Training Secrets of the World’s Best Athletes Over 50

How the World’s Best Athletes Over 50 Actually Train
===

Kush: [00:00:00] At 65, Judy Oyama still races downhill through slalom skateboard courses at 25 to 30 miles an hour. She weaves through tightly spaced cones, shifts her weight in fractions of a second, and competes against people young enough to be her children or grandchildren. When Judy is not on the skateboard, she is often at six o'clock CrossFit class in Santa Cruz.

She does not train as though speed and power belong to her past. She trains those qualities because she she stills needs them. Bill Ramsey, meanwhile, is a climber in his 60s who can spend an entire day doing maximal finger strength work, powerful board climbing, and difficult routes outside in Mount Charleston or Red Rocks.

But after a session like that, he may take two or even three full days to recover. Joe Barr rode the entire [00:01:00] 2,448-mile length of Route 66 in 10 days. He was 66 when he began and turned 67 the day after he finished. Joe thinks that this has been the top achievement of his life. To prepare for that enormous endurance effort, he did something that might sound backward.

He reduced much of his training distance and introduced more intensity. Steve Swenson has spent five decades climbing some of the world's highest and most difficult mountains. He summited Everest without supplemental oxygen and completed major ascents through the Himalaya and Karakoram. In his 70s, one of his strongest pieces of training advice is not about climbing technique.

Go into the weight room Gary Linden has been surfing for more than six decades. Friends invite him to ski, skydive, paddle, or try another new sport. [00:02:00] Gary is usually saying no. "I surf," he told me. "That's all I do." And then there is Bob Babbitt, still training and racing in his 70s, who believes one of the great secrets of remaining young is to keep spending time with people whose conversations are not organized around decline.

"If you're going to events and there are 30-year-olds there," he told me, "and all you're talking about is your PRs and how to get faster, you get younger." After more than 140 conversations, over 200 hours spent talking with extraordinary athletes, I have come to believe that the people who remain capable for decades do not simply train more.

They train with greater contrast. They know which qualities must still be challenged. They know which sessions deserve full commitment and which need to be almost embarrassingly easy. They become highly specific about what they're training [00:03:00] for. They build strength outside their primary sport. They sacrifice activities that threaten their central goal.

They create communities around movement, and they increasingly judge today's training by whether it protects tomorrow Hello, friends. This is Kush and welcome to Ageless Athlete. Some time ago, I published a solo episode called Seven Things 70-Year-Old Athletes Know That Most of Us Learn Too Late.

That episode reached far more people than I expected. Many of you wrote back with questions. You wanted to know not only what these athletes had learned, but what they were actually doing. How were they training? Were they still training at high intensity? How much did they rest? Did they lift weights? How did they decide which risks are worth taking?

What had they stopped doing? And what allowed them to keep improving when the conventional expectation was simply to slow [00:04:00] down? These questions sent me back into the Ageless Athlete archive. I reviewed lessons from more than one forty conversations and over two hundred hours with world champions, record holders, pioneering climbers, Olympic and Paralympic athletes, ultra-endurance competitors, coaches, scientists, and people who are still operating at remarkable levels in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties.

What emerged was not one universal program. A big wave surfer should not train like an ultra-runner. An ultra-runner should not train like a slalom skateboarder. A rock climber should not copy the exact weekly schedule of a cyclist or marathon swimmer. But the deeper principles repeated with surprising consistency.

Today, I want to share seven lessons about how some of the world's best athletes over fifty actually train Let's go.

Lesson one: [00:05:00] they keep training power and intensity. I repeat, they keep training power and intensity. The conventional story about aging is one of gradual retreat. You stop moving quickly because speed feels dangerous. You stop lifting heavy because lighter weights seem safer. You stop doing hard intervals because your heart rate rises faster and recovery takes longer.

Some adjustment is necessary. The body changes and pretending otherwise is not bravery. But the athletes I've spoken with do not respond to age by removing every high-end demand from their lives. They become more deliberate about preserving it. Judy Oyama is one of the best examples. Judy began skateboarding in 1973 when she was 13.

The sport barely made room for women, and it made even less room for an Asian American girl. There were without [00:06:00] women's divisions. There were events where her name was misspelled or omitted from the results. At times, the media crews left for lunch while the women competed Judy stayed.

She raced through the early decades of skateboarding, helped shape the culture of the sport, and continued competing through work, family responsibilities, injuries, and arthritis. In her 60s, she remained a world champion in slalom skateboarding. Slalom is not simply rolling downhill. It resembles ski racing on pavement.

Athletes accelerate through a sequence of cones, carving rapidly from one edge of the skateboard to the other. Small mistakes compound quickly. Balance, coordination, reaction time, leg strength, and explosive movement all matter. Judy told me that she likes to wake up early and attend a 6:00 CrossFit class.

