You Start Losing Muscle After 50 — Stop Making These Mistakes | Joe Friel, 82

Ageless Athlete - Joe Friel
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[00:00:00] 

Kush: Right now I'm in, Boulder, Colorado. 

Joe: and for breakfast this morning I had, unsweetened, plain Greek yogurt, with homemade,granola and orange slices, which is kind of the sort of thing I, I would normally eat for breakfast anyway. So that's my, kind of my go-to breakfast most of the time. 



Kush: sounds delicious. I love Boulder as a city. you mentioned that you worked out this morning, so I'm curious, what does a normal morning look like for you these days?

Joe: Well, today, I don't usually ride in the morning at this time of year. This is, this is kind of a, the shoulder season for my cycling. Up, up until this time, you know, th- throughout the winter, I ride in the afternoons 'cause it's, it's warmer, and if, if it's- snowed in the morning. It'll ho- hopefully be melted by the time I go out in the afternoon.

So I usually ride in the afternoon, but today is the first day I've ridden this, this year in the morning. And I wanna thank you for that, 'cause I would probably would not have done that without being on your podcast 'cause [00:01:00] we're, we're gonna use some of the afternoon here, which had been normally my, my riding time.

But the weather is perfect this morning, you know, 65 degrees Fahrenheit and, no wind, beautiful day, cloudless sky. so I b- did a gravel ride for about an hour and a half and, I'm still exploring gravel rides around here. When, when we lived here before there was no gravel riding, and I didn't have a gravel bike.

So, so I'm getting a chance now to explore things that I have never seen before. 



Kush: that's the first time somebody's actually thanked me for, , scheduling a certain time of the day, so I will accept that. And, I love Boulder for many reasons. one thing that surprised me, I spent, about a month and half there last summer- Ah

and I was just, so pleasantly surprised by the access to trails. 



Joe: know, where we live we're on the edge of town, so I, I can be in the trails within, in less than five minutes I'm on trails or, or a road, wherever I wanna ride. it's very, [00:02:00] very accessible here. You can, you can ride whatever, type of ride you wanna do.

you know, I decide in the morning sometimes if, or in the afternoon usually right now, what the weather looks like outside, if it's going to rain, is it cloudy, is the wind blowing. And I can make decisions of where to go with my ride based on those things and usually avoid the, the nasty weather sometimes we get.

We, last week we had, about a foot of snow, early in the week on one day, and, that took, kept me off the bike. But that's really the only weather that's kept me off the bike so far this winter. That's 

Kush: incredible. 

Joe: Joe, 

Kush: if I may,could you share your age? I, I think hosting this podcast emboldens me to ask, a personal question.

Joe: Sure. No problem at all. I'm, I'm 82 years old. I'm, I'm learning a lot about being pretty old. it's been a, it's been an eye-opener for me to see things going on the last, well, especially the last, la- let's, let's just say five years. Everything [00:03:00] was pretty normal up until about five years ago, and then things began to change for me.

So, so it's, it's kind of experience, it's kinda like, s- taking a trip and seeing things change as you go along. You know, this, the terrain changes, and there's mountains, and all of a sudden there's desert, and there's, you know, there's all sorts of things going on. And so that same thing's going on in my life.

This is like a voyage, a trip. Wow. And I'm getting to see all these things are happening that are really unique things. They're, they're, they, they interest me because I have a very strong interest in aging as an athlete. Wow, Joe, that is 

Kush: fascinating and, yeah, that just provides, just this, excellent, segue.



Kush: could you share more about, this journey and particularly the last five years? , what have you been noticing? 

Joe: Yeah, well, about five years ago, it may have been four years ago, come to think of it, I was riding with a group. We lived in Arizona, and I was riding with a group on a very, um, hilly terrain, some really steep climbs.

And, so four years ago I [00:04:00] realized for the first time ever in my riding career, I was getting dropped by riders on climbs. And so the group had to wait for me at the top of climbs. I'm like 78 years old, and I'm, so they're, they're now waiting on me, and this had never happened before. And so this was kind of an eye-opener that something needed to change here.

You know, my training had not changed. I was still doing pretty much what I have done as I've aged over the last 20 years. gradual changes all along because of aging. but this was something new for me 'cause I us- when I was young, I was as, I was top of the hill, first guy up. But now, you know, age 78, I'm the last guy up.

And so, that got me to thinking, you know, either I, I either need to stop riding with this group, I didn't wanna hold them back, or I need to make some kind of a change, and that change wound up being getting an electric bike. So I got a, I got a road bike, which you cannot tell it's a roa- it, it's a electric bike.

It looks exactly like any other road bike. You have to [00:05:00] look really close to see this is not, this, this, you can tell this is a road bike. And so I got one, and lo and behold, you know, I can s- I can now stay with the group. I keep the motor off on flats, and when I come to climbs where they would normally drop me, I just turn the motor on and go up with them.

You know, I, I never try to beat anybody on a, on, use an e-bike. that seems pretty low caliber to me. So I never do that. I just, I just, you know, just put it in, in, in motor mode and go up the top of the hill with them rather than them waiting for me at the top. And then I'm with them, I turn the motor off again, and we go on our merry way.

So that was the first change I noticed in the aging process that really affected my performance. 

Kush: Are you riding, or when you first noticed it, were you riding with, , age groupers? Or what was the, maybe the median age of the group? Yeah, 

Joe: they, they were probably, the oldest one was probably, I don't know, 10, 12 years younger than me, [00:06:00] and the youngest one was probably, probably about 30 years younger than me.

And so I, I'd been riding with these guys for some time, some number of years, and so this was a, this was kind of a new thing for me to s- to realize that I could no longer climb with them. I, I realized earlier that, you know, previous years, that I wasn't the first guy at the top anymore. I was, I was back a little ways and I was getting farther back every year until finally it happened, you know, at age 78 that now I'm, I'm the last guy now.

and, so anyway. So that's, that's kind of the, the, a thing you're always gonna go through, with performance, especially on a bike or, or running or anything like that actually. 

Kush: Sound- Okay. Sounds like your ability to climb hills at the same speed, that changed. 

Joe: Definitely. 

Kush: any other changes that you noticed in yourself?

Joe: Yeah. , Loss of muscle mass. I've been noticing that in my legs. I've been doing [00:07:00] squats since I was in college, and I've, and I've got a home gym. In fact, I'm sitting next to my home gym right now as it's, just next door way over. I've got a... So I, I've been lifting weights most of my adult life, with a couple of exceptions.

A couple times I just wasn't, wasn't able to. I was in Vietnam for a while, Viet- during the war, and, so that stopped me from lifting weights. But otherwise, I've been lifting weights for decades I wouldn't say I had massive quads, but I had quads that were f- for my age always were bigger than the average guy's quads.

And so you kinda get used to that after a while. You just, you put on your shorts and you see your, your bulging legs. But I've been noticing in the last several years that that's not the case anymore. they aren't bulging anymore. so I'm losing muscle mass despite training with weights two to three times a week for decades.

So this happens. This is not, it's not something to tell you in a textbook it's going to happen maybe. [00:08:00] It's going to happen. And, so I'm, that's one of the first things I've noticed which is really, I f- I wouldn't say scary for me, but it's, it's an eye-opener that I, I've seen other old gentlemen older than me, and I've seen what happens to their legs and they have, you know, very little muscle mass left.

really skinny legs. And I, that, that's the direction I'm going also, and I'm doing everything I can to prevent that from happening. But I think, think it's, beyond my control, quite honestly. 

Kush: Joe, thanks for sharing that. 

I feel like most of society takes, this kind of decline as something to be taken...

something inevitable. people, you know, younger than you, they will suddenly find that their capacities are changing. And again, it's sort of like they accept it. but what is, what is it about you that, surprised you? Like, you did not think that this was gonna happen to you, and yet it did.

Joe: you know, you, you talk about it all the time. I've, I've been talking about [00:09:00] aging for athletes for a long time, for decades. first book I ever wrote on the subject was back in the 1990s, so that's like almost 30 years ago I wrote my first book on this subject. And, and in those books, you know, you're gonna talk about loss of muscle mass.

That's one of the things you expect to happen. But somehow you don't expect it to happen to you. That's gonna be somebody else's problem, not yours. but I can testify that it does happen, and it happens to everybody. I've known very good athletes. One of my best friends, was about, what is he, about, nine years older than me.

He owns the world... He, at that time, he owned the, the,course record for Hawaii Ironman for his age group, 75 plus. he did, 13 hours and, and 31 minutes for, um, at age 75, which is really good. Wow. Wow. A tr- tremendous athlete. He works out, been working out most of his life, and very consistent with his training.

He's a coach also, so he understands training. [00:10:00] And, you know, began to realize that things were changing for him also, in his 80s. he, he was beginning to show signs that things were not as they had been previously as far as physique, for example. Mentally, same guy. Physically, it was changing a little bit, not because he didn't exercise, because he was, he was...

He exercised more,he exercised more than I did,have done, which is quite a bit. Yeah ... I typically put in... You know, I, I typically put out, in a- probably the last several years, my average weekly training has been like 12 hours, something like that a week, and he does more than that. He, or he did.

