Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown

396: The #1 Mindset Shift That Will Transform Your Running After 40

• Angie Brown

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In this episode, we hosts discuss how runners over 40 can redefine their running goals and mindset to focus on strength, endurance, and enjoyment. We challenge the narrative that aging means decline, instead advocating for an evolution in running. The conversation touches on shifting perspectives from losing weight to building muscle, the importance of strength training, the benefits of intelligent training, and the psychological impacts of changing paces. We encourage runners to focus on long-term health and resilience, redefine what progress looks like, and embrace the joy of running in their new, evolved identities.


00:55 Mindset Shift: Aging as a Blessing

11:36 Adapting Training for Longevity

22:48 Shifting Focus: From Speed to Strength

23:42 Training for Health and Longevity

25:25 The Importance of Strength Training

27:18 Redefining Progress and Success

30:32 Balancing Running with Life

33:33 Embracing a New Running Identity


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Angie:

So many runners over 40 start to feel like their best running days are behind them. The narrative around aging often focuses on decline rather than adaptation and strength. So today we want to shift that perspective. Aging doesn't necessarily mean slowing down. It means evolving. Evolving your running. Evolving the way that you think about your running. Evolving your goals. So let's dive into how your mindset and how the way that you think Aging as a runner affects your training, your results, and your enjoyment of running. So stay tuned. What's up, runners? Welcome to the show today. We are digging into one of my favorite topics. mindset in general is one of my favorite things to talk about. Let's be honest, right?

Kevin:

Is your favorite topic getting older? Because that seems like an odd topic.

Angie:

It's starting to be. let's be honest with what I've been researching and creating lately, it has been a lot about getting older and really starting to shift our perspectives around this as really a blessing to get older, not this negative decline that so many narratives have told us in the past. that's

Kevin:

true. You are aging like a fine wine. So this is helpful.

Angie:

thank you, my love. But yes. And I think that. That really should be all of our goals, really, to age like a fine wine, to get better with age. Because I do feel, as a woman who is about, actually, you know what? When this episode releases, it's my birthday.

Kevin:

Yes, it is. Because it's actually Happy birthday! Thank

Angie:

you! It's birthday week right now when we're recording this. And so yes Let's not

Kevin:

kid ourselves, it's birthday month.

Angie:

It is birthday month, you're right. But there's a lot of stuff going on this month, so I'm not probably going to have as many birthday celebrations as I have in the past, that's why we're doing the party so I can like Condense a lot of it. Condense some things? Condense a lot of it into one. But anyway, so yes, it, I, it is my birthday month and so yes, I am turning another Number older, another age older. So this actually is

Kevin:

very

Angie:

appropriate. I actually didn't even think about that when we were at, when I outlined this, episode. So yes, I'm another year older, which is really only a day older if you think about it. but that's a good way to think about this too. How. Are we choosing to age? How are we choosing to look at our life and our longevity? And I really hope by the end of this episode, you will start to have a shift in your perspective. If you have any sort of negative aura is not the word I'm looking for negative feelings, connotations, or feelings around getting older. I hope that we can start to shift the way you think about it by the end of today's episode.

Kevin:

Yeah, no, it's not getting older. It's just finding new age brackets to race inside of. Yeah,

Angie:

it's getting better. It's changing. Like it's not worse. It's different. And I think that's really one of the biggest things because it's not that we want you to think about, Oh, like I'm just declining and getting worse. And we're like, no. Everything's getting better and you're getting faster and everything's fine. Like we still have to. Be one with reality and understand that our bodies are definitely changing like me at 44 is not the same as Angie at 24 Why are you laughing so much? One

Kevin:

with reality is just a fantastic phrase. I like

Angie:

it. It just sometimes it just comes out of me. So So, we do have to understand that things are changing and we have to accept those changes and also understand how much control we do have over the way that we change and the way that we experience the change as we get older.

Kevin:

okay. There's also like your chronological age, like literally how many times you've circled the sun, but there's also your training age. So just because you're past whatever certain Number on the calendar does not mean you're actually necessarily immediately going to slow down. If you're pretty new to running, you might still be in that part of training where everything just keeps getting faster because you're at that point of training.

Angie:

Which is great. And it's, I love working with runners like that. Even when, especially when they're 60 years old, and I just started running a year ago and wow, look at all this stuff that I can do. Like we have people. In our program, like on our training team that's their current experience. And it's the most beautiful thing to see. I just absolutely love it.