"I prefer to get my workout in," she said, "so I get it done [00:07:00] for the day, and it always kind of starts my day off right." CrossFit gives her something skateboarding alone may not provide in a complete way: loaded strength, pulling, pushing, jumping, whole body coordination, and exposure to power. she has continued setting difficult physical goals rather than choosing only movements she has already mastered.

She trains with younger people, competes against younger people as well, and lets the environment continue asking something serious of her. She has even talked about working towards skills such as muscle-ups in her 60s. I am 48, and I would love to be able to do a muscle-up. I am inspired by people like Judy That matters because a muscle-up is not a maintenance exercise.

It requires pulling strength, power, coordination, and the willingness to be a beginner at a demanding skill. [00:08:00] Judy does not ignore her age. She has dealt with injury and arthritis. She takes sleep, nutrition, and recovery seriously. The difference is that she does not treat those realities as an argument for removing athleticism.

Speed is still trainable. Power is still trainable. Coordination is still trainable. And perhaps most importantly, the willingness to attempt a demanding skill is still trainable. A very different athlete made a similar discovery decades earlier. Lee Scheftel is a climber who completed his first five-fourteen route at fifty-nine.

He was the oldest person to do so. For people outside climbing, five-fourteen is not simply pretty hard. It is an elite grade. Only a tiny percentage of committed climbers will ever climb at that level, regardless of age. Lee is now in his seventies, but his greatest leap in climbing [00:09:00] performance came after fifty when he began training more deliberately.

for much of his earlier climbing life, structured training barely existed. Climbers went outside and climbed. The standard approach was often to get on a route repeatedly and hope persistence produced the necessary adaptation. Lee described his own method quite honestly.

He simply would throw himself at the rock. In his fifties, though, he became more systematic. He built a climbing wall in his garage. He used more targeted strength and power work. He chose routes that suited his endurance while also developing the exact qualities he needed to climb harder At an age the standard expectation was maintenance, Lee improved enough to climb the hardest route of his life.

This was especially counterintuitive in the climbing culture of that [00:10:00] era. Today, climbers talk casually about fingerboards and campus boards and limit bouldering, power endurance cycles, and route-specific training blocks. Lee began experimenting with structured power training before many climbers of his generation believed older bodies should be doing that kind of work at all.

His regret was not that he had trained too hard, it was that he had not discovered systematic training earlier. The principle applies in endurance sports as well. Ned Overend became one of the defining figures in American mountain biking. He won world and national championships and remained highly competitive into his seventies.

Ned told me that he does not rely on enormous training volume. "I don't put in a ton of volume," he said, "but I kind of embrace the intensity." That distinction matters. More is not the same as harder, and harder is not [00:11:00] the same as reckless. High volume and high intensity at the same time can become destructive.

But removing intensity completely may allow speed, power, and cardiovascular capacity to disappear faster than necessary. Steve Swenson described a similar balance for mountain athletes, a large foundation of long-duration, low heart rate activity interrupted periodically by intervals that bring the heart rate very high.

That foundation creates capacity. The intensity protects the ceiling. And Judy's CrossFit work supplies the strength, speed, and coordination needed for a sport where the body must react immediately. These athletes are not trying to prove that they can tolerate pain. They are identifying physical qualities that decline when neglected and giving those qualities a reason to remain The practical lesson is not that everyone over fifty should begin doing maximal [00:12:00] sprints or attempting muscle ups tomorrow.

It is that age alone is not a sufficient reason to abandon intensity. The questions need to be more specific. What kind of intensity does your sport require? What movements can you still load safely? What capacity have you quietly stopped challenging? And how could you reintroduce it gradually enough that the training builds you rather than breaks you?

The world's best athletes over fifty do not train hard all the time, but they still train hard sometimes. Lesson two They create a sharp distinction between hard work and recovery. Bill Ramsey does not train like a man trying to avoid effort. Bill is a philosophy professor and one of the most accomplished older climbers in the world.

In his sixties, he has continued climbing routes that would challenge elite athletes several decades younger. His serious training days can be enormous. He may begin with finger strength work, including maximal [00:13:00] hangs. He may move into powerful board climbing. He may continue for hours and finish with difficult routes after most people would have gone home.

But the structure only makes sense when you see what surrounds it. Bill may take two days off afterward. Sometimes he takes three. He described the change this way: " Taking two days off is what having one rest day was like, and taking three days off is like what taking two days off used to feel like. The workout remains ambitious, the recovery window expanded. That is different from making every workout slightly easier while continuing to train tired every day. Bill preserves the quality of the hard session by allowing enough time for the body to become capable of another one.