He, he, he passed away last year at age 92. By the way, the day he died, he had a stroke. The day he died, he had, he did a bike ride that morning and had a stroke that afternoon. up until that time, he was- Still going strong. Still tremendous athlete Wow Still coaching athletes. He would meet with athletes.[00:11:00] 

The athletes he coached, he would meet with them. it w- local athletes. They would, they would come to his house and he would go for a workout with them. And then when he'd get back from their workout, he would do his own workout. So he was, he was a fanatic about training. Super guy. Anyway,that, that's one of the things that opened my eyes was that, you know, this, this guy is experiencing changes also.

And, um, so th- this is just what, is what happens. You really can't avoid this, unfortunately. 

Kush: Joe, by all accounts, from most mainstream definitions, you are doing stupendously well. But obviously you hold yourself to a high standard and that is such an excellent observation that, you know, one can be an expert in something, but then when it comes to applying that lesson to oneself, like sometimes, one doesn't know how to do that.

Speaker 3: Yeah. 

Kush: If I can ask a slightly contrarian question. Sure. Is there something [00:12:00] that you think you would have done differently? Maybe- What would I have 

Speaker 3: done in, in, in- ... last couple of 

Kush: decades to maybe- 

Joe: You mean in terms of training? 

Kush: Phys- physically? To, in terms of training, lifestyle, mindset, whatnot, to have pushed out this, surprise, quote, unquote, further down the line?

Joe: Yeah. Well, yeah, there'd be a couple things. one is that y- one, one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is that you're more susceptible to injury. That's obvious. And I've made two mistakes along that line in the last, what? Five, s- six years, I made two mistakes along that line. one was, a- and both things had to do with,being around, not my house.

To, you know, maintaining my property. And they don't sound like it'd be anything, it'd be a real big deal at all. But for example, , when we lived in Arizona, we had a, a rather large [00:13:00] patio. and, about once each, every couple of years, you have to stain the concrete in the patio. It has kind of g- it loses its, its luster.

And so rather than hiring somebody to do that, I decided to do it myself. Well, that meant for a week I was going to be sitting on a stool, which was about, 10, 12 inches tall with a paintbrush in my hand going like this for hour after hour after hour for a week. And, lo and behold, I began to realize there was something wrong with my, my groin.

Went to see my doctor, had some MRI. MRI says a torn, torn labrum in my hip. Yeah, so being on that w- stool bent over at the waist for hours set up this problem. So if I had to do it over again, I would definitely hire somebody to do that, painting job for me. that's gonna wind up being one of the worst things in, in my life.

Phys- physically right now, I think it bothers me the most is that. The other [00:14:00] thing is very similar, again, because I was stupid. I was in, I was going... My wife and I like to go to Europe occasionally and, and do, um, bike rides, long bike rides. We'll, we'll spend a week riding every day. We, our last trip was, to, Sweden and Norway, and we rode the coastline, up to Oslo, Norway from Sweden for a week and had a, had a great time.

But back in, 2000, I, we were in, Paris or in France rather, southern France, and we were going to,do a ride down there every day. and so the very first day I'm walking... We're, our, our room we're in in the hotel was on the second floor, and I'm walking down the stairs to, to where my bike is downstairs, and I'm not wearing any shoes.

I've just got my socks on. And, I'm checking my email while I'm walking down the stairs, and the way they've, they've got these stairs polished, they were extremely slippery. And the next thing I know, I've slipped on the stairs and fall a couple steps because [00:15:00] of not paying attention to what I'm doing and wind up tearing a meniscus in my left knee.

again, stupidity. I should have been, at, at the very least I should have been paying attention to what I was doing walking down these stairs with socks on, no shoes. You know, I should have been paying attention, but I, but I wasn't, and that poor meniscus, which now is the thing that's given me the most trouble as I- Try to ride, for example, or walk, and it comes and goes.

And so, you know, I would not, I would definitely tell my, remind myself, and I would te- I did, I tell this to all the athletes to remind them, as you get older, you become more susceptible to injury. You've got to be more cautious with the things you do, and that was the two mistakes I made. I wasn't being cautious with the things I do, and now I'm paying the price, and it's gonna be with me, for the rest of my life.

These things are not gonna go away, and they're the sort of things that, that they no longer fix. I've talked with my doctor about this, they say, and the surgeon, and they say, [00:16:00] "These are things we don't fix anymore. We used to, but it's really fun- we found it's a waste of time, so, so we don't fix these things."

So I'm stuck with them now for the rest of my life because, just dumb mistake. 

Kush: I guess as an athlete or just as a human, our, our bodies need to be treated like a prized stallions. 

Speaker 3: Yes, indeed. And, 

Kush: and one has to be strategic, you know? Just because one is this strong, confident athlete doesn't give us this, ability or maybe this liberty to take on tasks that can injure us.

And I guess one of the things that I'm sure you can speak to and, and can talk about is two things can happen, you know. You get injured. One is, well, you're injured, and that's gonna hinder you from being able to perform your sport and carry on life. And then if you get injured, you can't also train the same way because...

Can you talk a little bit about that on how that [00:17:00] setback changed the way you- Yeah ... train and perform? 

Joe: Yeah. Well, yeah, I've gotta be much more, careful with my training now. Um, for example, on, Saturday last week, I decided to do a, a moderately hard workout. I was gonna, I was gonna ride a, I'm a cyclist.

I was gonna ride a course which has got a lot of hills on it, and I was gonna work the hills on the, on the, on the climbs and recover between. This is kind of like a, what I call a hill fartlek workout. You just, or you're riding based on the hills. You're not, I'm not doing like two minutes on, two minutes off.

I'm doing this hill, recover, and then do the next hill, and recover, and so forth. So the hills are the, are whatever ha- whatever order you, they happen on, on the ride is what I do. And I came back from that ride and I realized that, the next day, I had just a little bit of tenderness in that knee that I, where I tore the meniscus.

A little bit of tenderness that required me to, be very cautious going up and down stairs because my knee was sore going up and down stairs. So again, you know, it came back to haunt me, but [00:18:00] these are the sorts of things, you know, you, you have to adapt. I now have to adapt my training To my knee and to my, my hip.

that I keep take both of these things into consideration whenever I think about going out for a ride, what am I going to do on this ride? is my hip and my knee, are they, are they ready to do this today? And so I've got to ask myself when I start the ride also, as I'm doing the first hard e- effort, climbing a hill, for example, can

Is this creating any problems for my, for my knee or my hip? Especially the knee, that's the one that aggravates the most. And so you're always thinking about these sorts of things, and that's the way it's gonna be now f- going forward for me forever, is forever meaning until I no longer ride a bike, which is hopefully a long, long time from now.

that, you've got to be thinking about, you know, how does this workout impact my health? you gotta take that into consideration always. 

Kush: Gotcha. You had to adapt your workout and your training, and these were [00:19:00] two specific injuries that set you back. Outside of those, do you think that there were still some things that you

okay, firstly, things you have adapted into in the last couple of decades, so things that you strategically started changing about your training- Yeah ... and maybe, other factors, maybe. Let's start with training first. Can you talk about how does your physical training look like today? 



Joe: I do two things every day for ex- for exercise. first one is my wife and I go for a, a long walk every morning. very early in the morning, just after sunup, sunrise, we'll be out walking. We'll walk for an hour, hour and a half. it's, it's pretty common for us to do. Sometimes a little bit less and sometimes a little bit more, but that's kind of the range we fall into with walking.

We don't walk like it's race walking. It's, it's a brisk walk, but [00:20:00] it's a good way to start the day, I think. so we do that. then some days, two to three days a week, I'll come back from that and lift weights in our home gym. and that takes roughly a half hour to 40 minutes. And, then that afternoon, typically, I'll go for a bike ride, which is typically somewhere between one hour and three hours, depending on what I'm doing that day and h- what season I'm, we're in.

so that, that's kind of my standard routine. year round. it stays pretty much the same until it's interrupted by a snowstorm or it rains all day, in which case I usually wind up on indoor trainer, in my, in the gym. I'll still lift weights and we'll, we'll usually still go for a walk. That usually doesn't stop us from going for a walk.

But I found those two things are nice and balanced. there's a little bit of cross-training going on there. I'm using a different set of muscles. It's all aerobic with the walking. And so, I found that to be very,beneficial for [00:21:00] my, my general health. 

Kush: that's what you do in a typical day.

I have, some things I wanna unpack. When did you start, modifying your training? And was there a certain point where you started doing certain things or stopped doing things? Let's say if you go back 10 or 20 years, some things became more important and you wanted to protect. 

Joe: Yeah. Well, I've been through a lot of changes like that, I guess.

Um, some are related to, um, injuries. I've got a history of injuries, which have always... I've al- I've already mentioned two to you, but that, there's, it goes way back beyond that. I was a triathlete. let's go back. I was a runner in the 1970s. And in 1983, I did my first triathlon just to see what it was like, and I fell in love with the sport and started doing...

So now I'm swimming, biking, and running. And then I started doing bike races also on the side after that. So I was doing [00:22:00] three sports. this is mostly like the '80s and '90s. And then by 2007, I realized when I, when I was running downhill, that, my right knee didn't feel quite right.

And so I went to see my, physical therapist about this, who I've known for years. I trust him tremendously. And he said, "Well, it looks like you've got a, you've got a, a meniscus that is wearing out, or a cartilage that's wearing out in your right knee. know, it, what will pr- probably happen if you keep on running is in 10 to 15 years we'll have to replace that knee."