Kevin:

It's super exciting because that was the excitement and joy I had when I was like 14. So it's cool to see it at all sorts of age levels. It

Angie:

is. So let's first talk about what we might experience, like the psychological impact of seeing your pace change, because a lot of runners, especially if you've been running for a long time, you might. Start to notice that your pace is starting to slow down. Maybe your old 5K PR is a couple minutes, you're running a couple minutes slower than that now, or half marathon, pick whatever race, or maybe just your normal training paces where you go out on your normal run. And you're starting to notice that your paces are slower than they used to be. Why is this so emotionally challenging for us, Kevin? Can you speak on this? Because I think, I feel like you have a very good perspective on this because you've been running for a much longer time than I have. And we've talked, in the past about how you have. Basically has hit a lot of PRs when you were a teenager, right? So it's I'm not touching those times again. So what is the kind of psychological and emotional experience that you have when that starts to happen? I'm getting there. Like I'm starting to get into this realm right now, but I still have some possibilities still on my brain, but

Kevin:

there's always still possibilities. The possibilities still exist, but like you said, we have to become one with reality. I think this is particularly. The case inside of the world of running because there's so many numbers so the ability to compare Yes is so easily available. It's right there. It's there. it's on your wrist every time you're like, This is my neighborhood loop and maybe you don't know the exact distance. Maybe it's not maybe it's a random distance. It's 3. 8 miles, okay, but normally it takes me You know, I don't know, 40 minutes, and now suddenly it's taking me 43 minutes. What is going on here? You can't ignore the fact that the number is changing. You raced a 5k a few years ago, and you hit it in 25. And you raced it this year, you felt just as tired, and you hit 26. there's no ignoring that. And I think that's part of what makes it so tricky in running, is there's no kind of pretending that it's not happening. In other sports, you can be like, oh, aging quarterbacks in the NFL, they don't quite have the same zip, they don't have the same evasiveness in the pocket, but they can read the field so much better. And their knowledge changes and you can still put up great stats. In running, there's the time on the clock when you cross the finish line.

Angie:

Yeah, but I think that aging quarterback is actually a pretty good analogy to use because as a runner Maybe you don't have the same speed but now you have a different level of wisdom You know your body a lot better, especially if you've been doing it for a while.

Kevin:

Yeah, this is I mean We're I think I had on your outline here, but the mastery of running a race is something that I was just so bad at when I was younger and, coaching track. Now I'm talking to these kids about like, how do you race a half a mile? I'm like, you find the fastest that you can run one lap. And then you do it just ever so slightly slower and then repeat it for the second lap. They're like, I don't even know what that means. I'm like, I know it takes a lot of practice. It took me years to be able to do this correctly, to be able to race a 5k effectively and not go so hard on the opening mile that you are crumbling on mile three, but not go so slow on the first mile that on the last half mile, you're looking to watch and you're like, I have so much left. Why did I not go faster earlier? it's tricky and it requires years of racing experience to get there.

Angie:

Yeah. And not just years, but repetitions, right? Like how many races did you do? It's not just about the number of years that you've run. You've run so many races. Like I've been running for a long time, but the number of races that I've done compared to you is so small. Even though, I ended if you compare, ratio wise. races.

Kevin:

I'm sure we could go to my mom's house and find the stack of my cross country numbers.

Angie:

She definitely still has them all.

Kevin:

Definitely. and it's a tall stack of bibs there. Those were, that's 5k racing history. That's a lot of racing. And then, track through high school, I would run two or three races every meet. We'd have, What? 15 meets over the course of the season because our school was big. So we had dual meets like that's a lot of races and they're all different distances, but you just learn how to race so well. Like we've been talking about this. I think we talked about it a few episodes ago. I can beat people in a 5k that on paper, I probably shouldn't be able to beat in a 5k. Yeah,

Angie:

because you know how to psychologically beat them. Yeah,

Kevin:

because if it's a high school kid and we're close, I can beat that kid. if it's close. If that kid Because

Angie:

of the strategy. Yeah, I can

Kevin:

out strategize that kid. if that kid literally can just beat me by two minutes, I can't out think that kid to the finish line. But if we're close I can probably take him.

Angie:

Yeah. And I don't think that a lot of runners necessarily think this way if they haven't been involved in things like cross country and. Competitive racing in the way that you have a lot of runners, especially the ones that listen to this podcast, who we absolutely love you guys are. I'm thinking a lot of you are probably more like me where you started to run after high school. You started to run a little bit later in your life. And so you didn't necessarily have that same competitive experience, right? So understand what race strategy even is. A lot of people are just going out there and trying to race the clock and just trying to do faster every time. And I think that's why running can feel so emotionally challenging because you start to see that number decline or increase, depending on how you look at it. And that can trigger the feelings of frustration or loss, or even that fear of oh my gosh, am I just going to keep getting slower from here on out? are my best running days behind me? And I think that this is what leads a lot of runners. Runners. When we get into this, phase of our lives into training harder and then breaking themselves, right? They see those numbers changing. They don't like the change that they're seeing. And so they train as if they were still younger and say, Oh, if I just push more, if I just do more mileage, then I'll get those times back. And that's a very dangerous way to train after

Kevin:

40. Because when you were younger, you could get away with that. if I just push a little bit more, I'll get faster that method in theory works. You can push a little bit more and you'll be able to get more out of it. It's if you squeeze the sponge a little bit more, you can get a little bit more water out of that thing.