He also spends more than one hour just warming up. "I have never been injured from being too tired," Bill told me. "All my injuries have always been from not properly warming up." His warm-up is not five minutes of vaguely moving his shoulders. He [00:14:00] gradually increases load until his fingers, elbows, shoulders, and nervous system are prepared for maximal effort.

Bill has also been extremely selective about the movements he performs. Modern climbing gyms contain dynamic problems where athletes jump, swing, and catch holds, with joints in extended or awkward positions. Bill scrolls through problems on an app and rejects movements that places limbs, that is his shoulders, fingers, or elbows, in positions he considers unnecessarily dangerous.

He described the process almost like swiping through bad dating profiles. A risky catch with the shoulder is in a vulnerable position? No. A violent move into an awkward gaston? Hell no. A problem designed for a flexible twenty-year-old who can absorb uncontrolled momentum through one arm? Oh, keep scrolling That does not mean Bill chooses easy climbing.

He chooses hard [00:15:00] climbing that his body understands. That is an important distinction. Athletic longevity is not necessarily built by reducing difficulty. Sometimes it is built by reducing randomness. Bill wants the muscles to be taxed. He does not want the joints to be surprised. He also made a provocative point that stayed with me.

People often assume that climbers become injured because they did one route too many or trained too hard for too long. Bill's experience was different. His injuries usually came from being insufficiently prepared for a particular movement or entering a vulnerable position without the tissues being ready.

The problem was not simply more volume. The problem was a mismatch between the load and the body's preparedness for that load. Bill's approach echoes the eighty-twenty principle Matt Fitzgerald has studied across elite endurance sport. The exact ratio [00:16:00] varies by athlete and sport, but the broad observation is that successful endurance athletes tend to perform most of their training at low intensity and a much smaller portion at moderate or high intensity.

Recreational athletes often reverse the wisdom without realizing it. Their easy days become moderately hard. Their hard days are compromised because they arrive already fatigued. They spend week after week in a gray zone, working enough to feel tired, but rarely rested enough to produce a high-quality effort.

Matt has spoken about how this fatigue can become invisible. You feel slightly tired so consistently that slight fatigue becomes your idea of normal. Joe Friel, who has coached endurance athletes for decades, makes a related point. Many masters athletes do not necessarily need to eliminate intensity.

They need to eliminate the meaningless work that interferes with intensity. This is where hard [00:17:00] days Hard, easy days easy becomes more like a slogan. A genuinely easy day protects the purpose of the hard day. A hard day provides a stimulus strong enough to justify recovery. And rest is not an interruption of that system.

Rest completes it. This principle crosses sports. A marathon swimmer may accumulate enormous volume, but not every length is performed near threshold. An ultra runner may spend hours on foot while keeping the effort controlled. A cyclist may perform one brutally specific interval session and surround it with days that feel almost gentle.

A climber like Bill may train at extraordinary intensity one day and then refuse to touch the wall for two to three days. The specific workout changes, the contrast remains. One difficult, one difficulty is that easy work can feel emotionally unsatisfying. I know I have been there. [00:18:00] Many of us are training to prove that we are disciplined.

A short recovery ride, gentle swim, or walk does not produce the same sense of accomplishment as a hard session. Rest may even feel worse. Nothing appears in the training log. There is no sweat, no Strava segment, and no dramatic evidence that we are still serious athletes. Bill's schedule asks us to judge rest by what it enables.

If two days off allow him to train at an elite level on the third day, those two days are part of the performance. The body does not improve merely because it has been exposed to stress. It improves when it can absorb stress. The athletes who last understand both sides of that equation. Let's move on Lesson three: They reverse engineer the exact demand.

I repeat, they reverse engineer the exact demand. Joe Barr began racing bicycles as a child. [00:19:00] He has competed for more than five decades, raced internationally, and completed the Race Across America multiple times. In 2026, he decided that he wanted to do the ride across Route 66 at the age of 66.

The full distance from Santa Monica Pier to Navy Pier in Chicago was 2,448 miles. Joe completed it in 10 days, turning 67 the day after he finished. During parts of the ride, temperature climbed well above 110 degrees. He crossed desert, high wind, major roads, and long stretches where the route itself had to be modified to comply with local laws.

Some days required 20 to 22 hours on the bike. On two consecutive days, Joe covered approximately 285 miles because weather delays had created a deficit in the schedule. The obvious assumption is that training for this required riding as many [00:20:00] miles as possible. Joe and his team went in another direction.

"We cut a lot of the distance down," he told me. "We inserted a lot more intensity, and we changed things around." That decision was based on years of evidence from his body. Joe was not training to win the weekly mileage contest. He was training to produce a specific output at a specific age

The preparation included heat exposure in Spain and North Carolina. He trained at elevation because the route would climb. He and his wife, Jill, built a nutrition system for nearly continuous riding. They planned sleep, cooling, hydration, route logistics, and crew shifts. The race itself was run through what Joe called a recalculated matrix.