So that was in 2007. So I kind of said to myself, "Well, you know what? I really don't need to run anymore. I can ride my bike and swim, so no problem. I'll just do that." So I quit running in 2007 because of, again, another injury, but this, this was not a- an injury that came on because of training necessarily.

This was something that was gonna hit me no matter what I did, I think, down the road. Even if I didn't run, [00:23:00] I'd eventually find out this knee was ha- having problems with the cartilage. So that was around 2007. Just shortly after that, I had two bike crashes, really bad bike crashes. One of them was extremely bad.

I was in i- intensive care for six days and, I won't go into all the details of that, but anyway, that wound up breaking twice. I broke the scapula and the clavicle. It's called the AC joint. It's right there on top of your shoulder. I've broken that twice in these crashes I've had about the same, within a period of a couple years, and because of that, I lost range of motion in my left arm.

Well, you can't do freestyle swimming with a motion, unless you can get your arm up and really reach high in front of you, reach out in front of you a long ways. So that was the end of my swimming. So now I'm left with the bike, and so that's all I've been doing since the early 2000s. Mid, you know, 2008 or so is riding the bike, and that's why I still ride today, and that's why I [00:24:00] walk, because that doesn't seem to bother any of my problems at all.

And lift- lifting weights, I gotta be a little careful sometimes with some of the squats and things I do, but I've learned how to adapt to that also. So this, this is aging. You know, this is what it's all about. The,I'm a probably... I may have more injuries than most people my age, but I suspect that we're all, as we get older, su- more susceptible to these things.

They become things we have to be very aware of when we're, when, in whatever we're doing. You know, painting the concrete patio at my house. I would've never thought this was gonna wind up being a, a, something that would stop me from training, but it did, you know? It's, so you just gotta be careful about, you gotta think your way through everything you do.

When I was young, I could do almost anything I wanted, as all, as almost anybody could, I could do anything I wanted. I was fine. Now, at age 82, I've got to be very cautious about the things I do because my body may not be able to, to handle it. So [00:25:00] th- those are the, that, that's the bad news of getting older

that's the bad news

Kush: Joe, a pointed question. It sounds like you were able to avert getting those surgeries. So we talked about the knee and we also talked about your shoulder. So it sounds like you have not had to go under the knife to repair those things? 

Joe: No, those things are not repairable. You know, I've, I've talked to 

Kush: doctors about this And...

I see. Okay, got it. So sounds like you, you would have opted to get them repaired if it was possible. You bet. But in your specific case, it was not possible, so you decided to, adapt. 

Joe: Right. And- I could have had, I could have had the knee replaced. That was what stopped me from running, or helped me make the decision not to run anymore is because of that.

I could have done that, but it somehow just doesn't strike me as being a lot of fun, having, a knee replacement. Now, my, my hip, my wife has had two hip replacements and she thinks [00:26:00] I'm a wimp because I won't, don't get my knee replaced. She's a, she's a, she's a tough cookie. but everybody tells me that the, the knee is worse than the hip, so I, I don't know.

So I, I'm just not gonna get another surgery 

Kush: Joe, I resonate so strongly. I am currently recovering from an ankle surgery. Okay. I am 

Speaker 3: six, 

Kush: six weeks in, and I'm 48, and I essentially diagnosed that I have some poor biomechanics and I used to enjoy more, lower body sports, I have had to adapt and, you know, I go to the, I go to the orthopedist now and we talk about, like, how much activity can I tolerate. I'm like, "Pain, it's not a problem. I just bicycle every day." I just I just, I just avoid walking like it's the plague. i- in my case, there are things that are sacrosanct and there are things that I can adapt around, and for me, I mean, walking and running I [00:27:00] used to love, but they're not as important for me as, as, rock climbing and surfing is.

So I'm curious, you made some choices and you adapted. How difficult was it for you mentally to get past, not being able to continue running and swimming, which, i- in your identity as a t- athlete, those are so fundamental? 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah, I'd been running since I was, I don't know, 12, 13 years old. that was always my primary sport.

I was a runner. junior high school I was on the track team, in high school I was on the track team. In college I was on the track team and, and after college I kept on running and even when I was in Vietnam, as I mentioned a while ago, I was still running over there. And, so running has just been always kind of defined, one of the things that defined who I was.

And so it was very, it was difficult, to give it up, but at that time I gave it up I could still swim and, and bike, and those things I enjoy also. I love doing [00:28:00] both of them. Then when I found out I really couldn't swim anymore, because of the shoulder, you know, I was down to riding the bike and, I love riding the bike, so it's not, you know, I, I'm just, which of your children do you like the most?

that's a hard question to answer if you can answer it at all. And I loved all three of these things, but I couldn't do two of them anymore, so it felt like a, a loss. but I still, I love riding a bike. I love getting out on the road and, or on the trails and, and, just having a good time, you know, riding with a group.

those, that's always fun for me. So, so I don't, I don't see the ba- a downside to this so much as I, I see, it's just more enjoyment of the things I really enjoy doing, which I've always done. I've always done all, all this exercise stuff that I've done in my life because I enjoyed it. I didn't have to do it.

I did because I said I enjoyed it. And I'm still enjoying it. I'm still doing it. So it, it's, I can't complain whatsoever. I can still ride a bike. If I couldn't ride a bike anymore, I don't know what I would do, you know? I'd take up another sport, I think. And maybe- Yeah, [00:29:00] 

Kush: yeah. No, I, I can totally see that you're a glass half full kind of person.

and maybe you've already answered my question, but, you know, some people might argue that riding a gravel bike in your 80s, actually I was just talking to somebody who is much younger and they refuse to even get on a road bike because they- ... are afraid that they can crash and then, they all, they have all these doomsday scenarios already like-

visualized. so no, so like, riding bicycles is certainly more dangerous than just being on a trainer at home. So- 

Speaker 3: Yeah ... 

Kush: again, like blunt question, why ride outside at all? 

Joe: Because I enjoy it. I li- I like the fresh air, the scenery. Beau- Boulder is a beautiful city. we've got the mountain range is just amazing here.

the weather in the summertime especially is fantastic, and, I love getting outside. if I couldn't ride, you know, I would find something [00:30:00] else, I'm sure. My wife and I, I, I've mentioned, already mentioned, my wife and I do a lot of walking. We walk, you know, every day for an hour to an hour and a half, and that, you know, I, I would just probably do more of that and wind up doing much more walking than what I'm doing right now if I couldn't ride my bike.

But, don't, don't jinx me here. I, I can still ride the bike and- No. ... as long as I can ride the bike, I'm happy. 

Kush: Joe, I wanted to ask maybe just another mindset kind of question, which is you have been an athlete all your life, and I can see the how that, your own training and how all of the wisdom that you have passed on has been fulfilling to you as well.

But now that your capabilities have shifted, are there other ways that you have found to stay fulfilled? Just, not just as an athlete, but maybe as a human. 

Joe: As a person, yeah. I gotcha. Yeah. yes, I have. what I, what I enjoy doing when I'm not riding my bike or walking with my wife [00:31:00] is writing. a, I've got a Substack account, for example, and, you know, I've written, I've written 19 books in the last almost 30 years.

I'm just a little shy of 30 years right now. I've written 19 books. Never thought I'd ever be a writer. Never, never even crossed my mind that I would ever write. I used to hate writing, in fact. In fact, it was the lowest grade I ever got in college was a C+ in, in a writing class I took my sophomore year.

so I, I never saw myself as a writer. It just, this, this kind of, like, happened to me. I just got lucky. I was in the right place at the right time with the right message, and, um, a, a, publisher asked me to write a book. Long story there. I wound up writing this book, and I thought, "Well, it won't do anything, and it'll just be something I can say I did once in my life."

And lo and behold, the book took off like crazy. It's been my be- my bestselling, one of my bestselling books ever was still the first book I ever wrote. And, so when I come home from, from, riding my bike or walking with my [00:32:00] wife, one of the things I will do every day is, is write. I write a column on, on Substack on, on what I call Serious Training.

it's basically how to train for, for endurance sports across the board. No particular sport at, at all. just general. And I, I really enjoy it 'cause it forces me to think again, now, what's going on? What, what are the... It keeps me up to date on, on the science of training. it's always changing.

I've been watching this going on since, oh, since the 1970s. I've been watching how we train- change as far as, how we do it, what the science tells us about it. And so this is just my opportunity always every day to say, "What can I learn today that I didn't know yesterday about training?" And so I'll do research on it.

I wanna tell other people what I've learned, so they can hopefully use something of, that I've learned to make them a better athlete [00:33:00] also.

Kush: Joe, I love that, 

I can just see your eyes light up when you talk about your writing. I had only vaguely heard about your writing, I'll be honest, until recently, and I started looking into it, and I came upon Fast After 50. Yeah. And great title.

It instantly lands. So when you chose that framing, the word fast What did you want people to understand right away? 



Joe: this, you know, what you're talking about is the book I've written now. In fact, I've written twice. I've, I got the second edition coming out next month in June. it, th- this, the...

I wrote this book as a present to myself. back in, um, 2013, I was going [00:34:00] to have my 70th birthday, and so I thought, "Well, you know, I always try to do something on a big birthday for myself. Well, what will I do this time?" Sometimes it's like go for a ver- very long ride or, or go on a vacation trip with my wife or something like that.

