time. Olympic distance triathlons and sprint triathlons and 5Ks and 10Ks, maybe occasional marathon. We knew all these events were under four hours. And now we’re talking about two or three times for an athlete. And, um, uh, I never really became extremely comfortable with that whole idea. It’s, it’s still, I never compete in those types of events. It’s still, for me, kind of a distant concept that I have to kind of wrap my mind around every time I talk with an athlete about doing something, which is going to take 15 or more hours. Um, I’ve never done that. So I don’t have this experience that I can lean on to say, Oh, this is, what I found works because I have to rely on what I learned from the athlete about what worked and what did not work. But I also enjoy that about coaching. I enjoy the idea of occasionally taking on something which is unusual, like horse racers, endurance horse racers. That was brand

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: new for me. I didn’t know anything at all about it. And I had to learn what the sport was all about. So that was, for me, that was enjoyable. I coached a rower once in my life. And I’d never coached rowing before at all. And so I had to learn again what you do in that sport.

Steve: Yeah.

Joe: So these things to me as a coach have been lots of fun. They’re challenges because I didn’t grow up with any of these things. I didn’t ride horses. I didn’t row. I didn’t do 15-hour events. And so I had to learn, which for me is part of being a coach, I guess, is figuring out how do I do this with this type of athlete. So I find those things very intriguing, but I still don’t consider myself to be anywhere near being somebody who knows what’s going on when you start talking about ultra events. The word ultra scares me.

Steve: We had a really interesting one come through about 18 months ago. There’s a race. out there called the Yukon 2000, where you paddle a canoe for 2000 miles through the Yukon.

Joe: oh

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. And he worked with one of our coaches and it was super successful. You know, so like you could, you could take these concepts and, you know, understanding of physiology and kind of like reconstruct it for, you know, kind of deconstruct it and then reconstruct it against the new objective, which in this case was, you know, a multi-day. It’s a little bit like a stage race for cycling, I would suppose, right? Because you’re not carrying the weight, the weight’s in the, in the boat, excuse me, the weight’s in the boat, but you’re, you’re, you’re, and you have to stop a certain number of hours every day and so on. But fascinating, fascinating event to think about.

Joe: It is. That would be quite a challenge to take that on.

Steve: a lot of my climbing career was spent doing things that were in that you know the sing longest single push event i did climb i did was 60 hours and the the typical like climbs we did where we would actually bivouac and get some kind of rest or sleep most nights was around a week six to eight days was probably pretty pretty typical um and i used to look at things like the tour de france or race across america or these kinds of things trying to find like again like when i was trying to figure out how to coach myself and was going to all these different sources and reading, you know, peer reviewed research and reading race accounts from people and all these different things and trying to piece it together. So, you know, I think that not so much of it is different from the physiology point of view, where I think things start to diverge in nutrition, fueling, recovery during the race. And it goes to this topic of durability. You talk about like being strong after four hours, how do you be strong after four days? And I think that those concepts were very, very, very nascent at the time, but were very relevant.

Joe: Yeah, I read a book, spent some time now, read a few years ago. I forgot the author’s name, I wish I could remember it. But he talks about how he decided to go from running marathons to ultras. he wanted to qualify for UTMB in France Chamonix and so he goes through the whole story you know the first the first alter he does and how it went and so forth he goes through all these events he’s trying to qualify in one year to get into UTMB and he does it he pulls it off but it was quite an experience but just watch this you know, the events and the food and sleep and what’s going on in your head and other people around you and all the weather and all these things are happening through all these events. It was really an interesting book to read, but quite honestly, something I would not want to do.

Steve: Fair. Fair. Do you have specific thoughts on kind of the back a little bit to intensity questions, strength training questions with the with master’s athletes? How do you adapt frequency of high intensity or either high intensity or high strength load workouts with them? Do you always stick with this sort of 5-2 framework? Do you sometimes stretch out further? As we age, we need longer to recover in between bouts of training. How do you think about that? And is there a floor? Is there a minimum that a master’s athlete shouldn’t drop below? What are your thoughts there?

Joe: Every athlete is different; every athlete is unique so it’s hard to come up with a way of training that’s going to fit for most all athletes but you know i stick with the five two pretty much all the time, except with some athletes what i found works better for them is what I call a nine-day churning week. Instead of a seven-day week, it’s a nine-day week. And so it’s, you know, it’s hard, hard workouts, so we get nine days in that way. And then we take a few days more to recover and then we start over again. That works really well for athletes who are in need of more frequent rest. and it also makes it a little bit easier to bounce back from workouts when they always know they’re going to have two days after a harder session, a longer session, whatever you want to call it, to recover. But the challenge is that it works best for people who are retired. you’ve got an eight to five job uh and you’ve got to be at work at you know eight o’clock in the morning and uh that’s the same day you’re supposed to do a three-hour run uh it’s not going to work out you’re just not going to be able to get a three-hour run and also make it to work on time so it works best for people who are retired who have great control over their what they do on a daily basis. But it’s also very difficult for anybody to do, I found, because it just doesn’t fit in with our lifestyles, where our lifestyles tend to revolve around seven days. But I found it works with some people. And for those people, it really works really well. They get by on this extremely well. But you got to be kind of careful on who you put into that kind of a plan.