When wind or storms cost time, the team recalculated the speed and distance required to remain on schedule. When temperatures rose, they adjusted effort to [00:21:00] control core temperature. When something threatened his ability to keep moving, they addressed it immediately rather than waiting for the small problem to become a race-ending one.

The main focus, Joe said, was to keep moving forward. This was not generic fitness. It was systems design Rob Mattson offers a very different version of the same principle. At 74, Rob climbed The Bells, The Bells, a notorious traditional rock climbing route on the sea cliffs of Wales. This was not simply an impressive climb for his age.

The Bells is serious committing climbing where physical preparation, technical control, judgment, and the ability to remain composed under genuine consequences all matter. Rob prepared for that route specifically. He was not trying to become generically fitter or stronger in every possible way.

He organized his [00:22:00] effort around what The Bells demanded; confidence on traditional protection, precise movement, endurance, familiarity with the start, and the psychological readiness to operate where mistakes could carry severe consequences. The goal was not to accumulate impressive workouts. The goal was to arrive at one particular route with the exact capacities required to climb it.

That's what Joe Barr did for Route 66. It is what Rob Mattson did for Bells. The sports could hardly be more different, but the logic was the same. Define the demand first, then allow the demand to shape the training. Mark Renneker offers the same lesson from big wave surfing. Mark is not merely an older recreational surfer trying to retain enough fitness for pleasant days at the beach.

He is one of San Francisco's great big wave pioneers, a physician, explorer, and meticulous student of the ocean who has surfed Northern California for roughly six decades. He [00:23:00] helped explore waves far beyond the established surf map and organized early surfing expeditions to places including Antarctica, Iceland, northern Norway, Svalbard, and Greenland In his 70s, he is still pursuing giant surf, including Mavericks and remote outer reefs in Northern California that can require nearly an hour of paddling big waves simply to reach.

Maverick does not even begin breaking until the waves are roughly triple overhead. So on serious days, a surfer may spend three or four hours in the water and catch only one wave. Success depends on conditioning, ocean knowledge, patience, and the judgment to know where to sit, when to commit, and when to let a wave pass.

That is why Mark's observation about paddling speed matters. He identified paddling speed as one of the most important capacities older surfers lose. A [00:24:00] five or 10% decline may seem trivial in ordinary conditions. In a large wave, it can determine whether a surfer enters the wave early enough to establish control or is thrown over the ledge too late.

Mark began studying faster paddlers. He looked at hand depth and technique. He considered both dimensions and flotation. He treated paddling speed as the bottleneck rather than merely trying to become fitter Neil Gresham has applied a similar analytical approach to climbing. Before attempting a difficult route, Neil breaks down his requirements.

Does it demand finger strength, power endurance, flexible hips, a specific type of hold, long periods under tension, technical confidence on a certain rock style? He does not assume that climbing more will automatically solve every weakness. The objective tells him what to train. This may be the largest difference between training and exercise.

Exercise asks, "Did I move today?" [00:25:00] Training asks, "What am I prepared to do?" Both have value. Movement for health, enjoyment, and emotional regulation does not require an elaborate performance goal. But when an athlete has a specific ambition, general effort can become a form of avoidance. It is satisfying to perform the workouts we already enjoy and are generally good at.

The difficult work is identifying what the goal will actually demand. Joe Barr's preparation included less distance and more intensity because that was what his current body and event required. Rob Matheson trained for the physical and psychological realities of the belts. Mark Renneker focused on paddling because no amount of style on the wave matters if he cannot enter it safely.

The best athletes do not merely ask whether the workout was difficult. They ask whether it was relevant. Joe Barr, Rob Matheson, [00:26:00] Mark Renneker, and Neil Gresham each explain these ideas in far more depth in their individual conversations. You can find any of those episodes by searching Ageless Athlete and the person's name.

Now, the next lesson is one that appeared across almost every sport in the archive. Lesson four: they build strength outside the sport. Steve Swenson has spent more than five decades climbing mountains. He grew up reading about polar exploration and began climbing in the Cascades as a teenager. He climbed Mount Rainier at fourteen.

Later, he made major ascents through the Himalaya and Karakoram, including Everest without supplemental oxygen. By any conventional measure, Steve's sport has already looked like strength training. He carries loads uphill. He climbs steep rock, ice and snow. He moves for long periods through difficult terrain and at extreme altitude.[00:27:00] 

Yet one of his clearest recommendations for older athletes is that the sport itself is no longer enough. "I think the biggest mistakes that older athletes make is they don't do enough strength training," he told me. Steve spoke specifically about sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength that accelerates later in life.

