SPEEDWORK
FLEXIBILITY
STRENGTH
THERAPIES
PROPHYLAXIS

SPEEDWORK

If you're older, you've lost strength and speed. But you've not lost it irretrievably. You just lost the ability to have it without working at it. When I was younger I had a lot of natural speed, and I didn't have to do much, or any, speedwork to bring it out.

Okay, perhaps I'll never have the same degree of top-end speed I had as a youngster, but they don't run the quarter-mile in triathlon, do they? You don't need to run flat-out.

You've lost more than just quarter-mile speed, however. You also don't have the ability to easily glide through the first few miles of a 10-K or half-marathon at the pace that was comfortable to you as a youngster. My rough guess is that you lose about thirty seconds per mile of natural speed for every 10 years of age past 25 years-old. No, that doesn't mean you've got to lower your expectations by this amount as you age. It's the natural speed I'm talking about — the ability to effortlessly hold a certain pace without really doing anything special in training.

Let me explain. We've all seen people in 10-K races, or marathons, who go out too fast. It's never the 50-year-old man or woman who does this. It's the youngster. That's natural speed. We've also seen these same people fade relatively early on because they don't have endurance. You've got the opposite problem. You've got endurance and — with the discipline that years gives you — the ability to enhance your endurance abilities through routine training. What you don't have is the natural speed that will allow you to easily leverage that endurance to a faster overall performance.

Let's say you want to run a 45-minute 10-K off the bike in an Oly distance triathlon. That probably translates to a sub-43 in a stand-alone 10-K. That's 7-minute miles, more or less. You need to be able to run this pace easily, painlessly, with no strain, so that the first three miles of your stand-alone 10-K can go by without much effort. It's entirely possible that 7-minute pace is well within your aerobic potential, but you've just got a problem with your speed. Maybe you used to be able to click off 7-minute miles with no effort a decade ago, and the only thing that's holding you back is a few workouts designed to build your speed. You'd be astonished to see what a few speed workouts will do. This is because holding a faster pace is often not an issue of fitness, but of motor learning. You just need to familiarize yourself with the pace you need to run.

I'll give you an example of how you might fix the problem above. Let's say you want to run a sub-43 stand-alone 10-K. You might actually want to train yourself to comfortably run a sub-40-minute pace. That would require holding a 6:30-per-mile. So, take your 10-K "race" and break it up into segments. Here is an example of how you might string together eight speed workouts that would get you to your goal.

In each of these workouts (save the first two), you're going to actually run a 10-K. Half of your effort will be run faster than race pace (in this case 6:30 pace). The rest of the 10-K will be at the rest interval pace (as slow as you need to go).

You might do these workouts once per week, and you'll start with 200m runs in 48-50 seconds, with a 200m jog in between (48.75 seconds per 200m is 6:30 pace). Intervals of the 200m distance (half a lap of your high school track) will be your workout the first three times out. Your first workout will be 8 x 200m, and your second will be 16 x 200m. Your third workout will be 24 x 200m, and the reason for the build-up in distance is because your legs are going to be mighty sore the first couple of times out. This is because they're just not used to running this fast.

By the time of your third workout, you'll actually be running a 10-K non-stop (well, six miles, but let's not be anal). This is because your rest interval jog plus your work interval all adds up to 24 laps of the track (if you do these on a track, which is not mandatory). What is important, I think, is that you do these workouts absolutely non-stop. You can jog as slowly as you want in between the hard efforts, but just don't stop, and try to keep your accelerations and decelerations (lead-in and lead-out of your hard interval) gradual, so as not to stress your soft tissue. (This means your fast intervals will have a running start.)

In your fourth workout you'll move the fast interval —and recovery interval — distance up to quarter miles in 1:36 to 1:38 (again, with a quarter jog in between). You'll once more be doing 6 total miles, so you'll do 12 of these quarters fast with an easy one-lap jog in between.

Next workout is 8 x 600m (one and a half laps) in 2:25 to 2:30, with a 600m jog in between.

You get the picture. The following week you'll do 6 x 800m, and then 4 x 1200m with the same interval recovery jog. The final week you'll do three repeat miles with a mile jog in between. All at 6:30 pace.