So th- this, what am I gonna do this time turning 70? So I decided I was, what I was gonna do is give myself a present. The present was going to be that I would learn all I could about, aging as an athlete. So I went back and started reading the research, which I enjoy doing. And to top it off, I decided to, um, I, I, at that time I had a blog online.

I was gonna write about what I was learning, about aging. So I started writing a column, um, a weekly blog on my, about the, about the aging process for athletes, what I was learning in the research. And, all of a sudden I realized I was getting a lot of feedback from people who were reading this blog and enjoying it, [00:35:00] and they were always telling me what could I...

They'd ask questions from me, things they wanted me to write about or things and so forth. So there was a lot of interest So I went to my publisher and I said, "You know, I think there's a, there's a, there's something here that may work as a book." And, um, they liked the idea also. We had a little bit of a, of a go, a little bit of a disagreement on what the title of the book should be.

they liked the title Fast After 40, which could have been done. You're, you're really starting to age at around age 35, so by 40 you're starting to realize it. But I thought that's a little bit on the young side. I'd rather make it more specific to a little bit older audience. So I said, "Let's make it Fast After 50."

The word fast was their idea, not mine. they, in fact, I changed it. They started off saying faster. They wanted to make it Faster After 50, and I said, "No, you can't, you can't say that, because I can't really make people faster after 50." they can still be fast, but faster is a different world.

[00:36:00] So, so the book title became Fast After 50, and, um, so lo and behold, I wrote the book and it wound up being my third-best-selling book of all time is the, is Fast After 50. And so that was back in 2013 when I was writing it. It actually went into, to print I think about 20- late 2014 or '15. And then, I was looking at the book here just a couple of years ago and thinking, "You know, this book is getting kind of old now, and things have changed.

Things are not the same as they used to be when I wrote the book. so it's time to rewrite the book." So I just threw the manuscript away, started from scratch and wrote an entirely new book. The only thing that's the same about the book is the title. That stayed the same. o- other- otherwise it's an entirely new, new book.

So that, that's the history of that book. 

Kush: You know, I'm almost curious, given how older athletes continue to surprise us, if there is a Fast After 60 or a Fast After [00:37:00] even 70 book that is hiding in you, Joe. let me ask you this. So who did you write this book for? 

Joe: Yeah. Well, the first, the first book was written strictly for me.

it was, it was my birthday present. 70th birthday present was to read all the research I could find on the subject of, of aging and then write a book about it. So that, that was how that book came to be. Since then I've, I've, I've become a bit more interested in what's going on outside of me

And, so I decided to make this, this newest book, this newest Fast After 50, which is, just got done writing, wanted to make it more about, athletes that I follow, who I know of, who are really good athletes. And so I, I f- I wrote about two categories of athletes- in the book. Okay, so the b- the book is for them.

One category, every chapter ends with a, a story about a, an athlete that I knew, [00:38:00] that I've kind of followed throughout my, my, my aging career. like I mentioned a while, a while ago, the guy who's a friend of mine who was the tremendous Ironman athlete who died at age 92, and so there's, there, you know, so part of the book is dedicated to him.

then the other type of athlete I wanted to check on or write about was people who are up and coming in the age groupers, 50s, 60s, 70s. What are they doing? What are the new people in, new being, meaning who are becoming really fast after 60 or 70 or, or whatever. Who are these people, and what are they doing?

How are they training? And so it was written for those two categories of people. And so I interviewed all these other people who are now featured as,present time athletes who are doing extremely well, world records and,amazing things they've accomplished. What are they doing, and how did they get to this point?

And so the book is really about these two groups of athletes who have [00:39:00] been, influential in my thinking about training as you, as you age up. that's what's unique about this book, I think.



Kush: I heard about you through Greg Benning, and, I had him on the show. He's a rower who competes in regattas. 

Speaker 3: Uh-huh. 

Kush: And it honestly surprised me because, because people associate you with your key sports, triathlon and, and cycling and running. So when you hear that a rower is applying your ideas- 

Joe: Yeah

Kush: does it 

Joe: surprise you? No, it does not. what I typically write about or like to write about when I'm not writing a book specifically for, for cyclists or triathletes or something, when I write a general book, I really, I try to make it as much as I can, something that can be adopted by really any endurance sport.

There may need to be some adjustments made, for the sport, but I've coached so many sports over the years. I coached a rower, for [00:40:00] example. this is many years ago. This is back in the early 2000s. and I didn't know anything at all about rowing. You know, I had to ask him questions. "You know what, what's your cadence like, rowing cadence?"

A- and, he probably thought I was dumb because I didn't know these things, but I didn't, I didn't know anything at all about the sport. so I, I knew about training, how to train him for an endurance sport, but I had, I had to learn about the sport from him. I coached, two, To, endurance horse racers.



Joe: talk about a, a unique sport. This is unique. you know, they, they only have to get off the horse two times. The, the races may last for hours, six, seven hours, but every time they come to a hill, they have to get off the horse and run behind it going up the hill, holding onto the tail so you don't put pressure on the horse's back.

And as they come down the hill, they have to hold onto the reins and run next to the horse so they, they can keep the horse under control going downhill. Then they get back on and start riding again. And so I had to coach them to be able to run hills with a horse, and I didn't know anything about that sport, so I had to, I had to learn, you know.[00:41:00] 

"Explain this to me. How, how... What, what are you doing here?" And so then I would have to design a program based on what they were doing. I coached a, um, gosh, a woman who was a firefighter and, she had to, pass a, a physical exam every year, and it was a very grueling exam, the things they had to do that were all endurance and strength oriented.

And so I had to prepare her for that, that test she had to do, that physical test she had to do every year that would last, you know, over, well over an hour. So it's certainly an endurance event. And, but if she didn't pass it, she didn't have a job, so it was very important to, for her to be able to do this.

This was, this was unusual for me. I don't usually have somebody whose life income depends on my coaching them to get ready for, a, you know, an event. And she, fortunately she passed every time I coached her, so it was no problem at all. But, but you know, I've, I've coached all kinds of sports. I've, I've been involved in sports for a long, long time, so I don't find things to be extremely unusual about sports.

, there's more things that are [00:42:00] similar about endurance sports than there are dissimilar about endurance sports. So I kind of focus on those things. 

Kush: That is so badass, Joe, because I can just tell that even your curiosity knows no bounds. Most coaches and writers and trainers would maybe stick to their own lane, and here you are-

here you are,you know, geeking out about all these other sports. You talked about commonalities, so this is a good moment. maybe can you talk about a, a couple of things that are common between those sports, maybe even things that could surprise us? 



Joe: yeah, well, since we're talking about aging here, one, one of those things that's common for all sports, endurance sports, is recovery that's the same for everybody.

how often do we need to recover? How do we recover? all the sorts of things that, that you have to figure out, but that, that's one of the common threads for all sports. That's one. [00:43:00] Another is for endurance sports, aerobic fitness is extremely important, and sometimes I'm afraid athletes bypass aerobic fitness because they don't think it's important.

They wanna do the, the hard stuff. They wanna do the intervals and the hill work and all the stuff they may do for their sport that's very grueling. They wanna do that, and I... So part of the job as a coach is to make sure they understand how important aerobic en- en- endurance is, and that we have to train that also.

That's the same across the board. All of the, the horse racers I was talking about, the endurance horse racers, they've gotta understand how important it is to be able to hang in there for hours at a time, with exercise. And so we've gotta, we've gotta build this aerobic fitness base. Every sport has that.

Even the rowers, whose event was much shorter than the, the horse racers, we're talking minutes for their race as opposed to hours for the horse racers. They've [00:44:00] still gotta be able to develop this aerobic fitness because it's important no matter what the endurance event is. If the, the event lasts more than about a minute and a half, it's an endurance event, and you've got to build aerobic fitness because of that.

You've got to have aerobic endurance. If you don't have it, everything else is kinda like icing on the cake, but you don't have a cake anymore. You just got icing. So that's what we're talking about here for all sport. That's the same across the board for all endurance sports. and yet I'm afraid sometimes we, we, we bypass that.

We try to bypass that and go exactly to the stuff that's, we think is gonna give us the most outcome, which is high intensity, but that's not the case. So anyway, that, those are things that are common for sports across, across the board.

Kush: those things are, are common indeed. I wonder if there are any more things that you can speak to which are common but maybe not as well understood, and it could be, yeah, maybe on, on fundamentals that are important across the sports that need [00:45:00] to be either preserved or doubled down on again- Yes

for that athlete over 50. 

Joe: You bet. Yeah, one of those things I would strongly suggest is a combination of things. I would call in, in a combination, I would call GYM workouts, G-Y-M, gymnasium workouts, strength training, flexibility training, and mobility training Those things are critical as you get older.

If you're beyond the age of 50, even, even in your 40s, these start to become much more important then. If you're in your 20s, I really don't think I need to worry about that, those things at all. If I was coaching, a, a 25-year-old, Kenyan marathoner, you know, if I was coaching one of those guys, I don't know if...

I would probably not have him go in the weight room. I would not have him work on mobility and flexibility. you know, at that age you've got so much strength and flexibility and mobility, n- I wouldn't call it a waste of time, but we're getting there. It's not too far away from that.

If you're 70 years old, this is critical. So there's, there's something that happens [00:46:00] between the age of 20 and 70 that makes this become much more important, and I'm afraid a lot of athletes don't discover this until very, very late in their careers. They've gotta do, spend more time working on this gymnasium fitness also.