Steve: yeah one of our coaches, Martin Zhor, just uh did this recently last winter he was telling our coaching group about an athlete that he had set up on a 10-day uh cycle instead of a 10 for there was an older athlete and he just needed to sort of spread the load over a greater micro cycle rather of 10 days rather than seven. So similar conclusion. You know, but I agree the seven-day week for almost everybody works best just because there’s a routine to it, right? Like Monday’s always the rest day or whatever it is and Saturday’s always a long day and it stays the same. And when you change things, these other wonky cycles that don’t line up with a normal calendar, it gets crazy. so how do you talk about when you mentioned durability and i wanted to dig in on that a little bit how are you thinking about durability and specifically how is that how are you programming with that idea of building durability in masters athletes particularly in mind what are you doing differently if anything how are you thinking about it as a coach

Joe: Yeah, the workouts change primarily because the focus of these workouts is longer sessions. And whatever that means for the athlete. Longer session for some athletes means an hour and a half. For other athletes, it means six hours. So it depends on who we’re talking about or what long means. But the idea is that we start off in the first, let’s say, hour of the workout, and we’re going to create some fatigue. So I may have the athlete do an hour in zone two just to create some fatigue. Or I may have the athlete burn, I don’t know, 800 calories or 1,200 calories, depending on who the athlete is and what their performance is typically like. to create some fatigue and then we’re going to go into a phase where we’re going to work on event specific intensity and this is going to take place now in the in in the specific training period the build period i call it not the base period base period we’re just building endurance which is the foundation for duration if you don’t have good endurance there’s really no reason to be doing uh durability workouts that’s a waste of time you got to have good endurance first so we get that established first. Now we’re in the build period, specific training. And now we’re training for an event that I want to have good. I’m training for a marathon. I want to have good in the last 10 K. I still want to be able to run at a fairly decent pace in the past. I’ve fallen way back on in that last 10 K. So we start talking about, you know, how are we going to do that? What’s the plan we’re going to come up with for that last 10 K? How are we going to get to that point. And then we’re going to replicate that in training by building fatigue, and then going into race-specific workouts. That race-specific workout could be done in many different ways. It could be steady state, like a marathoner might do, wind up doing lots of training, lots of running in, let’s say zone three. It could be intervals, could be like zone four for somebody who is doing a shorter event than a marathon perhaps it could be um it could be intervals it could be for an athlete like who’s doing a cycling event for example they’ve got a long cycling event and and we always know this is going to finish with a lot of peaks and valleys in the in the journey it’s not going to be steady state we’ll do lots of intervals like zone four zone five intervals in the last hour or half hour, whatever it may be. So the idea is you build, first of all, you build fatigue, and then you go into very specific training for what we’re trying to accomplish for this work, for this particular race. But it’s got to be specific. It can’t be just happenstance. We need to have a plan for exactly what the athlete’s going to do. Then there are all things, kind of things we can do along the way that have to do with building endurance that aren’t necessarily just training. For example, there’s a new study that just came out recently. It showed that caffeine taken in the last hour before an event ends is one way to improve durability. So maybe we play around with that. Or maybe we play around with nutrition. What’s going to happen if you’ve been taking in 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour and running a marathon, or it may be, what if we go to 90? What does happen if we do that? And that’s going to make some changes also about how the types of fueling we use it and all this kind of stuff changes so there’s lots of things going on here how much fluid are you taking in this has a lot to do with your durability if you’re not you’re not staying hydrated you don’t have as much durability so there’s all these little things that all come together to make the athlete more durable and the idea of training is to is to mesh all of these things so if they come into their event having built their durability through all these various avenues

Steve: Yeah, yeah yeah i think that’s that that’s so right, and you know, like as you started this, every athlete is different and and so you’re kind of working back but that that all makes sense how are you thinking about muscular endurance or strength endurance in contrast with durability how are you defining that or how are you how are you talking about that these days

Joe: Yeah, strength endurance is a little bit different. that involves once you’ve built strength in the gym for example once you’ve built strength now we need to we need to transform it into something which is sport specific so um for example we might do if the person is is a cyclist we might wind up doing lots of lots of high gear um uh low low RPM pedaling to build some strength also to make it more sport specific. We might wind up putting hills into their workouts for long times, not extremely high, not like five-zone sort of intensity, but more like zone four sort of intensity, bring them to the threshold and then hold it for a long time. So we can find ways to do this, to take the strength that we built in the gym into strength. transfer over to the sport specific activity itself.