These are very hard workouts. They're the hardest you'll do all week — probably the hardest in your life, if you've never done anything like this before. These 8 total workouts don't seem like that many now, but by the time you're done you'll feel like you've gone through an entire track season.

You'll discover a few things. First, there is no easing into these workouts. They're high-intensity, tough workouts right from the get-to. In fact, I usually feel the worst at during my third or fourth quarter mile, and then my cardio-pulmonary workout catches up and I'm in the game. Because you go right into it so quickly, you must warm up well, and you must take a lot of time to warm up properly. I used to do my track workouts on the same track with Steve Scott, and I was amazed that his warm-up lasted longer than his speed workout, and his warm up got longer as he got into his 40s. No wonder he almost never got injured.

You'll also grow accustomed to thinking that you can't possibly get through these workouts, but it's funny how your body finds ways to get through them anyway. You'll notice that your body is "smart" and it'll adapt its technique to one which affords more running economy. If you keep thinking about relaxation, your body will find a way to relax at this fast pace.

Further to this point, you must always keep in mind what the goal of these workouts is — not simply to stress and strain and get through the workout (although that's often what it is in practice) but to adopt and adapt to a technique that allows for economy and relaxation at race pace. Your goal is to be able to run through mile-one of any race over 5-K thinking, "This is really an easy pace, I could do this all day." In fact, you won't be able to do it all day, that's where your endurance comes in. That's what you haven't lost as an older person, your endurance. What these sorts of speed workouts allow you to do is to leverage your endurance abilities across a faster pace.

There is one caveat, however (you knew this was coming). You need to be very careful with speed workouts. Those workouts I outlined above are hefty. When you go to a 10-K race and you see the winner go up to fetch his medal after running 31:30, his workouts are no harder and no longer than what I just wrote out above. Should you decide to cut down those interval quantities by half, I'd have no quarrel with that. These are big-time workouts. They're serious. They're for grown-ups. (But then, so obviously is the Ironman, right? I figure if you're willing to do an Ironman, you'd want to know what a serious person's track workout looks like.)

It's not just the quantity and difficulty of these workouts about which you need to be concerned, but what they'll do to your soft tissue. You're older. As such, your soft tissue ain't what it used to be. Your calves, achilles tendons, hip flexors and low back can really take a beating, so you must be very careful in your warm up, and your warm down, and that you don't run a faster pace than you ought. A bit faster than 10-K race pace is fine. But really, no faster than that. There is no reason to run quarters in 68 seconds if what you're trying to achieve is an 8-minute mile pace over a half-marathon.

You really must also pay attention to the rest of what I'll write below regarding therapies, flexibility, and other prophylactic measures, and it goes without saying that these are workouts that you must curtail entirely for a time if and when you feel an injury coming on.

All that aside, the workout regimen above is the sort of thing that rolls back the years. It's an artificial way to get back the speed of youth, and you don't need to repeat this regimen often. Once you get your speed back, you won't easily lose it again as long as you're like me and you enjoy running a 5-K or 10-K every so often. Once you've got your footspeed where you want it, the very act of running a stand-alone 5-K or 10-K will keep your speed up.

FLEXIBILITY

There are three things you lose with age: flexibility, strength and top speed (as was discussed above). In point of fact, all you lose are the first two: flexibility and strength. The loss of top speed is just a symptom; that is, if you didn't lose flexibility and strength you'd never have lost your youthfully exhuberant top-end.

The speedwork mentioned in the chapter above is an exercise in getting back both the flexibility and strength in a sport-specific manner. It's really not necessarily fitness per se that is keeping you from comfortably running, say, 6:30 pace instead of the 7:30 pace you're now running. In other words, your levels of mitochondria, myoglobin, capillarization, hematocrit, the strength of your heart, all that stuff that takes months and years to train, might very well be there for you now. You might currently have a 6:30 per mile engine. You just might have something awry in the drive train. That's what speedwork can fix in a relatively short span of time.