It can't just be sport specific. It's got to be some of the stuff we work on, strength, flexibility and, and mobility. So those are things I think are critical to a performance because we're gonna, we're gonna lose all those things as we age up. You're gonna lose muscle mass, you're gonna lose flexibility, and you're gonna lose mobility.

That's going to happen. I will guarantee you those things are going to happen as you get older. And so s- the sooner we can start offsetting those things, preventing them, flowing them, slowing them down is what you sh- you need to be doing because they're going to happen still. You just need to slow them down so they don't happen as rapidly as they might otherwise.

So that, that's one of the biggies that goes across all sports, but it's not [00:47:00] sport specific. It's more general. 

Kush: That makes a lot of sense. And just maybe, diving deeper on this one a little bit. So let's say an athlete comes to you who's 50, and just for fun, let me throw a new sport at you. I don't know if you have coached rock climbers.

Have you? 

Joe: No, never have. 

Kush: Okay. Okay. 

Joe: sure Yeah. Okay. So, let's say you have somebody who's a, who's a mountain climber who approaches you for, for coaching. Like, how would you design a program for them? Again, this person is 50. Let's say this person has been doing this sport for 20 years. what would you first ask them?

Kush: What would you do with them in order to- Yeah ... help them continue performing? 

Joe: Well, as I've done with all the sports I've coached that I've never coached before, the rowers, the, the firefighter, the, the horse ri- riders, the endurance horse riders, it, it, I've got to l- I've got to learn a lot, [00:48:00] so I've got to ask all kinds of questions about the sport.

"Tell me, about your sport. I've never done it, so, talk to me as if I'm just a novice, because I am. You know, what is your sport all about? How do you do it?" The physio- physiology is gonna be the same. I, that's not gonna change. You know, the physiology is still gonna be, you know, fast twitch muscles, slow twitch muscles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That's all gonna stay the same. What I need to know is, what's the balance between fast twitch and slow twitch in your sport? how, how f- how, um, how intense is the sport? how high is the intensity in the sport? You know, how hard are you working relative, let's say, to heart rate? What's your heart rate at going on in your sport?



Joe: and that's gonna vary widely between sports, you know? If you talk about a, somebody who runs the 800 meter, on the track, you know, runs it in a minute and 45 seconds, what that person... That's a, that's a distance event. That's an endurance event. That is far different than the [00:49:00] ultra-marathoner, ultra runner who is doing a r- a race that takes 25 hours.

but there's a lot in c- a lot in common. There's still, the same things are going on in their bodies. The physiology is still the same. We're just, we're just focusing on one other part of the physiology as opposed to another part of the physiology. So that, that's what I've gotta find out, H- what's, tell me about your sport.

You know, with the rower, I had to find out what, what cadence he was using. You know, how, how often does he, does he put the paddle in the water? What's going on? And, what h- type of heart rates are, is he seeing? what are your sensations? How have you trained for this in the past? What have you found works and what have you found doesn't work?

and so there, there, there's just all these kind of questions you gotta ask to find out, but I know that the physiology's gonna stay the same. His physiology, no different than anybody else's, that's gonna stay the same. I just need to find out how, which, which part of the physiology becomes more important.

That's what it's all about. Upper [00:50:00] body, lower body, high intensity, low intensity. There's all kinds of things to be found out here, but, I just start asking questions and it goes down this long path of me learning what the sport is all about. It is not easy to coach this person. this is still more, much more difficult than I would have coaching a cyclist.

You know, coaching a cyclist is kind of like I do, I can, I... It's no problem whatsoever. I know exactly what I need to do. Just need to find out details. Try- time trial or, or, one day races or criterions or exa- I need to find out the details of what their race is, but it's gonna be the same thing basically.

But if somebody comes to me with a brand-new sport, a rock climber, for example, I've got, I've got to find out. I don't know all the things about that at a, really at all. I need to find out what, what's going on. That's one of the reasons I'm reading this book is 'cause,it's interesting to me that, to find out what, how it crosses over to sports that I've worked with for years.

How does rock climbing cross [00:51:00] over? And, um, I find that, that's really, intriguing. or ultra-marathoners. You know, I, I went to my first ultra-marathon race last August in, in Chamonix, France. never been to one before, and this, this was amazing. You know, these folks are doing extremely challenging events.

So then I read a book about, about,how they train for this and how they do it, how they race. all this stuff is eye-opening, but it was always coming back to the same thing. The physiology was the same always. We're just talking about different ways of, emphasizing physiology, which some part of the physiology could be emphasized more than another, and that's what it's all about really.

So it... that's what I find very interesting, is how do we go about doing that? 

Kush: Joe, one thing I was just thinking as you were talking is that somebody who's a rower or an ultra runner, I would say that the average person is more likely to find a coach that specializes in their discipline.

Yeah. So what is it that they [00:52:00] are getting or why are they reaching out to somebody like you who's not a specialist in their sport? 

Joe: Yeah, that's a good question. That's the question I would ask them also, why me? You know, there are lots of, there are lots of rowing coaches, lots of ultra running coaches, so forth.

why me? And, usually what I get, the answer that I'm... I don't coach full-time anymore. So you know, I just do consulting with athletes now. But when I was coaching, they would, the an- most common answer I would get was, "Well, I've read your books and I know you-" I kind of know how you think about training, and I like the way you think about training, and I'd like to see that applied to what I do in my sport.

So can you do that? So that, that's usually what I find out is if they've read one of my books and,Fast After 50, for example. That's not sport specific. That's general endurance training. But sometimes they'll read, my Cyclist Training Bible or one of my other books and, and they'll say, "You know what?

I, I, I, I [00:53:00] like the way you're doing it. I like what you're saying. Can you apply that to my sport?" And that, that's usually the way the conversation goes, or used to go. I don't do this anymore.

Kush: That makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about the average athlete who's, again, let's say the age of 50 or round about. okay, so I have, some things I want to tease out. So first is what is this person doing that is,

that is an opportunity for improvement? What is the average person who's 50, doing that they are overlooking? 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. With- without doubt, number one is inconsistent training. That is the thing I find invariably, I don't care what the sport is, they're not consistent enough.

They, they've, they've got... A- and, it's not a fault, it's just a problem they've got. You know, the problem is by the time they're, you're in your, typically in your 50s, you're moving to the head [00:54:00] of your, in, whatever your career is, you're moving to the top of it. You know, this is when you're really becoming into your own.

You're, you're becoming one of the, the key people in your business, in your industry even, because you've been around the sport or been around this business for so many years, decades. So you, you've got lots of, commitments. Y- there's lots of time being spent in your job. It doesn't always mean at the workplace.

People are calling you at all hours of day and night. You're making decisions all the time. you find it very d- but at the same time, you want to do an Ironman triathlon, which takes a lot of training. But here now you're doing a job which takes 60 hours a week, sometimes more. how do you blend this all together?

So that, that, that's the problem that most athletes have. And because of that, these 50-year-old athletes I'm talking about, something has to give. Well, it [00:55:00] can't be their family, and it can't be their job. So the next thing it has to go is I gotta cut back on my training, so I'm gonna miss a couple workouts this week because I've got this business trip came up and I've gotta travel to some place And, so forth.

So, so that, that's the kind of things you see a lot is this, the inconsistent training. And again, it's not because it's their fault necessarily. It's because often they just have a, a lifestyle that takes so much time. ... When I have this conversation with this person, where we start is I start with, "How much sleep are you getting?"

That's the critical question. If they're going to bed late and getting to bed at midnight, and they're getting up at 5:00 in the morning to try to get in a workout before they go to work, we can't make any progress. We're not gonna go any place. It's just not gonna happen. So something has to go someplace.

If you really want to qualify for Ironman Hawaii, or you really want to be on the podium at your [00:56:00] rowing event, or whatever it may be, you we've gotta change your lifestyle. that's the starting point. We've gotta get more sleep. Sleep is when you become more fit. If you're get- not getting enough sleep, that means you're not getting enough fitness.

So we start talking about things. The, the two things that are not going to change are career and family. Those two things are not gonna change. I don't wanna see them quit their job to try to qualify for Ironman Hawaii, or shortchange their family, you know, don't do anything with the family on the weekends because it cuts into your training.

No, we're not gonna do that. What, but what are other things in your life that we can cut out? You know, are you volunteering for any organizations? Maybe you serve on the board of directors for a, for a non, for a local non-profit. Well, that is great. I'm glad you're doing it. However, it takes time, and that's the thing you don't have right now.

If you really wanna qualify for Ironman Hawaii, we've gotta find more time. That time needs to be put into sleep. Not into [00:57:00] anything else but into sleep. And so that becomes our, my focus with that athlete. they're inconsistent, but not always because it's a fault. It's sometimes just because of their lifestyle, things they can't figure out how to deal with, so it winds up taking away time from their training.

That is by, by far the most common problem I see for, for aging athletes, especially those in their 50s. 

Kush: Excellent point. And, I am nearing 50 myself, and there are many others, and balancing all of those demands is- Yeah ... is challenging. I agree. And protecting sleep is important. any other things you have found, Joe, on how can people make the time that they have more impactful towards training?

Joe: Yeah. Tryn- Whatever time the person has, let's say, let's... I get this all the time, "I can only train four days a week." And I'm a road cyclist, but I only train four days a week, and I can't go more, any [00:58:00] more than an hour and a half, and I wanna tr- I'm training for this race that's gonna take place in July, whenever it may be.