Steve: Mm-hmm. And I think that all tracks so cleanly to what we talk about with Uphill Athlete all the time. Here’s a slightly different question related to strength. How are you, with this age group of athletes, how are you talking or how are you changing the strength prescription for paramenopausal or postmenopausal athletes? Or are you?

Joe: It stays pretty much the same. There are some changes that may take place just because a female at one of those times in her period just doesn’t feel right. And so we may need to be able to say, okay, we’re going to move this back two or three days, which is quite all right. We can shift things around a little bit to make the training more accompanied to what their situation is at the current time. But I don’t think we need to make big changes. We don’t need to move things two or three weeks because of what’s going on. We can make small changes to adapt and still get through the training and still accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish. It may not be on the same day we’d like to accomplish it. but we need to think of this as being long-term anyway. It’s not just a one-and-done sort of thing.

Steve: 100%.

Joe: It’s the sort of thing that’s going, this doesn’t take days. It takes weeks, if not months, to achieve what we’re trying to achieve. So if we have to miss a workout, that’s quite all right because we can make up for that later on in training. We’ll get back to it again. Or if we need to move it back a couple of days, not a problem. We can do that. These things the athlete needs to be able to accept and say, and this will make me feel better with the training. So it’s as much probably just being aware of the athlete situation as it is trying to make gigantic changes. We’re not going to make big changes. It’s going to be small changes.

Steve: Yeah. For female athletes through perimenopause and beyond, is there something that you’re thinking about or watching for now that you wouldn’t have watched for or noticed, I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago?

Joe: Yeah, 10, 15 years ago, we never talked about this topic. This was a taboo topic for a male coach to talk about with an athlete. We didn’t really get involved in this discussion whatsoever. And since I don’t coach full time anymore, I don’t have those conversations with anybody. So quite honestly, this is outside of my realm of expertise or experience, especially.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Joe: So I’d be interested in learning how to go about this from your perspective as opposed to mine, because you probably deal with this much more frequently than I do.

Steve: yeah i mean we do uh manage manages a lot and i think that there is just i think one of the first things as you pointed out the first thing also for me as a coach as a male coach has been to learn to work through that feeling that it’s a taboo and you know have amazing colleagues who are women female coaches and you know they’ve been leading the the charge on that and been feeding us there’s been a lot of new evidence and signed you know a lot of published peer-reviewed science has been coming out in the last years around this and you know it’s a deep topic one of the ways we’re trying to approach it as a coaching team however is we’re trying to not silo that information about like let’s have a podcast just about training for you know post-menopausal women we’re trying to more like say like hey let’s like these women are part of people that are just athletes at this stage of life that as you mentioned multiple times it’s part of our lifestyle it’s part of our community and it’s just there as we go through life each one of us is we go through being different in occupying different bodies in a way being different people in some level and it’s just just part of that and I think it’s more of taking that uh that frame that that you laid out earlier and just applying it. But I think that there’s been a lot of really interesting information out in the last few years. And I think the best thing is just we’re talking about it now, right? Like you said, it’s on the table. And I think that’s a relief for everyone. Yeah.

Joe: after 50, I wanted to include something on this topic. And I found it very difficult to talk with women about this subject. What can you tell me about this as an athlete? What can you tell me? What can I learn from you? And I found women very reluctant to talk about it, which made me reluctant to ask about it. But I had an assistant coach who I know had just gone through menopause.

Steve: Hmm.

Joe: And so I asked her to write something for that first edition of the book. And she didn’t really say a whole lot because she didn’t really have much in the way of any issues or problems, setbacks or matters she had to deal with because of menopause. So I didn’t learn a whole lot from her, but it was like the first time I’d ever had that conversation with a woman for besides my wife, which is what’s going on with you right now and how is that affecting your life. Very interesting topic. I have a lot to learn there.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, I think we all do. athletes like data and there are a few of them what is the what is kind of the minimum data set that that you like to have people track that you know is that gives gives the training direction