That doesn't mean, however, that speedwork ought to be your sole method of increasing flexibility. In fact, speedwork is quite inefficient at that. Speedwork's job is to increase the range of motion in which your muscles contract. So, perhaps the difference between a 6:30 pace and a 7:30 pace might be an extra several millimeters of hip flexor contraction. If you never contract your hip flexors those few extra millimeters, your hip flexors will not be trained throughout that extra range of motion. That's what speedwork does, among other things: it increases the range of motion in which your muscles must work to perform the job required.

How much easier would it be, however, if the tension in your hamstrings was not fighting against your hip flexors as they sought to contract those few extra millimeters? That's part of the idea behind staying flexible. As you seek to increase your speed, it's hard enough getting your working muscles to increase their capacity without your opposing muscle groups kicking and screaming every step of the way.

Besides that, you're going to be a lot less prone to soft tissue injuries if your muscles and connective tissue aren't drawn tight as piano strings.

You don't need me to tell you that flexibility decreases with age. You know it already by virtue of your own experience. Are your ranges of motion the same now as when you were a teenager? Can those former cheerleaders among you still do the splits? Anybody try the high hurdles lately? What I don't frankly know is how much of this is irreparable, but I'm pretty sure with some diligence and patience most of the flexibility that you've lost is recoverable. Fortunately for those of you who are triathletes, swimming seems to be your hole card. Not only does swimming require quite a bit of flexibility, the act of swimming seems, at least anecdotally, to stave off a lot of the age-related flexibility loss that neither running nor cycling can allay.

There seems to me to be the Eastern way and the Western way to reverse the trend of flexibility loss. The Western way is my choice, I suppose because I'm an old, bigoted, chauvenistic, white, caucasion male with fears and hang-ups. Therefore, I stretch the way my 7th gym teacher taught me to. I'm not going to go through all the stretching exercises one might want to do, you've certainly got all sorts of descriptions and photos of them in your glossy triathlon-related magazine archives.

Then there's the Eastern way, which is yoga. I of course don't do yoga, because it leads to pot smoking, licentiousness, vegetarianism, social anarchy and the wearing of tie-dye apparel and earth shoes. Other people, however, report to me that yoga is THE solution to their flexibility issues (in fact, we have two articles on yoga for triathletes on Slowtwitch, here and here).

Whatever way you choose to stay flexible, I figure it'll put you on an even footing with those half your age. This is because you actually will engage in a regular flexibility routine, whereas 25 year-olds — lazy as they are — won't.

STRENGTH

I'm not a big fan of lower body strength training. It's not that it doesn't have potential benefit, it's more an issue of time, energy allotment, and priorities. In giving you an example of what I mean I'll borrow from the speedwork discussion. On our forum is a post in which a well thought out explanation of the different kinds of speedwork are listed. The four categories of speedwork — five if you include tempo runs — each produce a different effect. While this might be sound for a runner, it is problematic for a multisport athlete, because you might only run three or four times per week as it is. Only one of those runs — two at the most — would likely be devoted to a speedwork session. So who's got the time to integrate and execute all the varieties of speedwork of which one might avail himself?

Likewise, your lower body only has so much go-juice in it. There are only so many energy bullets there. In any given week you've got cycling and running, kick sets in the pool, and whatever high-intensity stuff you've got on your plate (Computrainer sessions, speedwork on the track). When do you fit in hack squats and leg presses, and what will lower body weight room sessions take away from your riding and running workouts?

All that said, if I was writing to a pro triathlete who was coming into triathlon from a swim/run background, perhaps I might consider a weight room regimen that included lower body work. But if you're reading this, that's not who you are. I'm writing to a masters athlete with a limited amount of time. Lower body weights is the final element I'd add onto a regimen, and the first thing to jettison if available time or energy was at a premium.

Upper body, that's another story. You've only got one sport in which upper body strength is used, and you'll stress your upper body two to five hours per week as opposed to triple or quadruple that amount of time spent working from the waist down. So you can spend another hour or two per week hitting the weights and it isn't going to throw you into a tailspin.

There's another rationale for upper body weights. The swim is quite strength-specific. Strengthening your pecs, lats, triceps and deltoids will make you faster in the water, and the speed benefits will come quickly. This is true whomever you are. So much more so for an older athlete, because strength — not muscular endurance — is the thing you lose with age. Therefore, that's what you've got to get back, if you've lost it, and it's what you need to maintain once you have it.