Angie:

I'm a master at getting toothpaste. That was going to be my metaphor. I'm

Kevin:

like, Oh, I should've gone with a toothpaste. Yes. So are both of our kids. Their toothpaste tubes are empty when they toss them like they are empty. but there's, that's I think instead of the racing of what can I get, against other people, even if you're looking at the clock, you can think about maybe there's a little bit more that I can get out of this thing and trying to get more out of yourself. And a lot of people then default to pushing harder in all of their training efforts. And after the age of 40. Pushing harder in all your training efforts is not a good setup for success. that is most likely going to derail you. It's going to derail you a lot more often than it did in your twenties and thirties.

Angie:

Yeah. And so I think we have to really start thinking about our training differently. We have to think, start thinking about what improvement means, because I think for a lot of us, We equate improving with getting faster. And so we have to start to reframe this and stop focusing so much just on speed. And I'm not saying that you can't get faster. That is definitely not. So if that's what you're hearing, do not hear that at all. Okay. You can get faster after the age of 40, you can continue to get faster. That is not, you just have to train a lot differently, but. What we really want to start focusing on is strength instead of focusing just on speed when we start to focus instead on Strength and endurance and resilience all of that can definitely still improve so we have to start flipping our mindset Okay, aging doesn't mean decline aging doesn't mean I can't get better. It does not mean I can't make progress It just means Progress might look a little difference. I need to start adapting and thinking and training a lot smarter than I definitely was training before. Like what you just said, you could make stupid decisions in your training when you were younger and your body would probably adapt and. You would gain benefits. And so there's a lot of runners that were like, Oh, it used to work. Why does it not work anymore? And it's because your body's different. So you have to start doing things differently.

Kevin:

Yeah. when you're in your twenties, you can throw a lot of random training theory at your body. Some of it's Sticking, some of it is not working at all, but you just throw a bunch of it at you and you're going to be able to make some adaptations and you're probably not even sure exactly what it's coming from because you're just throwing everything at it. And because you're in your twenties, you're then also able to recover and feel fine the next day. You try and do that in your forties and fifties, you throw everything at your body. You're not getting back up.

Angie:

Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin:

Yeah. You're just, you're not like that's going to be, you might be able to get through that workout, maybe pull it for a couple of days, but it's going to go south real quick.

Angie:

Yeah. So we have to really start to shift our training to focus on longevity because I think if I asked any runner and I want you to answer this question right now to yourself, if I asked you, do you want to have a, an end to your running? What would the answer be? Like, do you want your running to end at some point? And I'm hoping that most of you listening would probably say no. So we need to start shifting to, okay, how can I increase my longevity as a runner? How can I increase my strength and my endurance and my longevity? In order to do that, we have to start focusing on different things. We can't be so obsessed with our mile splits and our paces. And instead, we have to focus more on our effort, on our strength, and our running efficiency. And where running efficiency gets really cool is what we talk about when it comes to that is that Your body requires less energy to do the same things. You become more efficient at doing the task of running and you do that by especially increasing your strength because when you increase strength, when you increase the number of muscles that you have firing at any given time, you're using up less energy and you can last longer, which is why a lot of runners see an increase in their endurance, especially as they get older as well. Yeah.

Kevin:

Yeah. you also, like you're. The one of the reality things that's happening is your muscle fibers are actually changing from like fast twitch to slow twitch It's more involved in that but to since I'm the one explaining it instead of the doctor explaining it Let's say in general your fast twitch are switching over to slow twitch fibers Which allows you to be better at endurance? but the con the flip of that is you literally are losing some of your speed and Unless you are purposely training your speed because you can purposely train it. If you don't, it really falls under the use it or lose it. So if you don't train your speed, it goes away where when you were younger, if you didn't train your speed, you're like, I'll knock out some strides and in two weeks, all of your speed is back. That's not going to work anymore.

Angie:

Yeah, you have to be much more intentional about. Everything when it comes to your training, and so that's one of the things is, and we were talking about this and we're, brainstorming over dinner tonight too. Sprinting is a very good thing for you to start incorporating as a runner over 40, but it needs to be in very small doses because if you are like, okay, I want to get faster. I'm just going to go out and I'm going to sprint every day. That'll last maybe a week if that, and then you're probably going to be hurt. You're going to be injured. You're going to be, fatigued and burnt out. Like it's just not going to work because you need to recover. Hard efforts are very good for your body. It doesn't matter what age you're at. if you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, it's still important for you to push hard sometimes. a little bit of the time. Not a lot. Most of your training should feel easy, and that is a really big shift for a lot of people to make.