Joe: I try to get it down to one thing. What’s the most important thing for this workout today? What I run into is athletes who think everything is important, equally important, and they get caught in this rabbit hole of going through all this data, like in TrainingPeaks. You open TrainingPeaks after your workout, and there are 20 or more data points from an hour-and-a-half workout or whatever it was. There’s just a lot of stuff there. I’ve known athletes who want to that and what it means. And they wind up, I think, going in directions they shouldn’t go, don’t need to go. They assume things, you know, if I change this number, I’m going to get faster. And they’re just making bad decisions. So I try to get them to understand there’s one thing important every time we do a workout. Here’s the thing that’s important. Let’s see if we can accomplish this thing today. For example, we’ve talked a lot here today about low intensity. One of the things we’re trying to accomplish there is what I call the efficiency factor. EF. for short. And what that is, is just a measure of pace or power, depending on your sport, divided by heart rate. And it tells us essentially what’s going on with how your heart is responding to the intensity or how your power is responding to the intensity. But if we put them together, we get a nice number that tells us a lot about what we’re accomplishing aerobically. so that’s that’s what i wanted to look at i want you every time you finish a workout and it’s designed to be like a zone two workout i want you to look at ef and see what that number was and then i want you to take that number and i want you to go back eight weeks prior to today find a very similar workout and see what your ef was then what we should see happen over time is this ef number ratchets up it keeps getting higher over time as we work on your aerobic fitness. So that’s the one I work on in the base period with the athletes. In the build period, where we’re talking about specific training, now I’m more focused with the athlete on something called decoupling. It has to do with what happens to over a period of time. It’s kind of like durability, really. We’re measuring durability by doing this. We’re looking to see what happens to the relationship between heart rate and power early in the workout versus late in the workout or pace and power early versus late. And we’ve got a number we can give the athlete for that. And what I want to see is I want to see that number going up gradually over time. That means your durability is improving. That’s the most important thing. There could be other things that we’ll take a look at that are less important, but they’re also good to pay attention to like what’s happening to your to your tss if you’re using turning peaks what’s happening to your tss um over time is are you putting in how high is your tss on a on a weekly basis on a daily basis how high is it we may be getting it too high you maybe need to bring that down a little bit so we’re looking at that also it’s not as important as what’s what the stuff they just did in the workout is and there are a few other things like that we could talk about but Most important are what I call EF and decoupling. Those are the two that I’m really highly focused on. Other things are going to be interesting. I don’t want to see what’s going on there also, but that’s not the focus of our training. I don’t want the athlete to be involved in thinking about too many things they’ve got to accomplish today. There’s one thing we’re trying to accomplish today. Here it is.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We talk a lot about aerobic threshold and just raising aerobic threshold over time, which you can sort of measure through proxies of these things or directly, but same idea.

Joe: Let’s work on that.

Steve: But again, like it’s something that changes in the order of months, not days. So, yeah. Yeah. So I think also the thing that struck me as you were talking there is what you described is so much the beauty of having a coach because there is just this torrent of data. and you know the two things that you just singled out were probably not the first two things most people would say they would have asked about hrv or time and zone or you know a million of these you know ctl you know if we want to go into the training peaks language um but you know you you just like went right in and said okay like this is about efficiency factor this is about building And the way we’re going to measure that as a proxy is the heart rate decoupling for a given effort over a given time. And I think that that’s just one of the great superpowers of coaches is they can just take it all, get rid of all the noise and say, here, this is the thing. And it’s not permanent, right? It’s not a forever metric. It’s like, this is what we’re doing, I don’t know, this week, this month, this training block, whatever it is. and this is what we should pay attention to. And I think that’s really freeing and really valuable to a lot of people.

Joe: Good point. As a coach, I’m going to be looking at lots more data.

Steve: Sure.

Joe: But I’ve got a hierarchy in my mind. The problem with an athlete looking at lots of data is they don’t have this hierarchy.

Steve: Yeah.

Joe: They don’t fully understand what the most valuable thing is that came out of training today. They tend to see everything as being important. And so that’s the difference between what I’m looking at and what the athlete is looking at.

Steve: yeah yeah and how that yeah how that hierarchy shifts over time right it’s it’s a it’s a it’s not a fixed hierarchy it’s it’s it’s changing as as the athlete develops and depending on yeah well a myriad of circumstances so just want to as we as we close out this has been a fascinating conversation one of the questions going back to your your new book or your their third edition of your Fast After 50 book. If a 50-year-old picks up that new book this week and could act on only one thing in the next month, what was that one thing that you would have them do? Yeah.

Joe: yeah one thing is put in more low intensity training you’ve got to build an aerobic base that that is the key and that’s the thing i keep pushing in this book all the way through giving examples of athletes who are world-class aging athletes and how they do that this is the most important point take it nothing else away from the book that would be the most important

Steve: yeah that’s 100% agree well thank you Joe it’s been a real great honor to speak with you and to to have you come to share your great wisdom with the uphill athlete community I’m sure many will appreciate it and I certainly do so good luck with the book launch and if there’s anything we can do to help you or get the word out, please don’t hesitate to reach out or at your disposal.

Joe: Thank you very much, Steve. Enjoyed it.

Steve: Thank you.

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