It must be acknowledged, however, that I write these words from the perspective of a certain type of swimmer. You might counter my argument above by asking how it is — if strength is so important — that slightly overweight girls with arms lightly muscled can swim so darn fast. Doesn't that counter my argument about the necessity of strength? Yes, perhaps it does. But only for that girl, not for me. I, personally, cannot hold my form without a reasonable amount of strength. I didn't grow up as a swimmer, and maybe I just have adopted one of those techniques that requires a critical mass of strength before my "hull" and my pulling surface can conspire to generate speed.

Once you've established that upper body strength is something worth getting, how do you get it? What exercises do you do? They fall into two categories: swim specific, and tradtional weight workouts.

By swim specific I mean a routine in which the underwater part of the swim stroke is reproduced on dry land. A Vasa Swim Trainer is one way to execute this, but a much cheaper and, it appears, more common method is via the use of pull cords. Here is an exerpt from an article on the muscles used during the freestyle, written by Sheila Taormina (she wrote a series of controversial articles for us which appear over in Swim Center, all of which I highly recommend reading):

The most effective tool I use for conditioning throughout the year is Lane Gainer Sport Vector tubing with handles. Nothing compares to it, and it only costs $20-$25. It will help you learn the technique and will condition your muscles for swimming better than anything you can find in a weight room or health club. If you build up to five minutes of pulling time with the tubing per day, then you're doing great!

I do believe there are a variety of pull cord products available. I don't know which are better or worse, if there is any difference at all. But they are in fairly widespread use by swimmers and triathletes. Monty and I have two pro triathletes — Katja Schumacher and Liz Vitai — staying with us up at the ranch right now, and when I got up this morning there was Liz, out by the Endless Pool, her pull cords attached to the fence, going at it.

There is also, however, the weight room. Or perhaps a combination of the two. If you followed Scott Molina's recent Epic Camp installments you saw how important the weight room was for him. His view was different from Sheila's and, it must be acknowledged, more time consuming. What Sheila felt she accomplished in 5 or 10 minutes took Molina one or two hours. Obviously, there's more to the story than that but, bang for buck, I'm with pull cords.

But there's something satisfying about pull-ups and bench press that you just don't get in an exercise-specific workout. How much does it really help to do 8 or 10 dumbbell press reps to exhaustion? I don't know. But I feel more manly afterward. Does that count?

Pull cords having been mentioned, here's one last thing. JulieAnne White has a machine built specifically for her that is analogous to pull cords, but for lower body. It was built in Canada, and uses a series of long cords of surgical tubing for resistance. She uses it for strengthening adductors, abductors, hip flexors, and in the same sort of repitition mode as described by Sheila: about five minutes per exercise. While I have no experience with it, maybe this is the sort of lower body regimen that makes sense for a triathlete.

THERAPIES

A common category in surgery, according to a news report this morning, is the replacement of hips and knees (and the like). These are surgeries requested by "Baby Boomers in their 40s and 50s," said CNN. The gist of the report is that we ought not to fall prey to these types of surgeries which are, after all, lucrative for the doctors who perform them. Better to just avoid high impact sports which, said CNN, include running. CNN's alternative sports? These would include water aerobics and stretching.

As we all know, stretching is good for us. But I'm wondering under what rules the "sport" of stretching would be held. How do you win? Do we need a governing body? Can we competitive stretchers aspire to someday be in the Olympics?

Also included in accepted category of sports for 40- and 50-somethings are golf and walking. But didn't I just hear from a doctor — probably also on CNN — a warning that golf ought not be substituted for the vigorous aerobic workouts I should be doing at least 3 days per week?

In my attempt to glean what I thought were the salient points, this was not the theme behind CNN's report. More it was the profit margin in joint replacements, to wit, why should a doctor earn more than a headwaiter in a midrange steakhouse?

There was another alternative, according to CNN: physical therapy. You can pay the physical therapist, but not the avaricious doctor.