Kevin:

at any age, most of your training should feel easy. But in, when you were younger, you could get away with Pushing your like medium workouts to medium hard workouts and your hard workouts to really hard workouts a lot more often Like I remember being in high school like we tended to have real hard workouts on Thursdays like the back end of the week There was a really difficult workout or if there was a race in the middle it got thrown But there was essentially one really hard workout almost every single week and you got fired up. You're like, oh, alright, it's Thursday Let's go for this thing I can't necessarily pull that off anymore. Like, when I was training on my own in my 30s, it was like, alright, hard workout on Monday, hard workout on Thursday, and then long run over the weekend. knock out a hard one, knock out a hard one, knock out a long one, get it all done. I don't have that same routine anymore. you've gotta be careful and pick and choose your training battles of Alright, I'm feeling a little tired and worn out today. So it's gonna be a speed workout, but I'm gonna reduce the volume. Or I might pull back a little bit on the intensity. It was supposed to be, I don't know, let's just make up a thing. It was supposed to be 6, 400 meters. I'm going to pull back and make it three 400 meters, and then I'll add that distance onto my cool down So I'll still have the same volume, but I won't have as much of the intensity If you've got some training years behind you, you don't need a ton of training intensity. You don't need a ton of training volume. You just need enough so that your body remembers it, so that your body can hold on to the training that it already has.

Angie:

Yeah. And I wanted to just point out what you just said here because people often get confused and they're like, that means I'm not doing enough. But what Kevin just described is the training load that you're applying to your body, you've helped to decrease, which is a good thing in this sense. if you are feeling tired and you don't have as much energy that day, you're still getting in the volume. So the mileage or the kilometers is the same, but the number of speed repetitions you're doing has decreased. So it's not as much load onto your body, which means you're going to be able to recover better from it. It means that you're also going to be able to hit those three repetitions More effectively than if you were trying to stretch it out and do all six

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean that goes for a lot of new runners Also, if you tell them that you've got a workout and you have to do ten repetitions at a certain pace They're probably gonna go out and be like, oh my god This is gonna be super hard and go out super slow on the first few Hoping that they'll be able to hang on by the time it gets to the end If you tell somebody you're only doing two reps.

Angie:

Yeah,

Kevin:

there's not a reason to hang on So you're able to actually hit the pace because it doesn't feel mentally as overwhelming.

Angie:

Yeah. And that plays a huge role that people often don't really understand, which is that how it taps into your nervous system. if you are stressed out about a workout before you even go into it, before you even take that first step or start your watch, that workout is going to be harder because you are activating. That stress response in your body, your heart rate's probably going to be higher. Your cortisol levels are going to be higher. And this is like the secret that so many runners don't understand is that really helping to regulate and manage your nervous system response affects the way that your training response like affects your training response in your body.

Kevin:

that's, I'd argue the biggest benefit of a cool down is not physically getting in a couple of miles. back in like the late nineties, people were like, you got to make sure that you move and you get a little jogging afterwards that you quote unquote flush out the lactic acid, right? that was the training philosophy. Flush out the lactic acid. That's not why Some of the biggest benefit of the cooldown is you and your friends got to talk and it changed you from workout mentality to cooldown mentality. And you got to tell me which sympathetic, parasympathetic I'm in.

Angie:

But sympathetic is fight or flight, the hard stuff. So

Kevin:

you lose, you leave sympathetic and you move over chatting with your buddies. Into parasympathetic and your body naturally flips over into restoration mode,

Angie:

right? I wouldn't say that for most people that when they're still jogging they're like getting in there But you are definitely starting to decrease your sympathetic activation, but

Kevin:

mentally you're making that flip also true And that helps the nervous system be able to say like, all we're done with the physically challenging stuff the part that like could go wrong and you may still be out there your heart rate's still a little elevated because you're still out there and running If you can do it with other people, or that's when you flip on the, you don't need the peppy music, the gung ho we're going for music, change the music mood on that one. maybe it's a podcast on the cool down that just brings you down and mellows everything out.

Angie:

