Who I Am and Why Structure Changed How I Train After 50

I’m a better‑than‑average, never‑elite endurance “athlete” who has come around to the concept of structured training as part of my riding and running. I still sometimes wonder, out loud, what if I had actually trained in my younger years? The answer? Who cares?

I’ve always liked pushing myself with endeavors that forced me to broaden my knowledge and improve my physical ability. It went beyond the physical—starting a business I was not fully trained for and remodeling projects that went well beyond weekend‑task territory. But this is about running, so let’s get back to that.

When I was younger, training wasn’t really training. It was mostly “go hard, go often, and hope your body keeps up.” I ran and rode a lot because I liked it and I could get away with it. Getting fit for the few competitions I did was just getting out more often and trying to go faster. No structure, no plan, no recovery, no cross‑training, and not much attention to nutrition. Getting faster was just a side effect of youth, enthusiasm, and a body that bounced back from almost anything.

I’ve never been particularly gifted or ambitious. But I did, and still do, enjoy experiencing new things. I was never chasing podiums, just PRs, so it makes sense that now I’m not chasing a comeback season; I’m just trying to stay in the game long enough to see what else my body and brain can do together. In the past I’d do a few race series and some special ultra events—really, I just wanted to get outside and have a good time. I still wanted to be fast and strong; I was just doing it all wrong.

A few years ago, after a several‑year layoff from any competitions, I decided to try The Rut, an ultra in Big Sky, MT. This race leans hard into steep mountain uphills at elevation. The Mountain Project was a sponsor and had a training plan that I figured would need as I had never done anything like this before. My introduction to structured training was sealed. Me being me, that introduction became podcasts, blogs, books.

The Mountain Project training introduced me to the idea of training in lower heart‑rate zones, running fewer miles, paying more attention to elevation and, most importantly, time on my feet. I stopped being concerned about mile pace and started caring more about time in zone and time on trail. For an older guy who just wants to be outside, this was a real awakening.

Then, while listening to a podcast, I first heard the term “durability” as it pertained to endurance—the idea that the real separator is how well you hold up when the hours start stacking, not how shiny your best split looks on paper. One line stuck with me, paraphrased: Don’t tell me your fastest split; tell me your slowest. That, they argued, is what really matters. It hit me that this is not just a racing idea; it’s an aging idea. The older I get, the less interested I am in pretending I can outrun decline, and the more interested I am in shaping the curve—slowing the slowing, instead of worshiping another personal best. After that, my running would never be the same.

Durability gave me a simple way to think about it: Can I move well when I’m tired, with less slowdown and less breakdown, for more years in a row? That question quietly rewired how I look at training, effort, and even what “improvement” means at 59. If you’re an older runner or rider figuring out endurance training after 50, that’s exactly what this post is about.

What Is Durability in Endurance Training? (And What It Means to Me)

If you asked someone with real knowledge, durability is about how much your physiology degrades over time as the hours roll on—how quickly your thresholds sag, how much your heart rate drifts up, how badly your pace or power falls apart in the back half of a long effort. For the most informed, practical explanation, the “Durability: The Fourth Pillar of Aerobic Fitness” episode of the Fast Talk Podcast is hard to beat.

In my words, durability is the ability to keep moving well when you’re tired, with less drop‑off than you’d expect for your age and life situation. It’s the difference between cratering at mile 18 and just getting a little ragged, between needing three days to recover from a big day out and being able to come back reasonably ready in one. It’s not about never slowing down; it’s about slowing down less than you otherwise would have.

Anyone can look impressive early when they’re fresh and caffeinated. Durability is what you still have in you coming into hour four, when the novelty has worn off and the little mechanical flaws and life stresses start to show through. As someone who is much closer to 60 than 40, that feels like a kinder and more useful scoreboard.

It also maps neatly onto aging. I’m not trying to freeze time or pretend that VO2 max and top‑end speed aren’t declining. But if I can shape that decline—if I can be “less slow” at 59, 63, 70 than I would have been without intentional work—that feels like a real victory. Improvement becomes “better at being this age,” not “almost as good as I was at 30.”

How I Used to Train vs How I Train Now: Before and After Adding Structure

For a long time, I saw “real training” as missing the point. I wanted freedom, not a spreadsheet. My plan was simple: go hard when I could, go long when I had time, and let youth and stubbornness mop up the damage. People with plans and zones looked, to me, like they were turning something joyful into homework.

I’ve always enjoyed learning new things. When I was younger, that meant figuring out how to tile a bathroom, not how to periodize training. I had a business, a family, and a house to remodel—getting outside was not going to be another stressor in my life. Ignorantly, I looked at guys who did pay attention to that stuff as needing more on their plate or maybe needing to spend more time with their kids. Not my best look.

Now, none of that is true in the same way. Time feels finite in a different sense—work, family, energy, and the long‑term health horizon all weigh more heavily on how I spend a Tuesday morning. Recovery is a different animal at 59; the old “it’ll be fine by tomorrow” optimism doesn’t always cash out. So training has had to become intentional. Every session has to pay rent: it needs to build durability, protect my health, or open the door to new adventures. If it’s just mindless suffering for its own sake, it no longer deserves a spot in the week.