Call me argumentative, but I can think of a few other options. I acknowlege the fact that there are only so many 90-second vignette segments available to CNN for reports like these, and as such there is only enough time for over-simplified and therefore ultimately useless advice. Kind of makes you wonder about what's getting reported concerning the Middle East, though, doesn't it?

Back to my assertion that I have better solutions than water aerobics which, rightly or wrongly, is less palatable to my peer group than just having the heart attack.

"Therapies" is my subject for today and, again, my bent is purely competitive. As a 46-year-old I compete against three entities: those in my own age group; the "me" of my youth; and the you of your youth, if you're youthful — that is, it's not nice to admit, but, if you're half my age I get a kick out of wiping the floor with you. Let's face it, which guy or gal in the 45-49, or 50-54, wouldn't enjoy not only beating everyone in one's own age group, but all those in several age groups younger?

Yet, as I stated above, the deck is stacked against oldsters in certain areas. Just as in business or politics, you've got to play to your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. One way to do that is to realize that you don't recover as well as you did when you were younger. So, recruit one of your strengths, which is the ability to actually do the things everyone ought to do, but that most people don't do. What therapies ought you to consider?

Let's start with stuff that's easy and cheap (or free). The first "therapy" in that category won't really represent any addition to anything you're currently doing, maybe just a rearrangement of your workout schedule. Just by thinking strategically, you can help allay or abate problems. First in that category is the realization that swimming — while a (usually good) stressor on your aerobic system — is a stress reliever for your anatomy. Position swim workouts after hard weight-bearing efforts. Swimming only, or a swim-heavy workout schedule (at the expense of running) makes more sense in the two or three days after a race. By "race" I'm talking about anything that involves running, whether a triathlon or just a pure footrace.

Cycling doesn't involve pounding, but is still moderately weight-bearing and involves repetitive motion. Soft-tissue injuries are therefore just as likely to flare up after a bike session as after a run. No, you won't have cartilage problems from riding your bike, but you may have tendon problems (anecdotally, most affected seem to be IT bands, patellar tendons, spinal erector insertions and hamstring origins (low back). Swimming is also, therefore, good therapy for a long or arduous bike ride. For this reason I favor doing my rides or runs in the morning, and my swim sessions in the evening. Evening swims seem to help keep my body on the straight and narrow.

That said, there is something to be said for swimming as a warm-up and a "lubricator," and a morning swim might be just the ticket for those of you who prefer the oh-dark-thirty masters workout. (Also, if your schedule requires you to position your workouts backwards of mine — evening weight-bearing, morning swim — I suppose you accomplish the same sort of thing.)

In keeping with that theme, there is another strategic configuring of workouts that works for me, especially when my legs are beaten and banged up, and this is especially true if I'm nursing a running tenderness. Running off the bike seems a lot less stressful than just getting up off the chair and going for a run. Even a good warm-up prior to my run doesn't seem to lubricate my joints and soft tissue like a bike ride. Plus, you can run shorter and achieve an aerobic benefit more akin to the last half of a long run instead of the first half (since the bike ride simulates the first half of the run).

Professional triathletes do this kind of workout quite a bit, but those I know don't generally call it a brick. They speak in terms of going on a "T-run" which is shorthand for "transition run." It's rare that I hear of a pro athlete going on a very long T-run. An hour is the longest, and some athletes prefer to keep it short and fast, like 2 or 3 miles at a quick pace. That simulates the feel of getting off the bike and breaking right into your running pace, and 2 to 4 miles fast off the bike simulates both the first few miles of a triathlon run, and the last few miles of a road race run.

If you're nursing a soreness that's run-specific, I don't recommend a fast T-run. What I'm saying is that 3 miles off the bike at a slow pace might be less likely to aggravate a tenderness than 3 mile run from an unlubricated dead stop, plus it might have the aerobic worth of a 4 or 5 mile run.

Here's another cheap therapy for you: sleep. It's hard to spend money while you're sleeping. And sleep is something you need a lot of for recovery, but most people don't get enough of. If you're one of those people who can't fall asleep before 11, but must wake up at 5:30, get over it. Fix it. Stop watching Leno. On your way home from work today stop at Barnes and Noble and get yourself a sack of books. Read yourself to sleep. You need at least 7 hours and more like 8. That's the best therapeutic weapon you can use. Likewise, it wouldn't kill you to eat well.