You could decline at a steep slope if you did nothing, or you could decline at a very gradual slope. Training does not abolish aging. However, it can change the trajectory. Steve's argument is that cycling, skiing, hiking, and already steady aerobic work may create excellent endurance without generating the muscular overload needed to preserve strength.

"There is nothing we do out there on a bicycle, on a set of skis or running up a hill," he said, "that overloads your muscles to where you are actually working those muscles to failure." He [00:28:00] believes the difficult repetitions near the end of a set, the point at which the muscle is no longer certain it can complete another repetition, provides a stimulus that endurance work cannot This is not an argument that every athlete must become a bodybuilder.

It is an argument that the primary sport leaves gaps. Dan John has spent roughly six decades lifting and coaching. At sixty-eight, his own routine is remarkably unglamorous. He lifts three days a week. He walks ten thousand to fifteen thousand steps a day. He pays attention to mobility, and he spends money on recovery.

Dan's approach emphasizes foundational human movements: pushing, pulling, hinging, squatting, carrying, and getting up and down from the ground. He's not trying to turn every person into a competitive weightlifter. He is [00:29:00] preserving options. Can you lift something from the floor? Can you carry it? Can you push yourself away from something?

Can you pull your body towards something? Can you lower yourself and stand back up? Strength gives you those moments-- Strength gives those movements reserve. Jamie Whitmore provides an equally vivid example. Jamie had been one of the greatest XTERRA athletes in the world when cancer treatment destroyed the sciatic nerve in her left leg.

Everything below the knee is paralyzed, and she has limited function in the hamstring and glute on that side. Jamie rebuilt herself as a Paralympic cyclist, became a world champion, set records, and won gold and silver at the Paralympic Games. But her strength work is not merely about riding faster. A strong core helps her walk.

A stronger upper body helps her manage the bike. Whole body movements help [00:30:00] her compensate for a leg that cannot produce a controlled force normally. She performs short, intentional strength sessions and often adds approximately ten minutes of core work four or five days a week Her favorite exercises include demanding work with a Swiss ball and TRX straps.

She challenges the high school runners she coaches to keep up with her in core exercises. "My core is so strong," she told me. "These high school kids have nothing on me." The humor matters because it reveals what strength training gives her beyond rehab. It gives her a field in which she can still compete.

Juliet Starrett speaks about strength and mobility through the lens of physical freedom. Juliet is a multiple times world champion in whitewater paddling and a co-author of Built to Move The point is not [00:31:00] merely to produce a larger number in the gym. The point is to remain able to sit on the floor, carry luggage, get into a vehicle, play with a child, tolerate a fall, and enter the positions life requires.

Eric Horst has made a related point in climbing. Strength training should support the sport rather than simply create fatigue that interferes with it. A cyclist can possess an enormous aerobic engine and still lose bone density or upper body strength. A swimmer can maintain extraordinary cardiovascular fitness while needing additional loading on land.

A climber can preserve finger strength while losing leg power or general muscle mass. A runner can log thousands of miles and still be poorly prepared to lift something heavy. The athletes who endure do [00:32:00] not treat this as an insult to their primary sport. They treat strength as support for it. They do not lift because they have stopped being cyclists, climbers, runners, swimmers, or mountaineers.

They lift so those identities remain physically available. All right. Are you with me so far? We are now at lesson five. They sacrifice activities that threaten the central goal. Okay. This is about sacrificing activities that take you away from the central goal. Gary Linden is in his 70s now but has been surfing since he was a child.

He became a pioneering big wave surfer, surfboard shaper, and contest organizer. He created the Big Wave World Tour and spent decades traveling in search of waves.

Gary's life [00:33:00] offers a lesson that conflicts with much of that modern advice about variety. Yes, it can be a little controversial. We are often told to do more things: cross-train, learn a new sport, keep the body and mind stimulated. Gary became successful partly by doing less. Friends asked whether he wants to skydive.

No. Ski? No. Snowboard? No. Paddle? I paddle to catch waves. Run? I run if someone bigger is chasing me. Then he summarized the entire philosophy: I surf. That is all I do. Gary is not incapable of becoming interested in other things. He has decided that surfing occupies the top of that hierarchy. He told me that earlier in his life, a relationship interfered with surfing enough that he eventually made a promise to himself: nothing is ever going to come [00:34:00] between me and surfing again in my whole life.

That might sound extreme, and Gary acknowledges that his approach is not for everyone. He has been married for decades, raised daughters, and cared for his responsibilities. What he did not do was treat the central passion as whatever remained after everything else has taken a share. "I think any success I've had in my life," he said, "has been due to my ability to focus on the priorities."