So that's the limitations I have. My job, my family, those things take up all my time. I can do these. I can do four days a week, an hour and a half. Okay, how are we gonna do that? Two things have gotta get done. We gotta, we've gotta first of all build an aerobic base. So we're gonna spend the winter, I'm assuming this person is riding and racing in the summertime, we're gonna spend the winter building your aerobic base.

That means we're g- if you only got four days a week of an hour and a half, we're gonna get in four days a week of riding, an hour and a half, in zones one and two, with a lot of zone two. We're gonna build that, that base fitness as, as much as we can given your limitation. Then we move into the, what I call the build period, or the sp- sp- the, specific period of training.

We're now starting to do things more like the event itself. Training becomes much more specific [00:59:00] to the race. Now we're gonna take those four days a week you have, an hour and a half each time, we're gonna take two of those days and they're gonna stay zone one and t- zone two, especially lots of zone two.

The other two days, what we're gonna do is we're gonna ride the first hour, 45 minutes to an hour, both of those days very s- in zone two. We're gonna ride easy. We're gonna continue to build aerobic base. The last 45 minutes to a half hour, we're gonna do race-like intensity for the last... This is gonna be like eight weeks before the race.

So we're gonna do race-like intensity. So now I'm trying to figure out how to make the best use of these limited six hours this athlete has to actually, like, do things that accomplish their, the fitness they need for the race. We could do it better, you know, if we did do 12 hours a week, no problem at all.

We get down to six hours a week, this is really, really tight. So it can be done, but you gotta be dedicated. You gotta be dedicated [01:00:00] to doing an entire winter working four days a week just in zones one and two. Most athletes won't do that. They'll decide it's too easy, they wanna do hard things. At that point, our relationship is done.

I can no l- c- no longer coach this athlete because they don't understand the principle of the physiology of preparing for an endurance event. You've gotta have endurance fitness to begin with. Then we've gotta do the two workouts a week that include some high intensity.

Now we're gonna get, start doing things that are more like the race. Along the way, there'll be a lot of other stuff we're gonna s- we're gonna sprinkle in there around this, like we're gonna do some sprints year-round, frequent sprints. We're gonna do some occasional hill climbs in a, in a high gear for cyclists.

short hills that only take a few seconds to get up, 10 seconds, in a high gear. We're gonna do some of th- we're gonna do strange things. We're gonna mix these things in with all these four days a week. So that's the sort of thing I would do, i- is [01:01:00] to take the advantage of what they c- what they've got, which is six hours a week.

Now let's make it exactly what gives us the fitness we need. If they start missing those four workouts a week, we've got real problems. Now it becomes very, very difficult to get them ready for their event. Six hours, pretty basic, pretty low to get ready for a cycling event. So that's the sort of thing I would do, is to figure out how we can make the best use of their time, but realizing that these are the things we've got to accomplish.

Joe, I notice, 

Kush: two things, coming across, really, strongly. One is thinking in terms of seasons and years, and thinking long term. that makes a lot of sense that, you are looking at the entirety of that person's, life- Yeah ... for this maybe medium to long term. But then the other thing is about protecting the zone one, zone two, the easy efforts, and I know this topic, is [01:02:00] universal across sports, and it sounds like maybe people are finally starting to talk about it more.

And again, like a naive question, you know, in, in climbing, for instance, same thing, you know, I go to the climbing gym and I know others will as well, and you're trying to do that kind of zone one, zone two type of climbing, and sometimes it doesn't e- even feel like, honestly, good use of my time because- Right.

it just feels, it just feels like, what am I accomplishing? I'm not even getting sore. Yeah. So why is that important? 

Joe: Because you have to under- first of all, you have to understand the aerobic base. there are things you can accomplish with aerobic fitness that you cannot accomplish with high intensity.

For example, and this is, this is a, th- this is one that people don't fully understand, they're really confused about, which is lactate. they always mos- usually refer to as lactic acid, which is entirely wrong. It's not an acid. It's a, it's a, it's, it's a molecule which is... I won't go into details on that, but, but it's [01:03:00] something that, you, you use for extra fuel.

People think of lactate as being something that is something that stops them from exercising because you get this burning sensation in your muscles. That's not lactate. It's actually used to fuel your muscles. so when you get into high intensity, your muscles have primarily sugar to use for fuel, and the second highest fuel s- source they have at high intensity is lactate.

It's being used to, to drive the muscles. So it's not a bad thing at all, it's a good thing. But guess how are you make yourself, better at moving this, this lactate, from the blood into the muscle? you create a, a little, carrier, a protein carrier that does... makes that... carries the lactate into the muscle.

That's done by doing slow intense- l- low intensity training, slow workouts. That's where that carrier comes from. It's called MCT1. MCT1 is only developed when you're training easy, zones one and two. [01:04:00] Going hard, you don't develop that, which means if all you do is hard training, you never get any MCT1, you never use lactate for fuel.

You're always relying on sugar for fuel, and that's the only thing you've got for high intensity. So you never get the chance to use the, the lactate, which is a free source of fuel. I'm just, I'm just touching the top. There's a whole list of things like that happen in your body that do not happen, that, that happen with low intensity training that do not happen with high intensity training.

So you've got to have both things. I, I equate this to kind of like, there's several equations, but one, I, I just wrote an article about this, is,it's kind of like building a house. you know, my father was a carpenter, and so I spent a lot of time with him when I was a kid, driving nails and, and carrying lumber and all kinds of things for him.

and what you do when you build a house is you build the foundation first, and it's very solid. It's gotta be underground. It's gotta be extremely well [01:05:00] developed. If there's any problem in the foundation, everything else is gonna fall apart. House is not gonna be, last very long at all. And this takes a long time.

this is the aerobic base. That's what that is. it's rebar, and it's concrete. all these things have to be put together in the right way. So there's holes being dug deep. We're trying to get a stability in the base, and that's what we do with, with preparing for fitness also. So you have to do exactly the same thing.

We gotta build this base platform. That's the hard part, 'cause you can't make any mistakes here. If you make, you make a mistake building the foundation of your house, the house isn't gonna be any good. It's a waste of time. No matter how great a job you do of building the rest of the house, it is not gonna last.

It's gonna fall down. Strong wind- strong winds, heavy rain, heavy snow, so forth, it's just not gonna make it. So the foundation is important, and this, that's what you have to do When you train also, you have to build this foundation, and that foundation is from low intensity [01:06:00] aerobic training, not high intensity that we usually refer to as anaerobic, which is an, an improper term to use, but people m- usually understand that.

That's not gonna give you all the things you need. It's not gonna be the foundation. Foundation has got to be built first. So that, that's what I usually use as a way of explaining this to people, that is that we've got all these things that happen through low intensity training, that do not happen with high intensity training.

So we have to develop these things, and, and they take a long time to develop. It takes longer to develop these low intensity, boosters, if you wanna call them that, than it does to develop the high intensity boosters. Those are easy. That's no problem. We can do that in a matter of few weeks. The base period though takes a lot of time.

Another analogy I use is baking a cake. you know, if, if you bake, if you don't wanna do... the base, the cake itself is kinda like base training. it's... And if you, all you wanna do is high intensity, all you're doing is the icing. You don't really have a cake, all you got is icing. That's all you're [01:07:00] doing.

So you don't really have a cake, you just got some sweet stuff spread around the top of the, the f- this plate in a thin platform. I try to get the idea across that this is critical. It's not something you can kinda, like, say, "Well, this has nothing to do with me. I'm different." You know, you're not different.

You're the same as all the rest of us. We all have exactly the same physiology with very slight differences, but we're all the same, and we all benefit from having a strong aerobic base. Even the half-miler I mentioned a while ago develops an aerobic base. He's only gonna be on the track for an hour, for 1 minute and 43 seconds, but he spends hours, or she spends hours, running at low intensity.

Hours. ' Cause that's the only way you can get certain types of fitness done, is by doing that. You can't just go out and do high intensity all the time. 

Kush: Joe, that was maybe one of the best explanations I've heard for the importance of, the low intensity stuff, and thank you also for taking us into the science behind it.

To flip [01:08:00] this, a lot of people, again, you know, they hit their 40s, 50s, they find that power has started dropping off. Yeah. The, the grades I could, or yeah, the kind of moves I could execute in climbing or the sprints that... Or even, even you, you know? You found that you were not able to go uphill as efficiently in the last, several years.

So how can we protect and maybe even find some gains in our power output? 

Joe: Yeah. Well, that, that all starts with strength. This is g- takes us back to the gym again. what we have to do in, in the, um, the gym is build this,this base of a, of strength. and that takes a long time. You're trying to change muscles and, and, soft tissues.

And so they take a-- there, there's, there's a long process we go through to, to, to develop that. You know, we go through starting off with, with, lower weights and higher repetitions, [01:09:00] kind of developing the techniques we have to be able to do. Like, like let's say it's we're doing squats, for example.

We're gonna do, wind up doing very light weights, maybe bar only squats to start off with, with high repetitions, 15, 20 repetitions. And then over time we're gonna, like add more load and decrease the repetitions. And eventually what, the athlete after several weeks, months, will be using very heavy loads, very few repetitions.

and so we, we've developed more muscle because of it. We go through this long process. So we've, we've ... So the first stage is we've got to develop strength to move resistance and m- to overcome a force. Force is the weight in this case, like a squat. Then we gotta take that force that we've developed, that strength we've developed, and change it into power.