There you go. I like it. Okay. So now that you start. You're starting to understand like the importance of starting to look at this differently. Part of that is starting to reframe your goals also, right? Because if your goal used to be, I want to PR in every race and you're noticing, okay, my speed is starting to slow down. Maybe the speed PRs. might be behind me. And this is what you and I have talked about with your, a lot of your PRs that you hit when you were in your teenage years. So instead of you trying to chase those PRs and think about them and being like, okay, I'm just going to do whatever I can to be as fast as I was back then, whatever it was, like in my twenties, in my thirties, in my forties, wherever you are, and you're thinking back on what you used to be able to do, we have to start reframing your goals and coming up with. Different goals because if you're just trying to PR in every race and you run that race and you cross that line and it's not a PR, how are you going to feel? You're probably going to feel frustrated. You're going to feel defeated. And then if you continue to feel that way, race after race, how joyful will running be for you? How long do you think you will continue to do it? And this is where a lot of people start to burn out because they have, The wrong goals and the wrong expectations for where they are right now, they keep in this cycle of frustration and defeat and comparison, and they're just trapped. And so it's really important for us to start shifting our goals into, okay, Maybe I'm not going to set a PR for this. Not saying that it's not possible. Again, things are still possible. But what do you want to focus on instead? And that's where the key is. Instead of focusing on the speed, the time, the pace, let's shift our focus over to, okay, how can I become better? The strongest, the most resilient runner that I've ever been, because when you start to focus on, okay, how can I get stronger? A lot of times, this is the really cool part. The speed comes along with it. And when we start to let go of our need for the numbers and the PRs and the paces, and we were like, okay, I'm just going to focus on getting stronger. I'm going to focus on feeling good. I'm going to feel us on focus on balancing my training better. All of a sudden, you unlock new levels of speed that you didn't even know you had.

Kevin:

so you can do a comparison to a previous version of yourself. Maybe it's not this, the best idea for me from a frustration level to compare my mile time to my high school mile time. I'm not getting that. Mainly Because I have no desire to get that, but I can train in a way now that is way different, way healthier than I used to. And this is a path that I've been on since 2017 of completely overhauling my training to make it the healthiest way to train while still seeing how hard I can push my body. Not can I push my body? I'll sleep when I'm dead. That's a bad choice. But how hard can I push my body? And still have some, have an outside opinion, look at what I'm doing and say, yeah, you're training as a healthy individual. They may think it's nuts how far I'm going for a run, but outside of periodic random days where I run really far distances, they would look at most of it and be like, that is a healthy lifestyle that you're living. You've got good nutrition coming in, you're sleeping appropriately, your stress levels seem to be balanced. This is an overall healthy way of living and then sometimes you run really far.

Angie:

So how do you tend to think about yourself right now then? Like when you think about,

Kevin:

I

Angie:

agree. but when you think about your goals and like what you're trying to do, what do you think about? Like, how do you set a goal? what is your kind of overarching goals? Cause you have these smaller goals of I want to run this 100 mile race, or I want to run this marathon, or those are like your smaller goals along the way, but what's your overarching goal of what you're trying to accomplish?

Kevin:

Continue pushing my body while being healthy.

Angie:

Okay.

Kevin:

That's what I'm going for. So

Angie:

strong. is there a strength in there?

Kevin:

There's a strength in there. we, the, if you caught the podcast, what last week or two weeks ago, I don't know. One of the recap things you said, what is one of your takeaways from running the a hundred? And I said, I need more strength training. And that's part of it is I a hundred percent need more strength training. It's going to help me not just run really long distances, but run for many more years, not, Oh, I knocked off these couple more hundred mile races, but now I will never be able to run again. Cause my knees don't work. I want to make sure that I can do this in a healthy way. And a huge component of that is, is the strength.

Angie:

So you're more like, I want to be the healthiest runner that I, Ever have been.

Kevin:

Yeah, the healthiest runner will still really training hard. There's a level of I think mastery to it And I think mastery is very difficult to define in the world of running I think that you talk to almost any runner after anyway, they could be setting world records And if you ask them the right questions, they can nitpick that race apart and be like, I could have done this I could have done that. So I think mastery of running and racing Is a goal that you can't ever quite get to

Angie:

I agree. It's an endless pursuit and an infinite game,

Kevin:

right? and so running has flipped to me to an infinite game as opposed to What seems like an endless series of finite games? Sure, there are races along the way There are some finite games that I get to play along the way But I see them so much more as playing and so much less pressure on the races. Yeah,

Angie:

so Bringing back that concept of an infinite game, the goal of an infinite game is to keep playing.

Kevin:

Right.

Angie:

And that, I think, is the key, right? It's not that there's some end that you're trying to get to, and I think that's what we start to realize if we're just chasing numbers and PRs, it's like, to what end? Like, when will this, when will I stop chasing this number? And not, again, not to say that it's bad to chase numbers, those numbers are fun to chase. It's fun to chase numbers. But it's how much pressure are you putting on yourself for that number? If you are Noticing that you're slowing down and that is making you feel angry or frustrated or defeated or down on yourself or not good enough, like it's time to reevaluate that goal, right? So it's time to start shifting the way that you're thinking. So instead of saying, I'm slowing down, I can't believe I'm getting slower. We can focus and shift over to, I'm training in a way that supports my longterm health and my running longevity essentially, which is what you're saying here.