Mark Renneker came to a similar conclusion through injury. Mark surfed, climbed, skateboarded, and skied. Over time, injuries in the other sports began taking him away from surfing. A skateboarding injury could mean weeks without waves. A climbing fall could threaten far more. Eventually, he began asking whether another activity supported surfing or endangered it.

He gave up some of those other [00:35:00] sports. That was not because variety had no value. It was because variety had begun competing with the thing he valued most Another older surfer I interviewed expressed the same idea through horse riding. He was not interested in falling from a horse and losing months or years of the sport that mattered to him.

The details differed. The decision rule was the same. The activity may be enjoyable, but what is the cost if it goes wrong? Jim Donini built his life around climbing in an even more comprehensive way. Jim became one of the defining alpinists of his generation and continued climbing into his eighties.

He chose where to live, how to work, and how much conventional comfort to pursue partly through the lens of access to mountains. This kind of life contains real costs. Financial stability may be reduced. Relationships require negotiation. Risk affects more than the [00:36:00] individual taking it.

Opportunities outside the sport may be declined. The lesson is not that everyone should imitate the most obsessive athlete in the archive. The lesson is that meaningful performance has a price, and pretending otherwise often creates frustration. A person says a goal is important but leaves no time for training.

They say recovery matters, but sleep five hours. They say the race is a priority but organize the rest of life so that every session has to be squeezed into exhaustion. A goal cannot be central to only what's inside your imagination. It has to appear somewhere in the architecture of your days. That may mean choosing a home near trails.

It may mean turning down a late night before a key session. It may mean spending time on coaching rather than another piece of equipment. It may mean declining a second sport during [00:37:00] the most important training period. Or it may mean accepting that the goal is not currently important enough to justify those sacrifices.

Both answers are legitimate. The trouble comes from wanting the result while refusing every trade-off required to produce it Gary Lindons is an extreme example of focus, but the underlying question applies widely. What deserves your best energy? And what are you willing to stop doing so that energy remains available?

All right, we are getting there towards the end of these lessons now. Lesson six, they build community into the training plan. Again, community is part of the training plan. Bob Babbitt has spent decades at the center of endurance sport. He co-founded Competitor Magazine, created [00:38:00] Breakfast with Bob, and helped build the Challenged Athletes Foundation.

He has interviewed champions, promoted races, supported adaptive athletes, and connected people across generations, abilities, and sports. Bob is also still an athlete himself. In his seventies, his days include movement, sauna, cold exposure, cycling, running, strength, and regular contact with other active people.

When I asked him what kept him fired up, he did not begin with a supplement, workout, or recovery device. He talked about people Just being with positive, upbeat people, Bob said. Then he offered one of the sharpest observations from our conversation. If you are in your seventies, you hang out with seventy-year-olds and what are you reading?

They're reading obituaries. They are reading about medication. [00:39:00] But if you go to events where younger athletes are present, the subject changes. All you're talking about now is your PRs and how to get faster. He said, "You get younger." Bob 

was describing the effect of an environment. What do the people around you expect? What counts as normal in the group? What do you talk about over breakfast? One envir- one environment may not treat gradual withdrawal as inevitable. Another assumes that you still show up next Sunday and asks whether your pacing improved.

Community changes behavior before the workout begins. A training partner creates accountability. A club supplies a reschedule. A coach notices patterns the athlete misses. A younger athlete introduces a new method. An older athlete provides perspective when one bad session begins to feel catastrophic.[00:40:00] 

Bob's own routines are social. He wakes up and joins people for activities such as early sauna and cold exposure. The point is not merely the heat or the plunge. The appointment exists. Someone else is there. The ritual belongs to a group rather than relying on a solitary negotiation with motivation every morning.

Bob's work with the Challenged Athletes Foundation shows the same principle on a much larger scale. The foundation grew from a community rallying around an athlete who had lost a leg, returned to endurance sport, and then suffered another devastating accident. Over the decades, Bob has watched equipment, mentorship, events, and social belonging return people to movement after disability.

The athlete still has to do the physical work, but a community changes the question from, can someone like me do this to which [00:41:00] person here can show me how? That is one reason Bob has remained so energized. He has spent decades inside groups where people are not merely discussing what the body has lost They are exchanging ideas about races, equipment, goals, personal records, and what to attempt next.

Jamie Whitmore made a similar point through coaching. She shows up for her high school cross-country athletes because she knows her presence affects whether they show up. If you want kids to listen to what you say, you have to practice what you preach. She rides from group to group, checks on athletes, and does her own training while they train.

The young runners create accountability for her, and she creates accountability for them. The relationship is reciprocal. Open water swimmers often speak about the same effect. Training may happen in an individual body, but long swims are rarely individual projects. There [00:42:00] are training partners, pilots, observers, feeding crews, and people who enter cold water beside you on days when staying home would be easier.