Joe: and so that involves things like, the initial things we'll do w- will be in the weight room. We'll lower the weights and we'll make quick movements. we'll stand up very quickly with power movement on the squat. Instead of going [01:10:00] through a very heavy weight slowly, we're gonna use a lighter weight and do more powerfully.

We're gonna make a, a powerful movement as we, come up in, in squats. Then we're gonna take that to the sport itself. Um, let's say it's a runner, and so we have the runner go to, short hills. short hills that will only take, 10 seconds to get up, and we're gonna run sprints up the hill with very long recoveries afterwards, you know, like two minutes recovery.

So these very short, powerful sprints up the hill. And we'll start off by doing only just a couple of those, and we'll gradually over time add more. And what will happen is the athlete will, with given time, will go from having very low power to having extremely good power because of this long process we go through.

And there could be other stages we would throw in there along, along with that also. different things like, explosive movements. for a runner, for example, doing, bounding exercises. You know, you'd run a, run 100 meters and you bound for 100 meters, [01:11:00] very high off the ground.

We're not worried about your stride length, we're worried about your stride height. And so we do things like that. So there's various ways we can do this, but we're gonna convert strength To power. And then once we've done that, the athlete is able to, in this case, to run more powerfully, because of the work we have done.

Without all of that, we're kind of like stuck with our body not being able to do things we'd like for it to do because we haven't done all the stuff that's necessary. that's why the gym work is so important for all athletes, especially older athletes.

Kush: Are there... you mentioned the squat. Are there any key exercises in the weight room, just to make our time in the weight room? Because, you know, most of us outdoor athletes, we don't like to be in the weight room. You know, we, we wanna make sure we get things done. So are there any keystone exercises that, that apply everywhere?

Joe: Yes. simple. four exercises. upper body push and pull, lower body push and [01:12:00] pull. So let's start with lower body push and pull. Push would be like a squat or a leg press, or for an older athlete especially, just put a weight in, in each hand. It could be a, a bucket of water or whatever you wanna use, and just sit down on a, on a stool and stand back up.

Sit down, stand back up. Sit down, stand back up. That's lower body push. Pull, you have to have something like a, elastic band, and you, you fasten it to something which is very stationary, a post in your house or whatever, and you sit down facing the post. You put the strap around your ankle, and you pull your foot back away from the post.

so you're bending the knee with the foot coming back toward your body. That's... We, we would call that a leg curl, would be one example of that. So that's a pull. So there's a push and a pull, lower body. Upper body push and pull the same way. Push would be something like [01:13:00] a bench press. You know, you lay on a bench and you push the weight away from your chest.

that's a push. A pull would be a curl. You pick the weights up, and you curl them up to your chest. That's a pull. and there's... That's just four examples, but that's the most basic thing you could be doing. It doesn't take a whole heck of a lot of time. You can do th- You could do three sets of all four of those exercises in probably, 20 minutes.

You can do, have the whole thing done. Do that two or three times a week for several months, and you'd be amazed at what comes out on the other end. The athlete becomes a much more powerful athlete because of this. 

Kush: And as far as programming is concerned, are you suggesting that we repeat the same exercises for, for each workout?

And the reason I ask is when I was much younger, I used to lift weights, you know, a, a lot, yeah, that used to be like a fun thing to do. And we would divide our time into, you know, the [01:14:00] classic like leg days and then like upper body chest days, tri days, and then upper body,back and bicep days.

So are you suggesting a different kind of split now for an older athlete where weight training is not the primary sport? 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah, we wanna keep it as simple as possible, and as short as possible. It's, I, I understand exactly what you're talking about. I, you know, I've been doing this since I was in college, as I mentioned a while ago, lifting weights.

And, um, there are still days when I gotta convince myself I gotta go in the weight room, I gotta go in the gym and do this. 'cause sometimes it'd be, it'd be much easier to sit down and read a book than it would be to go in the gym. But I realize, you know, this what it does for me. It's, this is important.

I'm getting older, I'm losing muscle mass. I, there's no question about that. I need to get in there two or three times a week and do these push-pull exercises. you know, it, it's the sort of thing that I can't make it more [01:15:00] interesting. you know, I can't bring in programs that, that you can watch while you're doing this and make you happy.

It's just the sort of thing you've gotta do because you know it's important. That's the bottom line. That, and it's really hard to do, but it's, you've got to do it. At least twice a week you need to get in the gym- Sure ... and do this. 

Speaker 3: Sure. 

Joe: And it, and it doesn't have to be a gym. You can do these things at home.

Sure. You, you don't have to go to a gym. Sure. 

Kush: Okay, two questions here. What about the intensity or the heaviness of the weights and- Mm-hmm ... and rep ranges? What are you, are you advising, yeah, sure, if you're a beginner at this, low reps, sorry, low weight, high reps. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Kush: But ideally, what is the kind of, yeah, weight and rep range ratios?

Joe: Yeah, you, you can read books on this subject that, that- Sure ... go into all the details, but quite honestly, it, it doesn't have to be that complicated. when you start off, you're using lighter weights with higher reps I, I would say high reps to me means 15 to 20 reps. That's, that's higher reps. [01:16:00] But somebody else that may, that may be something different.

It may be 20 to 30 reps or it may be 12 to 15. That's not critical. That's not a big deal. It's just the idea is we start off using light weight and lifting it until we get to the point we're almost to, failure, but not quite. , We could probably go one or two more repetitions, but we're not going to.

We're not gonna push ourself to our limit every time we go in there. That becomes one of those things that becomes, demoralizing that you g- realize you have to go to pain every time you, you do an exercise. I'm not gonna do that, and you don't get that much benefit anyway from doing this. So just, do a high number that you think is high, what feels high to you.

It's probably more than 12, I would say. If you wanna do 25, there's no problem with that. If you wanna do 12, no problem with that. Just do high reps with low loads, and it should take you to pretty close to your limit. You know you could... When you quit doing a set of curls, for example, and you're doing these curls and you think, "I could probably do two more," stop.

you don't [01:17:00] have to do those last two. Just stop right there. You'll still get a good benefit from that. Let's move on to the next exercise. Do the same thing again, whatever the next exercise is. Maybe it's pushups. Maybe you could do pushups. if you can only do six or seven, do six or seven.

That's a little bit different than lifting a weight because it's your body weight. We can't change it to accommodate, more repetitions. So w- th- so these things are very flexible, but the idea is we start off with using what the athlete considers to be high repetitions, low weights, and they move to low repetitions, higher weights as we progress through several weeks.

that's the only thing that has to be there. It does not have to be science. It just has to be consistent in that direction, moving from high reps, low weights, to the opposite with high weights. 

Kush: Joe, appreciate that. Thank you for,walking us through that. One other question I have with regards to, again, balancing practicing one sport , versus spending time in the weight room.

What changes after [01:18:00] 50? what is the ideal, ratio of... You know, you mentioned, let's say that busy person can afford four workouts a week and 90 minutes each. So How should they ideally be structuring their time? 

Joe: Yeah. so if we're gonna stick with the, the four days a week sort of thing, we, we've, we've got to get in aerobic fitness.

So that's, that's gotta be a big part of their time. We've gotta get that in, and that's gonna take It's gonna take a long time, 'cause you only got four days a week to work on it. it's not the same as if you had seven days a week to work on it. Seven days a week to work on it, we could develop the aerobic fitness to a very high level.

But with only four days a week to work on it, that means we need to make the base period last longer. 

Kush: let's say that four days was not the limiter. Yes, let's say that this is not the professional athlete, but that person can still afford maybe six days of training- 

Speaker 3: Okay

Kush: but again, wants to make that training impactful. 

Speaker 3: Sure. 

Kush: Just the ratios. Yeah. Again, it maybe doesn't even matter, how much actual time. [01:19:00] 

Joe: Yeah. it depends on, again, now, a little bit on the sport. some sports take a lot, have longer workouts than... Like cycling typically has longer workouts than running, because running's a little bit more stressful on the body than riding a bike is.

Consequently, the, the workouts are shorter. so what we wanna do then is say, "Okay, we're gonna take, we're gonna work in your base period, we're gonna spend, 80% of your time in your base period," whatever that is, "Is gonna be spent on developing aerobic endurance, zones one and two. 20% of that time we're gonna do a, a long workout relative to whatever your sport is."

a marathon runner's long workout is much more, much longer than a, somebody who's doing a, a criterium bike race, which only takes them 45 minutes. so we're gonna do a longer workout one day a week, so that's, that's six days a week now. So we're spending four days a week just working on aerobic endurance.

One day a week we're gonna start working on, a longer workout. This is early [01:20:00] base per- now base period. We're developing this aerobic fitness. And one day a week we're gonna work on technique, I call skills, movements. how do you move appropriately the best way in your sport? that could be, for a runner, let's say a runner might be doing things like doing, what I call strides, which is like a sprint workout.

So warm up, 15, 20-minute warm up. Go to a grassy park, and then run,10 seconds almost all out, but not quite all out, focusing on technique, cadence, body carriage, all the sort of things that the athlete knows they need to be able to do and how to do them right. Then turn around and walk back to the starting place, which may take a minute, and then do it again.