Kevin:

Yeah. Running longevity seems like a great way to go for this. And we could, I could talk a good game probably a few years ago on the podcast. I probably did. I'm sure you could go back and find a podcast a few years ago. I didn't personally buy in as much to it. I theoretically bought into it. I'm like, yes, running longevity. That sounds awesome. But also how fast can I run this upcoming marathon? And I've really over more miles, you get real philosophical when races start getting double digit hours. You

Angie:

mean, I was going to say, you mean triple digits, triple digit distances,

Kevin:

double digit hours. You just, you got a long time to think about running and it's just like, how long do I want to do this? In terms of how many more years, not how many more hours do I have left in this race, but how many years do I want to keep doing this because it's enjoyable,

Angie:

probably not as enjoyable when you're at like mile 62 of your 100 mile as much.

Kevin:

No, we've covered by mile 62. I'm punchy right around mile 50. I'm a giant a hole.

Angie:

47 is the worst. I think that's the one. So we just have to start thinking about this. And I would invite all of you to start to redefine what. What progress means for you as a runner and what does strength mean for you as a runner? what does it mean to be a stronger runner? If you right now in your mind is a stronger runner means I'm faster. Okay. Is that the definition you want to keep after you hear this? Because you can totally keep that definition or do you want to start to shift it to. A stronger runner means that I am focusing on improving my endurance, my strength and my overall performance. My, becoming a stronger runner is actually learning how to train smarter and get better results with less training. that's a cool definition, right? we can start to define these things however we want to because there's not one correct way.

Kevin:

I think that we've got, I know we have some clients, I'm sure we have some listeners also that may be inspired possibly by some craziness that I've done, that they're like, how far could I run? And that doesn't necessarily mean how far can I run and can I do it as fast as possible because there's a point where it's I've run a marathon, so I've covered 26 miles, but the race that I want to run is 50 miles, 60 miles, 75, but like some crazy does a hundred miles. The pace is no longer the first thing that you're looking at. we talk to train people all the time. First time they do a marathon, it's like. Is your goal a number on a clock or is your goal to cross the finish line? And almost all of them are like, I want to cross the finish line. And there may be a number in the back of their head that's yeah, that'd be neat, but it's so much lower on the priority list. So it's just, it's interesting to go out and do things. like you love having that mindset of curiosity. As we age as runners, having a curious mindset of, what if I trained in a different way and tried to, maximize the benefits out of lower training. can I improve my running efficiency and train less and still be able to run at the same level?

Angie:

Yeah. And I think that's a really cool thing. And this is one of the things that even my business coach challenges us on. what do you want your business to look like? Do you want to work every day? Do you want to work four days a week? Do you want to wait? Work, work three days a week, like what kind of life do you want to live and how can you build your business to support that and how, like, how can you achieve the results that you want within the boundaries in the confines of the business that you're choosing here? So it's okay, I want to be able to work. 20 hours a week or 30 hours a week, and I want to be able to make X amount of dollars. Okay, what is that going to require? And so that we can look at our running the same way, which is super cool. It's okay, I want to be able to run a half marathon. I want to be able to go out on my with my friends every Saturday morning and run double digits. I want to be able to do X, Y or Z. Here's the results I want. How can I be most efficient with my training in order to do that so that I'm not just like gassed and exhausted all week long?

Kevin:

Or maybe there's a certain number of running days that you want to do. I like to run every other day. maybe that's something that you want. that doesn't mean how many days per week, because if you run every other day, you're going to run three days, one week and for the next, I like to run five or six days out of the week. So I need to train. Outside of those running windows, I need to train in a way that allows me to continue to run five or six days out of the way, which means I need to figure out, do I need to cut a run short so that I can increase the amount of strength training on that day? Because I can't just run six days. I could pull this off when I was a little bit younger by high school, younger before I started really upping the mileage. And then my knees got all screwy because. I was fine at lower mileage, but now running six days out of the week is a decent amount of volume. I need enough strength training that my body can handle six days of running a week.

Angie:

It's so funny. Like you and I are just so different. Like you're like, how can I? Maximize the number of running days that I'm able to stay healthy with.

Kevin:

I thought it was, it's like the opposite. Cause you mentioned the business one. Now, most people are like, can I run a business and only work three days a week? I'm like, can I have a run where I still go six days a week?

Angie:

But it's true. And there are runners that are like you that just love going out for a run. that is a very relaxing part of their day. They want to be able to have that. The number of days there, and then there are other runners like me that would say, okay, I still want to be able to accomplish these things on the least amount of running days possible, because I like to focus on doing other things. I like strength training. I like yoga. There's other things that I like to incorporate in my fitness routine outside of running. And so I still love running and I want to keep it. As a part of my fitness routine, but okay, how can I still maximize the benefits in as little time as possible,

Kevin:

right? And that's why you need both of us on the podcast. We got a very different angles coming at

Angie:

this, and I think that there's definitely listeners that can relate to both of us. the last thing we really want to talk about is one of the most major shifts that I want you to start making, especially if you are a woman out there. Okay, so I am

Kevin:

Not only woman, just to contribute.

Angie:

Okay. Yeah, I'm just going to

Kevin:

put that in there. You continue.