Sarah Thomas completed the first four-way crossing of the English Channel, but her preparation and execution depended on a network. Her husband, crew, and training community were not decorative additions to an individual feat. They were part of the system that made the feat possible. This may be especially important as we get older.

In youth, sport is often supplied automatically. There is a team, a school, a coach, or a competitive season. Friends happen to be training at the same time. Later, movement becomes easier to lose because the structure disappears. Work expands, children arrive, friends stop competing. The person who wants to keep training may need to build deliberately what once [00:43:00] appeared by default.

Bob's example suggests that we should not treat community as merely a pleasant extra. It may be one of the most effective pieces of performance equipment we have. The people around us influence our standards, mood, consistency, and sense of what remains possible. Training partners do not simply help us work harder.

Sometimes they help us remember why we still care All right. Final lesson for this episode, lesson seven: they protect continuity over any single heroic day. Harvey Lewis can tolerate an extraordinary amount of suffering. Harvey is a champion ultra runner who has raced for days at a time and won some of the hardest enduring events in the world.

In one effort, Harvey ran for a [00:44:00] hundred and eleven hours and covered almost five hundred miles. So this is running for more than four days nonstop. During that race, he fell on rocks, cracked ribs, and injured his hamstring, yet continued for another twelve hours. Then after returning home, he went back to his job as a high school teacher.

A story like that can make Harvey sound like evidence that the best athletes simply ignore the body. His recovery process reveals something more thoughtful. After extreme races, Harvey uses sleep, nutrition, walking, cycling, sauna, red light therapy, physical therapy, and gradual movement. He pays attention to what his body will tolerate rather than forcing it immediately back into full training.

He described the mindset this way: "I just think about where I'm headed. [00:45:00] I don't get stuck into the minutiae or where I'm at right now." Even if progress is only centimeters or inches, he wants the direction to remain forward. That does not mean every forward movement is a run. Sometimes it is sleep.

Sometimes it is a walk. Sometimes it is a day without training The best long-term athletes begin judging sessions by the effect on the larger sequence. Will this workout make the next useful workout more likely or less likely? Will this risk advance the goal or threaten the entire season? Will pushing today create adaptation, or will it create a hole that takes three weeks to escape?

Mark Renneker, the physician and big wave pioneer who has spent six decades studying the most dangerous surf in Northern California and beyond, carries this principle into the ocean. [00:46:00] One of his role models, Jay Lopez, gave him this simple phrase: "Surf today to surf tomorrow." Mark applies that even at Mavericks, his goal is not to prove courage by wiping out.

He may decline a wave unless he believes that he has a very high probability of making it. That selectivity has helped him surf entire winters without a major wipeout while continuing to enter serious water in his seventies. Ed Viesturs used a similar framework in mountaineering. Ed became the first American to summit all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen.

His most famous principle is that reaching the summit is optional, but getting down is mandatory. A summit is not success if the decision required to reach it removes the possibility of returning [00:47:00] home This may sound obvious from the safety of a podcast. It becomes far more difficult after months or years of preparation when the summit is visible and turning around feels like wasting everything.

Long-term athletes become good at protecting the next opportunity from the emotion of the current one. Bill Ramsey swipes past a dangerous gym problem. Mark lets a questionable wave pass. Ed turns around below a summit. Harvey accepts a small recovery session rather than demanding evidence that he's already back.

Gary Linden gives up another sport that might remove him from surfing. These choices can look conservative when viewed individually, but over decades, they become the lesson that the athlete is still there. Consistency is not produced by motivation. It is produced by avoiding preventable [00:48:00] interruptions.

The workout that proves toughness but causes an injury is not automatically a better workout. The race entered before recovery is complete may cost the race that mattered more. The additional route performed because everyone else was still climbing may be the route that changes the next six months.

This is not an argument for avoiding all risk. Every sport in this episode contains risk. Progress itself requires entering uncertainty. The distinction is between risk that serves the pursuit and risk that serves the ego. The best athletes over 50 are not trying to win every Tuesday. They're trying to make sure Tuesday remains available next year and 10 years from now.

These are only short excerpts from much larger lives and conversation. Bill Ramsey goes much deeper [00:49:00] into how his warm-ups and recovery changed in his 60s. Judy Oyama talks about remaining a world champion while training with younger CrossFit athletes. Steve Swenson explains exactly why he now considers strength training indispensable And Bob Babbitt shares the daily rituals and people that keep him engaged in his 70s.

All of the athletes I have spoken about in this show come from... Uh, all of these athletes that I speak about in this episode, they come from prior conversation on Ageless Athlete. Search their names to hear the original conversations from any podcast app. The point of this episode is not to replace those stories, but to show what becomes visible when we place them beside one another.