As I’ve gotten older, I started to consider the need to train. Not as a way of capturing podium spots, but as a way of being able to get out and spend time with that family that is still important to me, and just to keep being outside. The curiosity got me listening to endurance podcasts, reading blogs, and picking up books like “The Science of Running”—the things my stronger peers were doing years ago.

I even had a Garmin watch, wore it every day. Barely knew what it was telling me beyond pace and miles. Now I’ve got TrainingPeaks synced up on an Apple Ultra 3, and I actually understand what I’m looking at. TSS—Training Stress Score—tells me how much load a session puts on my body, which matters more to me now than how many miles I logged. And then there’s aerobic decoupling, which has become one of my favorite ways to think about durability in plain terms. Decoupling is simply how much your heart rate drifts relative to your pace or power as a run goes on. A low decoupling number—under five percent is the rough benchmark—means your aerobic system held together well. A high number means it started to crack. Early in a training block my decoupling on long days can run pretty high. As fitness and durability build, it comes down. That number, more than any pace or mile split, tells me whether the work is actually working. The gear didn’t change me. Learning what it was saying did.

The biggest shift is that I no longer confuse “exercise harder” with “training.” In my twenties and thirties, anything that felt brutally hard was automatically labeled “good work.” Now, the bar has moved. Good training is what lets me move well late: in the last hour of a long day, on the final climb, in the busy week after a big outing. I’m still capable of going hard, but I’m choosier. Durability—not pure speed—is the goal I’m optimizing for.

If the old me looked at my current week, he’d probably call it “too easy” or “not serious enough.” Current me looks at it and sees a system that lets me stack weeks without blowing myself up, that treats long‑term consistency as the main performance enhancer. That’s a trade I’m willing to make.

Trail Running, and Hiking as a Strategy

For me, trail running after 50 looks like this: The heart of my week is a long trail day on Monday. Usually around three hours, sometimes stretching to five & six, depending on the goal of that week and life logistics. I pick routes with plenty of vert, varied terrain, and at least a few stretches where the scenery forces me to slow down and look around. It’s about time on my feet, moving, loving where I am. I go out thinking “adventure,” not “workout,” but under the hood it’s a very specific kind of training stress. I love to sit in front of my laptop with onX and map out an adventure.

Most of that time is spent in Zone 1 and Zone 2, with spikes as the trail pitches up and down, but the overall aim is simple: time on feet at an easy‑enough intensity that I can still move well late. Zone 1–2 gets talked about a lot, but its real gift to me is that it’s sustainable—it’s the intensity where I can build mitochondrial and cardiovascular capacity without nuking myself for three days afterward. That’s exactly what durability demands.

Hiking and walking are not backup plans on long days; they’re planned tools. On some days, where the goal is big vertical and less distance, hiking is the goal itself. Steep climbs are often better tackled as deliberate, strong hiking in Zone 2 than as heroic but useless “I can run this” moments that spike my heart rate and shred my quads. Downhills are chances to practice staying “tired but tidy” rather than reckless. The success metric for these outings is not how destroyed I feel at the car. A good Monday leaves me pleasantly tired but structurally sound—used, not used up.

Framing these days as adventures does something else important: it keeps the whole system psychologically durable. I’m not grinding out “mandatory” miles on a spreadsheet. I’m going somewhere interesting, seeing something beautiful, and letting fitness be the byproduct of a day I would have wanted to do anyway. It lets me keep doing the things I love while still nudging myself toward new experiences.

Why Durability Training Feels Like a Better Way to Age as an Endurance Athlete

What makes this approach feel safer and better, at least for me, is that it spreads stress out rather than concentrating it into a few heroic efforts. Prioritizing time on feet and vertical gain over pace distributes the load across more muscle groups, joints, and energy systems, and the emphasis on mostly aerobic work keeps each session within a range I can reliably recover from. Using hiking, uphill travel, and slower running as “friendly stressors” means I still accumulate the fatigue I need to adapt without constantly flirting with injury.

The two true low‑load days—Friday off and Sunday as family day—matter as much as any workout. They’re what let me keep stacking weeks and months instead of oscillating between overreach and forced downtime. Over time, I’ve noticed tangible signs that this is working: I handle long days better, I feel surprisingly solid deep into runs that used to unravel me, and I still find myself looking for new challenges rather than new excuses.

The phrase I keep coming back to is “slowing the slowing.” I’m not getting faster in any absolute sense, but I do feel like I’m getting better at being 59 than I would have been if I’d tried to keep at it like 29‑year‑old me. Durability, for me, is a way to keep adventure and health in the same sentence—especially for those of us who will never make a pro start line, who juggle work and family, and who still want long, interesting days outside rather than one last glorious race. It offers a framework where just getting out and being healthy is a win.

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Durability Podcast References

• Durability: The Fourth Pillar of Aerobic Fitness – Fast Talk Labs
• Predicting and Measuring Kilojoules to Determine Athlete Durability – TrainingPeaks
• Why Do Ultra Endurance Athletes Get Better With Age? – Born on the Trail
• The Fourth Dimension: Physiological Resilience as an Independent Determinant of Endurance Exercise Performance – Journal of Physiology
• Half-Life: Hating High Aerobic & Anerobic Workouts

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Durability After 50: Frequently Asked Questions