Angie:

Alright, I want to, I would love to hear more of your perspective on this because Most of us over 40, most of us women over 40, were raised with the idea of being smaller is better. I want to get skinnier. It's one of the reasons that I started running. If I'm being totally honest, I wanted to lose weight. I wanted to be skinnier. I wanted to look like a quote unquote a runner, right? And running was that way for me to try to get skinny or stay skinny rather than a way to build power. And research Continues to show us that muscle is that key to longevity to metabolism and to injury prevention. And this is why you guys have probably noticed we've, we always talked about strength training on the podcast, but obviously our podcast. Now we're on year eight, like we've completed seven years of the podcast. We're now in our eighth year on the podcast. And so during our time on the podcast, both of us have turned 40 and we're now into our forties. And I'm really starting to dig so much more into the science of longevity, right? And of making sure that I am staying strong and avoiding any sort of potential disability in the future. And so after 40, we really need to start shifting our focus to muscle preservation and building more muscle. Because that is not only key for running longevity, but it also is key just for our health in general. Because We start losing muscle mass after the age of 30 at the rate of about 3 to 8 percent per decade if we don't do anything about it. And if we're running too much, if we're, if we are just pushing ourselves really hard on our runs, if we're not strength training, that's actually going to accelerate our muscle loss. A lot of people think that running makes them stronger, and that's not true. Running can make you physically or mentally stronger, but Physically, if you are not balancing your running and your strength training, it can actually start to weaken your muscles. Because if you're running too much, if you're pushing too hard, you can actually be breaking your muscles down in that process. You can be breaking your bones down in that process, especially if you're not giving yourself good nutrition. And so we really have to start focusing and shifting from wanting to be skinny, wanting to lose weight. Into I want to be strong, I want to build stronger muscles, stronger bones I want to build and so this is one of the topics that we talked about in our most recent five day challenge is shifting from skinny to strong and from losing to building instead of thinking about losing weight, especially as those of us start to notice, weight gain from menopause and from the hormone changes that we're experiencing, there's a lot of women that are noticing that menopause belly and other weight gain, especially around the stomach area. And so Most women I see shift back into that diet mentality of I just have to start restricting I have to start exercising more and that can make your hormones even worse. And so we really have to start shifting our focus to building muscle building bone because again. The same way we were talking about earlier of how, when we start to shift our focus, we might actually get the results that we want. That's what's going to happen here as well. If we shift our focus away from being skinny and away from losing weight and focus instead on building muscle and getting stronger, you will most likely lose weight in the process. So it's like that unintended byproduct or, desired byproduct just by changing your focus on things.

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean my goal again, let's go back to running longevity You say that you know most many women over 40 were raised the idea of this like the skinny mentality in culture Okay, there's a subset of men whose heroes were Olympic athlete runners. You look at runners in the 90s There was very little variation in body You look at the most recent Olympics, and you're like, Ooh, that runner's he's a little thicker. She's a little thicker. And then you look at him standing next to a normal person, and you're like, Oh, never mind, they're tiny. But there's at least some variation. Back in the 90s, it was literally, it was a race to how light could you get. The runners who looked stronger were very few and far between. And so the posters and the pictures and the magazine cutouts that I had up on my wall in high school, those dudes were rails. And so I was like, that's where, I would like to be as fast as them, so that's the look that I'm going for. That's

Angie:

what my body needs to look like. This is

Kevin:

what, this is the aim. And was it worse on the female cross country team? I'm sure it was. I went to an all guys school, but research suggests that it was drastically worse on the female side. But it was certainly there in small subcultures of male side of society. Now I'm looking at people that I'm still looking at, running heroes that I'm looking towards and they're running stupidly far distances and doing incredibly fast. They're all strong. Like you can notice muscles off of them. They're not huge because there's still, it's still a group of, skinny runners out there, but you can see a whole heck of a lot more muscle definition. And even on the top athletes in the Olympics, you can see muscles defined. It's a different look than 20, 30 years ago.

Angie:

Yeah, you're right. And I think that's because a lot of the trainers and the elite athletes, the professionals, and obviously the scientific research is showing us that strength training. It actually improves our speed, our endurance, our metabolism. And so women, especially over 40, when we're in perimenopause and menopause, if you lift heavier weights, you maintain more muscle and more bone density than people that don't lift heavier weights that don't do the resistance training. And so it's this shift of okay, I've got this new identity of this person. I don't want to be this skinny runner anymore. I want to be a strong, resilient. Athlete, a runner that is athletic, that is strong, that can do whatever she wants. And so that's really what you have to ask yourself, is who do you want to be? which one of these do you want to be? Do you want to be a runner who is always looking back to the past and chasing your past? Or do you want to be a runner who's building a future and looking ahead to see, okay, how can I be the strongest? The most, not most enduring version of myself, but right? the most enduring, sure. Most enduring. what if races wasn't just about your time, but how you felt crossing that finish line, crossing the finish line, feeling stronger and energized and unstoppable because when you start to focus on strength, running not only gets easier, but it's a lot more fun.