What these athletes actually have in common. [00:50:00] Okay. Judy Oyama is a skateboarder and CrossFit athlete. Bill Ramsey is a rock climber. Joe Barr is an ultra-distance cyclist. Steve Swenson is a Himalayan mountaineer. Gary London is a big wave surfer. Bob Babbitt comes from triathlon and endurance sport. Harvey Lewis is an ultra-runner.

Their weekly schedules do not resemble one another. Judy needs speed, balance, and rapid force production. Bill needs maximal finger strength, pulling power, and enough recovery to protect connective tissue. Joe Barr needs to remain functional through heat, sleep deprivation, and thousands of miles. Steve Swenson needs strength, aerobic capacity, and durability under load at altitude.

Gary needs paddling fitness, timing, and the strength to keep returning to the ocean. Bob's consistency is sustained partly through ritual and community. Harvey must be able [00:51:00] to recover from efforts that disrupt nearly every physiological system. The commonality is not a particular exercise. It is a decision-making framework.

They continue challenging qualities that decline when ignored. They create contrast between work and recovery. They train for a defined demand rather than the emotional satisfaction of feeling tired. They build strength to fill gaps their sports leave behind. They organize lives around the pursuits they truly value.

They surround themselves with people who normalize participation, and they protect continuity from the temptation to prove too much in a single day There is another theme underneath all seven. These athletes accept aging without turning acceptance into resignation. Joe Friel expressed that well near the end of our chat.

He said that [00:52:00] ageless is in some ways a misnomer. We are all going to age, he said. I can't do away with my aging. I can accept it, though. But he also made a vow not to consider himself old because a number told him to. I still think I can do things because I enjoy doing them. Take on new challenges, physical challenges, mental challenges, he said.

That is the balance. The body changes, recovery will take longer, warm-ups expand, training volume may decline, exercise selection becomes more careful. The lifestyle may need to be reorganized. But none of those facts requires the athlete to stop asking questions

The goal is not to train like a 25-year-old forever. It is to continue training like an athlete. That means preserving ambition while changing the methods. It means understanding that rest can be [00:53:00] disciplined. Strength can be sport specific even when it happens away from the sport. Force may require sacrifice.

Community can be part of performance, and the most impressive workout is not always the one that looks hardest from the outside. Sometimes it is the workout that leaves you capable of recovering

Okay. In closing, after more than 140 conversations, I do not believe there is one perfect formula for training after 50. Some athletes thrive on variety, others become specialists. Some use high volume, others deliberately reduce it. Some lift heavy, some use body weight bands and short whole body sessions.

Some train with detailed data and carefully calculated plans. Others work through decades of experience and highly developed nutrition. The lesson is not to copy the surface, it is to copy the quality of [00:54:00] attention. What does your sport require? What is your body telling you now? Which physical quality are you losing because you stopped asking for it?

Which training sessions create useful adaptation and which simply create fatigue? What strength would make the rest of your athletic life more durable? What needs to be removed from the schedule? Who helps you show up? And what decisions today makes tomorrow training more likely? The questions are not reserved for world champions.

They are available to every athlete. You do not need to race down a skateboard course at 30 miles an hour, climb in the 99th percentile, ride 2,500 miles, surf giant waves or summit Everest without oxygen. The accomplishment can be more personal. You may want to run your first 10K after 50, return to climbing after an injury, keep skiing with your children, [00:55:00] build enough strength to ride farther, swim in open water, or simply remain the kind of person who still says yes when a physical opportunity appears.

Whatever the goal is, the long game is not built through one heroic effort. It is built through years of purposeful stress, sufficient recovery, useful strength, intelligent sacrifice, supportive people, and the willingness to adjust without disappearing. Every athlete mentioned today, like I said, has joined me for a full conversation on Age as an Athlete.

And yeah, many of those interviews run well over an hour. We have only taken a few minutes from each life here. To find any of these conversations, I will leave their names on the show notes Okay. I would love to hear how your own s- training has changed. What did you stop doing? What did you add? Do you take more recovery now?

Have you learned that you still n- need intensity? [00:56:00] Has joining a group changed your consistency? Or have you discovered that the most important training decision was organizing more of your life around the goal? You can reply through the Ageless Athlete Newsletter, which is really the best way to join the Ageless Athlete community.

I will include a link. It goes to my Substack page where all of these lessons, these essays are kept. I write every week, sharing stories, tips, and inspiration. So that's a really good way is through Substack. You can also send me a message on Instagram. That will be on the show notes as well. Thank you for listening, friends. Until next time, keep moving, stay curious, and train not merely for the athlete you are today, but for the athlete you hope to be 10 years from now



[00:57:00] [00:58:00]