Masters Running: How to Keep Getting Faster After 40

I Didn't Start Running Until 25 — And It Was an Advantage

I came to running late. I started at 25, just to get fitter for football, while working full-time shifts as a police officer. Twelve years later I ran a 2:17:36 marathon, won the Edinburgh Marathon and represented Great Britain at the European Championships and the Commonwealth Games.

I mention that not to show off, but because it changes how you should think about age. My joints arrived at serious training with no teenage mileage on the clock. Every year of consistent aerobic work added something. That is exactly the position many over-40 runners are in today: the engine has barely been built yet.

If you started running in your late thirties or forties, you are not a declining athlete. You are an early-career athlete in an older body. Those are very different problems, and the second one is far more solvable than most people believe.

Your training age matters more than your birth age.

What Actually Changes After 40

Be honest about the physiology, because pretending nothing changes is as unhelpful as giving up. Broadly, with age:

• Recovery slows. Muscle repair and tendon adaptation take longer after hard sessions.
• Muscle and power decline faster than endurance. Left alone, you lose speed before you lose stamina.
• Tendons and connective tissue stiffen and tolerate sudden spikes in load less well.
• Life load is usually higher. Careers, families and disrupted sleep all draw from the same recovery budget as training.

Notice what is not on that list: the ability to adapt. Give an over-40 body the right stimulus and enough time to absorb it, and it still adapts. Every coaching decision for masters runners flows from that one distinction.

Spacing, Not Softening

The biggest mistake masters runners make is running their hard sessions easier instead of further apart. A watered-down session gives you a watered-down adaptation, and you still carry fatigue from it.

What works better for most of the masters athletes I coach is keeping the sessions honest — proper hills, proper threshold work, proper long runs — but moving from the classic "Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday" pattern to hard efforts every third or fourth day. Some of my athletes run their best on a nine or ten day cycle rather than a seven day week.

The week is an administrative unit. Your body has never heard of it.

This is also where honest feedback matters. When a coached athlete tells me their calves are still wooden two days after a session, the plan moves. That conversation is the difference between coaching and a PDF.

Protect the Aerobic Engine

Easy aerobic running is the part of training that ages best. You may lose a little top-end speed each decade, but the aerobic system responds to patient volume at any age — this is pure Lydiard, and it applies to a 55-year-old club runner as much as it did to Olympic champions.

Practically, that means most of your running should stay genuinely easy — conversational, comfortable, repeatable. The temptation after 40 is to make every run "count" because time is short. Resist it. Grinding your easy days at moderate effort is the fastest route to flat legs and stalled progress at any age, and the penalty gets steeper as you get older.

If you are unsure what easy should feel like, the pace calculator gives you a realistic starting band from a recent 5k time.

Strength Work Is Non-Negotiable

If I could only add one thing to a masters runner's programme, it would be strength training. Power and muscle mass decline faster than endurance, and they are exactly what protects your running economy, your tendons and your ability to handle hills and finishing kicks.

It does not need to be complicated or long:

• Two sessions of 25–40 minutes per week
• Simple, heavy-enough basics: squats or split squats, deadlift variations, calf raises, step-ups
• A little jumping or hill sprinting for power, introduced gradually

Hills deserve a special mention. A weekly hill circuit is strength work, running economy work and injury prevention rolled into one session — and it was a staple of my own marathon preparation. I've written more about this in Strength Training for Runners: What Actually Matters.

Recovery Is Training

After 40, recovery stops being what happens between training and becomes part of the training itself. The basics carry most of the value: consistent sleep, enough protein spread through the day, and genuinely easy days.

Hands-on treatment has its place too. A regular sports massage — monthly for maintenance, more often in heavy blocks — helps manage the tightness that accumulates when tendon and muscle recovery slow down. A large share of my massage clients in Sedgley and Dudley are exactly this group: runners and active people over 40 who want to keep training hard without breaking down. It is also where niggles get spotted before they become injuries.

Masters runners don't need less training. They need better absorption.

Final Thoughts

There is no single "masters training plan", because there is no single masters runner. A 45-year-old with twenty years of club running behind them and a 45-year-old who started during lockdown need almost opposite programmes. One needs freshness and power; the other needs years of patient aerobic building.

That is the real lesson, and it is the same one that runs through everything I coach: different athletes respond differently. Age just raises the price of getting it wrong — and the reward for getting it right.