Kevin:

Yeah. And You can cross the finish line and feel like you're super strong. You can cross the finish line and feel like you gave it your all and you're like, you're collapsing to the ground. And while there might be a different number on the clock, the feeling of crossing a 5k, when you raced a 5k well, like you just know. And the more years that you run, the less you care what that number on the clock says, because crossing the line, whether you legitimately raced the 5k or not, regardless of what the number on the clock says. And that's why. The more you do it, the more it's Oh, it was windy and rainy. And whatever the thing is, it doesn't matter when you cross the finish line, you physically know the clock is irrelevant. if you raced a 5k or if you took it easy on yourself, if you went out too fast and you burned up at the back end, I don't need to know what the clock says. I can tell you whether or not I ran an effective 5k. I'm curious what that feels like as I run more. hundred miles because I'm not sure what that feels like if I did it well or not, but I can tell you at the finish line of 5k if it went well, regardless of what the number on the clock says.

Angie:

Yeah. And I absolutely love that. So as a little recap of like the three main shifts that we talked about in this podcast, number one, focus on strength, not speed. Okay. You need as a runner, you need to be resistance training. Two to three times per week. Okay. That is essential. It is no longer optional for you. It really never was, a lot of us, a lot of us never thought about it. And like we said, multiple times you could get away with it before you can't get away with it anymore. It's absolutely essential. Crucial. You have to be strength training and you have to be doing so in a way that's right for a runner. I think that's another piece that we really don't have time to get into today, but. runner specific strength training. Yes, regular strength training is good. But if you have goals to improve as a runner, you can make your strength training more effective also. Okay. And there's more effective and less effective ways to strength train. So working on hill running and sprints can also really help you to improve your strength as a runner and then shifting from the focus on weight loss or on getting skinnier or smaller to Muscle, building more muscle and fueling your body for the activities that you want to do.

Kevin:

Yeah, when you mention that hill running and sprint intervals, it's making sure that you know why you're doing the workouts, that you're actually getting the benefit out of the workout, and that you're not just throwing miles in for the sake of miles. Once you've been running for enough years, cross training is super beneficial because it increases It allows you to maintain the cardio without the pounding of running, and if you can do some speed stuff on hills, it also reduces the impact of the pounding because you're on a hill. make sure that you're still actually doing the hard stuff. But do it intelligently.

Angie:

Absolutely. The second shift we talked about is to really rethink and redefine what progress looks like for you now. Okay. So tracking how you feel, not just what your paces are, not just what those numbers are celebrating better recovery, more energy and endurance over. Just raw pace and then starting to let go of comparison to your past self training for the runner that you are today and the runner that you want to be in the future. I think that's really important. And then the third main shift we talked about is really starting to define that new running identity of what kind of runner. Are you now? What kind of runner do you want to be right now? do you want to think of yourself as an older, slower runner? Or do you want to think of yourself as a stronger, resilient, powerful runner because you have that option as well. And when you stop chasing that older version of yourself, it allows you to step into the new version, the athlete that you want to be, that you have the potential to be. And that is just so much more fun, don't you think?

Kevin:

It's funny. It allows you to use the experience and use your intelligence as a runner, your history as a runner, your knowledge of running in a way that you're not used to. So you're not getting older, you're getting smarter and stronger. The experience allows you to train and race in far more effective ways and not waste time doing things that are not really all that beneficial to you.

Angie:

Yeah. And focus more on joy.

Kevin:

Yeah, always joy.

Angie:

Always the joy. Like I, we had our team call the other day and it was just so wonderful. People were like, I was out of my run today and I just was focusing on the birds. Like the beauty of nature around me, like the songs of the birds, like how cool is that? Like we can, there's joy all around us. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about getting older is like you start to see the So much more joy around you if you start to pay attention to it. And I think that we start to shift more to that as we get older, too. Yeah.

Kevin:

It's always there. We're just able to see it now.

Angie:

Yeah. that's more along that, being wiser, smarter and wiser. Yes. There you go. All right. So if you guys liked this episode, I would absolutely love for you to reach out to us on Instagram at real life runners, leave us a review on Apple podcasts, share this podcast with a friend. By you sharing, by you leaving a review, you are helping us spread this message. You are helping us to help more runners to start to make these shifts and get away from injury and get away from frustration and defeat and find more joy in their running. And isn't that something that you want to be a part of? By you leaving us a review, you sharing this podcast with other people, that's what you're doing. You're helping us to spread more joy in the world. And I think. I would love for you to be a part of that. So as always, thanks for being here. This is the real life runners podcast, episode number 396. Now get out there and run your life.