Your 50 Year Training Plan

Your most important training-load ramp isn’t the one that prepares you for your next race. It’s the one that keeps you training for the rest of your life!

We endurance athletes spend a lot of time thinking about ramps.

How quickly should I ramp my mileage for the marathon? How many hours can I add to my next training block? How high can I push my CTL before my next race?

These are useful questions. But they aren’t the most important ramp.

The most important ramp isn’t the one that takes you from 40 to 60 miles per week over the next three months. It’s the one that takes you from being a healthy, active 30-year-old to a healthy, active 70-year-old!

It’s the ramp that enables you to keep doing the things you love as your body gets older.

And, unlike the ramps in most training plans, it’s not measured in TSS per week or month, it’s measured in decades!

The cost of standing still

One of the uncomfortable realities of aging is that the same training will not produce the same fitness forever.

It’s certainly been my experience my experience in working with Masters athletes, that it takes progressively more training to hold onto a given level of aerobic fitness as we age - often to a surprising degree…

A healthy, relatively lean 25-year-old may be able to maintain a VO₂max of 50 ml/kg/min with a fairly modest amount of deliberate aerobic training - the kind of physical activity that is just fairly typical for a healthy active person in their 20’s. However, by middle age, the amount of activity that it takes to maintain this level of fitness is up in the serious endurance athlete category. In the later decades, it is up in the elite masters athlete category!

In other words, if the training remains constant, the fitness usually does not.

As we get older, we need more!

This led to a relationship that author Alex Hutchinson informally dubbed the **Couzens Immortality Quotient** It goes like this…

To offset the roughly 0.4 ml/kg/min of VO₂max that we lose with each passing year, we need to add approximately one hour *per month* to our annual training volume with each passing year.

In other words, if you’re a 40 year old training 30 hours per month, at 70, to hold a similar level of fitness, you can expect to need 60 hours per month of aerobic training! When looked at over long time frames, that sounds like a lot, but viewed year to year, the addition is actually very small:

Approximately 12 extra hours per year—or about 15 extra minutes per week!

And, that’s kind of the point of this post - to keep the most important ramp, that tiny little ramp, in mind, and to quote Goethe - to never put things that matter the most at the mercy of things that matter the least.

This “gentle but firm” ramp is shown graphically below…