That doesn't exhaust my list of cheap or free therapies. Cool down after your finish your bike and run or, rather, just plan to start and stop any timed efforts some distance from your home, so that you are forced to both warm up and warm down. Studies are inconclusive as to how much a warm-down actually does clear anaerobic metabolites from your system, but some studies do show that a warm-down is advantageous, and I don't see any reason to wager to the contrary.

Flexibility has been mentioned in a chapter above, but I was mostly writing about its advantages as a speed weapon. It's also a therapeutic weapon. I'm not a huge fan of stretching before an effort, though I am a fan of starting slowly and using my warm-up as the mechanism for injury prevention. I'm more a fan of stretching afterward.

For my first cost-related therapy, I'll choose something very inexpensive. Are you taking a baby aspirin every day? It seems like every six months I read a study indicating that as few as 80mg per day of aspirin (the dose in one baby aspirin) will do more for more people than any other single drug in any category at any cost. It might even save your life. I'm no doctor, not even close, but it seems intuitive that aspirin's blood-thinning, anti-clotting qualities might provide for a mechanism not unlike that achieved through warming down (if there's merit in the idea that more and freer blood circulation is virtuous).

Then we get to the big expense. Massage. How necessary is it? I just don't know. I'm not aware of a study that has demonstrated its efficacy. But it sure feels good, and it certainly seems something that harder-core, heavily-training athletes appear to require. I'll leave that one up to you. On the one hand, I know almost no top athlete who doesn't avail him- or herself of regular massage. At the same time, there is no scientific basis for it that I'm aware of. On the other, other hand, how exactly would you construct a study to demonstrate its utility? Sometimes it takes time for science to catch up to a set of ardent practitioners' experiences in the field.

All that notwithstanding, whether you do or don't have access to a good massage therapist, and/or have the ability to afford one, there are all the other therapies described above, and you have no excuse if you choose not to engage in what's available for free.

Keep one thing in mind. These therapies aren't meant to fix or counteract problems with your running or cycling cadence or technique, bike position, cleat position, bad choice in shoe selection, choice of running surface, or any other mechanical reasons for your injuries. Putting anti-freeze in your car is a good thing, but it won't plug the leak in your radiator. Proper therapies will help keep you going, but only as fixers of minor things that pop up in the course of proper training under proper circumstances. They're inadequate patches for things that cause repetitive stress injuries.

And finally, after I publish this article I'll get half a dozen emails from people telling me that I've forgotten to mention any number of worthwhile therapies that a triathlete ought to consider. And each of these emailers has the capacity to be right — yes, there are good therapies I've omitted. While I appreciate these letters, I will almost certainly be the only one who reads them. Better to post them on our forum, where I'll read them, as will an awful lot of other people. We serve in the neighborhood of a half-million forum pages a month as of this writing, so there's where you want your letter to go.

PROPHYLAXIS

The best way to treat an illness, injury, or a spate of overtraining is to never cross that line in the first place. Two-thirds of what I have to say about injury and illness prevention has already been written above. But there's more.

As you get older there are a lot of medical things that can conspire to slow you down or stop you. They aren't necessarily sports-related. Brain cancer or ebola can stop you from setting a PR just as easily as patellar tendonitis. Of course I have more expertise in how to avoid tendonitis than ebola, except to convey the common sense stuff, such as to avoid falling face-first into bat guano when spelunking in Zaire. Still, we older triathletes will just continue to get faster as we age if we can just stay consistent in our training. That's the key. More than what you do, it's just that you do it—whatever it is—five or six days a week, ten or eleven months a year.

This year I made a decision. There were three people I did not know, and whose acquaintance I wanted to make. The first was relatively simple and I'm not unlocking any great mystery here. Just over a year ago I relocated to a new neighborhood, and I needed to find a dentist local to me. What could a dentist possibly have to do with setting a PR? Plenty, as it turns out. I know of one top-calibre pro athlete who, at this very moment, is returning to form after having a year of lackluster performances due to a low-level dental infection. This is just the latest of several top athletes I've known who'd have good races interspersed with bad, because of dental infections that were just enough to slow one down, but not enough to raise a huge red flag. I get my teeth cleaned and checked at least once every six months. No, it's not mainly so I'll race faster, but to be honest that's part of it.