So we spend one day doing that kind of stuff. So warm up- Strides, cool down. That's one workout all by itself. So that was not aerobic endurance. that was the fast stuff. But it's very short, so w- it's only 10 seconds. So we're not [01:21:00] doing, 10 minutes all out. we're not doing anything like that at all.

We're not doing interval, high in- high intensity intervals. We're doing very brief things that work on technique. that's six workouts a week right there. That, that's the six workouts we're gonna be, we're gonna be doing for this athlete in the base period. Then we move into the build period, which is more specific to the event we're training for.

It's more like the event. So now we're gonna do, four workouts a week that are still low intensity, One of these is g- at least one of these is going to be long workout. So one and two long, because now it's become easy for you. You've, you spent months doing this, focused on it.

Now we're just gonna do it as a part of your normal training, your four easy days a week. Two days a week, we're gonna work, do hard workouts, race specific workouts. So let's say the athlete is training for a, a 10K, race, running race. We're gonna do workouts, intervals on the track which are specific to that.

It may be [01:22:00] 800, 600 meter intervals with, 90 second recoveries after them done at race intensity or slightly higher. and, but this is gonna be very high- highly variable depending on the athlete and what they're training for. So that's the way I would structure the season, is that, that's the two major seas- t- two major portions of the season.

The base period, primarily aerobic fitness, and the build period, maintaining aerobic fitness, but now working on race specific fitness also. That's the process. 

Kush: Again, brilliant, Joe, because, I, I think the point that's not lost on us is the importance of planning a long cycle like that macro cycle.

Yeah. And structuring one's training around that idea that we're not training to be able to perform, like, next week, but putting the time and the planning so we can be in the best shape for this performance period, and then we can keep building on that. Joe, I [01:23:00] have one last question. I In, in this section, which is, is, Have you found that there are actually some strengths that older athletes can capitalize on? Because we talked so much about, slowing down the decline, about things that we need to adapt to be able to keep performing. But maybe are there any, any, anything else out there that older athletes h- possess that they can do more with?

Joe: Yeah. There are so many things. Um, it's hard to actually know where to start. For example, we haven't talked about- Maybe the top ones ... we haven't talked about body, we haven't talked about body weight at all, and that's, that's an issue for older athletes. As we get older, we tend to accumulate more body fat.

And, um, so this, this takes us into all different kinds of areas again that are very fascinating things. I, I, I find anyway. I enjoy reading about what goes on nutritionally. And, there are things you can do to change this without starving yourself. You don't have to [01:24:00] starve yourself to maintain or, or perhaps even lose body weight.

That's the sort of thing that you need to find somebody who understands body weight and how you can go about improving your body weight without going through a lot of needless calorie counting. and that can be done. so anyway, it, it, it's a very complex topic, but it's one that most, aging endurance athletes become aware of in their 40s, if not in their 50s or 60s, that they're gaining weight, and it's not because they've changed their, their lifestyle.

It's just their body is changing, and that's unfortunately one of those things that happens, again, with, with aging, is we tend tend to accumulate more body fat. very deep topic, which could take two hours all by itself. 

Kush: Well, we will, we, we will just have to, try to cajole you to come back on the podcast-

later to talk about that. Let's jump into the last section of the [01:25:00] podcast. I just have a couple of questions here. I call this the ageless section. Joe, is there a simple habit or a routine that you practice every day that gives you outsized returns? 

Joe: the one thing I, I've, I've been doing for, gosh, since the 1990s, late 1990s, i- is a mind thing.

It's a mindset thing. which with all the athletes I've coached or since then, I've talked with them about doing this very same thing, 'cause I think it's, it's a, it's a, it's a good tool for the mind. When I go to bed every night, there's about a 10-minute period there before I fall asleep, and I use that 10-minute period to go back and find what I did today- That was good.

It could be in my training. what did I do today in my training that was really good for me? And then I relive that thing, whatever it may [01:26:00] be. Let's say I did a track workout. I'm a runner, I did a track workout, and the track workout went really well. I'll go back in my mind during that last 10 minutes and just relive that track workout over and over and over.

The idea is what is... What happens is you build up this, reservoir of good things in your mind, all the things I've accomplished. Some of those things are gonna be extremely challenging. I can still remember one workout I did back in the 1980s. It was extremely hard workout, and I, and it was s- the weather was extremely difficult to work out that day, but I pulled it off and I did it, and I wound up having extremely good race as I, I think largely because of what I'd done building up to that workout, and then culminating with that particular workout.

And so you, you build up this reservoir of all these things you've accomplished in training, and then when you go to the starting line, like you, you're gonna run a marathon, and you go to the starting line [01:27:00] and it's, you're nervous. Can I really do this? You know, I've got this high goal I wanna set. And y- what you do is you go back and you remember, "Oh yeah, remember that workout I did when the snow was coming down horizontally and I was pushing myself through it all the way and I made it through the entire workout?

Remember that workout? If you can do that, you can do this marathon." So that's the sort of thing that you start building this reservoir of ideas and thoughts, positive thoughts, that'll help you, when you come- at some point in the future, you're gonna be able to use this, but you have to do it every night.

Every night you go to bed, you recall what that thing was today. What was it today that was really good for my training? 

Kush: Joe, that sounds so powerful. It sounds like it's like gratitude practice meets positive, affirmation practice meets- ... visualization. 

do you recommend just thinking about those things? Do you think, do, or do you think maybe writing them [01:28:00] or something else, is the best way to go about it? 

Joe: I, I think the last thing you think about at night is very powerful, but writing would also be a very good thing. You know, keeping a, a, a daily training diary, in which you write down things like that, like that workout I just described.

You know, I, I wrote that down when I did it. I came back, you know, this was- This was before the days of TrainingPeaks. This is back in the time when you just kept a, a, you know, written sample of all your workouts, a notebook. And I, I came back and I wrote that down, I know. But the most powerful thing for me was the going to bed that night and re- re- reliving the workout, that was the, the most important part. But both, I think, are valuable. That would be very, very good to add on, a written description of what you did that was, that was beneficial that day. 

Kush: that sounds just, yeah, really powerful and something we can adapt right... we can adopt right away.

And in fact, I, I would say that it's benefits could transcend sport. You know? Yeah. One could just talk about, one could just [01:29:00] talk about just other things in one's life and just really build that mindset around it. couple of final questions. Joe, at this time of your life, is there something that scares you?



Joe: yeah. There, there, there are always things that scare us. I think the thing that, scares me is what the future holds that I can't control. that scares me. that could be illness, it could be cancer, for example. it could be dementia. those sorts of things, you know, I don't have a lot of control over those.

I've got some control, but I don't have total control. So that, that, that does concern me, and it, it crosses my mind from time to time, and I try to learn as much as I can about topics like that, the ones that really concern me. And, um, and then I try to apply what I've learned from the reading to my lifestyle to offset some of these things that concern [01:30:00] me.

So yeah, I think we all have things like that, and I suspect a lot of them are, as we get to my age, for an ex- for example, are health related because I know I'm not gonna live forever. Something's gonna step up. You know, I've ha- I've had people die who are friends. I mentioned a while ago my friend who had died after a workout, from a stroke.

That's, it's... The guy's... you think he's gonna live forever. He's a tremendous athlete, but it didn't happen. he passed away at age 92, by stroke, but he had tremendous life. He was healthy his entire life and,was a tremendous athlete and tremendous coach and tremendous person.

Kush: All of that, makes sense. Joe, what does society get wrong about aging? 

Joe: Yeah. Um, I think society sp- sp- Pretty, suspects that we're gonna wind up being, useless, that we can no longer accomplish things. And, um, and I think they think that because they've, we've run into so many [01:31:00] people who are like that in old age who have not maintained themselves physically or mentally in some cases also.

But I've, I try to find people who I think , are,good role models, like my friend that died at the age of 92. He's a tremendous role model. There's another guy who just recently died. He's, I think he died at age 105 in, Colorado, who I've met, who's a good friend of a, my closest friend.

this guy up until the very end was, even in his hundreds, he was still living by himself, still driving his car, still doing things, that are activity-wise im- important to, to health. And, you know, he's doing these things until the day he dies. that's the sort of thing that, that I would like to see happen to, to me, to those who are close to me, is that we enjoy life right until the very end.

We don't wind up having poor health for the last 20 years of our lives, unable to do really anything except go to the doctor's office. So that's the things that worry [01:32:00] me.



Joe: and Joe, what does being ageless mean to you? 

Ageless. That's an interesting word because it is, it's really, it, it's a misnomer. we're all going to age. I can't do away with my aging. I can accept it, though. I can accept my age, and I do. but I also try to make the best of it. I don't, don't... I try not to use it as a crutch, but I sometimes find I do use it as a crutch.

I, I made a vow with myself many, many years ago that I would not consider myself to be, that... Let me back up on that. That I would not consider myself to be old until I thought of myself as being old. I wouldn't think of myself as not being able to do things until I decided I was old, and I'm still working that way, still trying to...

I, I still think I can do things that I enjoy doing, take on new challenges, physical challenges, mental challenges. I can still do these things, and as long as I can do that, I'm still ageless. I'm [01:33:00] still young, if you will. When I can't do those things anymore in my mind, I can't see myself doing these things, then I start to wonder, "Am I truly ageless, or is this, this a first sign of my true aging taking place?"

Kush: I will stop recording now