The second person I've decided to get to know is a dermatologist. I'm 46 years old, and while I'm not yet a raisin I'm spending an awful lot of shirtless quality time in the sun. I must assume that sooner or later something nasty's going to pop up. So I went to see a guy based on his ad in the phone book, and I think I lucked out (I limited myself to board certified dermatologists who accept Blue-Cross and whose ads didn't appear particularly cheesy). I went in for my first appointment. He looked me over and pronounced me most likely skin-cancer-free. He gave me a prescription, to be filled in November (post-season and post-summer). It is for a liquid or a cream called Efudex. It is used to treat actinic keratosis, which are pre-cancerous skin lesions. These aren't cancerous but often become so. They're hard to see, and as such Efudex apparently acts like a smart bomb, ferreting them out and making them easier to identify and remove. I expect to go through this regime as often as the dermatologist thinks is appropriate, though I might reevaluate after my first go-round (I've never done this before, we'll see how it goes). My point is that I'm getting older—you know?—and when it comes to disease I've decided to be on offense, not defense.

This, says my new dermatologist, and SPF 15 on my face, ears, etc., every time I go out, is my best bet for keeping skin cancer at bay.

My other new acquaintence, this one yet to be made, is with the gastroenterologist, or whomever it is that's going to introduce the camera into that place I'd always assumed would be reserved for exits, not entrances. Why would I be concerned about colorectal cancer to the exclusion of any other cancers? Because it runs in my family, which leads me to the real point here.

Nothing interferes with performance quite like death. Now that I'm a stone's throw from 50 I'm at, and even past, the age when people I knew died from one disease or another. Only one of my four grandparents lived past their 50s—and the fourth didn't make it to 70—and they all variously died from cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Yes, I lead a different (hopefully healthier) sort of life than they all did, but I'm on the lookout now for things that might come up and bite me in the arse, so to speak, and it wouldn't do any of you any real harm to think about your genetics as well.

Then there are the things that are specifically athletics-related. Over on our "Coach's Corner" section (the "Training" nav button above) you'll find articles on overtraining and things pursuant to it. In general I'm not a huge fan of supplements, but there are some things I'll recommend. How much of these recommendations you choose to take to heart depends on how much you want to spend, and how much of a pill-taker you are.

I keep my baby aspirin next to my dog's thyroid medicine. One pill for him, one for me. Above that, there's the one-a-day multi-vitamin. Why not? My diet is short on antioxidents, so I figure I'll make up for a little of what I'm lacking. When it comes to the really sport-specific stuff, there's one thing in particular I'd consider, and it's Damage Control Master Formula, from a company called Primal Nutrition. Why this? Because the company founder is Mark Sisson, who is the secretary general of the International Triathlon Union, but more importantly was the anti-drug czar of the ITU (he was forced from that post because of the perceived potential conflict of interest—he owns a supplement company; it was one more in a stream of triathlon-related moves by governing bodies which follow this rule: Anyone is allowed a supervisory post in multisport, so long as he knows nothing about what it is he governs).

I've known Sisson for a long time and, while we have violent disagreements about things from time to time, he knows more about how to legally keep your active body in good form via pills and powders than any man alive. The problem with his product is simply this: only EPO, or maybe an AIDS cocktail, costs more than Damage Control Master Formula. Well, okay, I'm being facetious. But $130 a month is a bit steep. That said, if I could afford it, this is the one I'd take (no, by the way, Sisson-the-cheapskate is not a sponsor of Slowtwitch, and never has been).

The occasional pill. A decent diet. A good night's sleep. Orthotics and the best shoes for your particuar footfall (go here for a look at some of this year's running shoes). Cycling and running at the proper cadence. A little stretching. The secret to becoming a faster over-40 athlete is not finding the killer workout. It's to keep healthy enough to do any workout. String enough workouts together and the PRs will come.