Like Wine or Cheese: How to Improve with Age

By TERRY LAUGHLIN


I have competed in Masters and Open Water swimming since 1988, when I was 37. My times that first season were encouraging, considering it followed a 16-year layoff from organized swim training. I improved each year through 1992, when I posted my best Masters results at age 41. I was excited about how close those were - within five percent - to college times I had posted more than 20 years earlier, especially considering that I was also 30 lbs heavier than in college and training only about half as much. Research has suggested that physical capacity declines about one percent per year in the average adult, but this decline is halved in adults who maintain a vigorous exercise program. So I had effectively decreased that rate of decline by another 50 percent, by giving up only five percent of performance in 20 years – all due to improvements in efficiency.

For the next 13 years I continued training with reasonable consistency, and continued improving my technique steadily, yet I experienced a slight age-related decline in performance over time – a more modest decline than virtually all my fellow Masters. But two months ago – on the verge of turning 55 - I suddenly saw my practice and race times improve markedly to the point where I'm now swimming faster than I have in 12 years.

What's most surprising about this is that I've spent much of the past two years recovering or rehabbing from two surgeries and an assortment of sports injuries - from weight lifting, mountain biking and winter sports but not swimming. My experience with middle-aged frailty isn’t particularly unusual. What is unusual is getting faster rather than slower as it happens.

My conclusion is that – as swimmers – we have an opportunity to turn a period of physical limitation into an advantage. In middle age, it’s reasonable to expect that various physical complaints will occasionally limit our ability to train. Being able to transform injury into opportunity during those periods would certainly be an exciting prospect. So here are the lessons I’ve learned recently that have convinced me this can be so.

During the extended periods (two stretches of four to five months in the past 14 months) when I've been unable to do any intensive physical work – i.e. such as the usual swimmer’s staple of timed repeat sets - I’ve replaced harder work with "examined" swimming.

For instance, last August 4th, just a few weeks after swimming the fastest
2-Mile open water race of my life…which itself came just five months after surgery for a ruptured biceps tendon, I suffered a separated shoulder in a tumble from my mountain bike – the same shoulder I’d had surgically repaired. From then through the end of the year I did no Masters workouts. Beginning in late September, however, I swam two to three hours a week in the Endless Pool in the TI Swim Studio in New Paltz, virtually always with the current set at a rather gentle level.

During this period, my primary goal was to use gentle swimming motions to rebuild strength and stability in my shoulder. But these low-pressure movements also proved ideal for cultivating a key part of the stroke. TI Coach Bob Wiskera described the art of trapping water at the beginning of a stroke as akin to “catching moonbeams.” That’s an apt description for how my stroke felt during this period, more like a jeweler than a laborer. Using force is not an option while rehabbing a separated shoulder; instead I employed finesse and felt a significant gain in my ability to begin each stroke effectively.

After registering for the 28.5-mile Manhattan Island Marathon I returned to Masters workouts in early January and, after a day or two of feeling my way back into group workouts, was delighted to find that a 4-month layoff seemed to have cost me nothing as I began matching my usual practice times the first week. Two weeks later I was swimming with more efficiency and speed than I had in several years. Even yet another injury – badly bruised ribs suffered in a fall – didn’t slow me down. Swimming in a Masters meet on January 28, just a week after bruising my ribs, I experienced breathtaking pain during warmup, yet still swam the fastest 1000-yard freestyle I’d done since 1998, finishing in 12:41. On the drive home I also realized that, though my ribs hurt as much during my post-race swimdown as they had during warmup, I could recall no awareness of pain during the race itself – my mental focus had become so keen as a result of several months of training that emphasized mental, rather than physical, exertion that my concentration on form during the race had completely blocked pain sensations.

Since 1998 I have swum six 1000-yard races, with all my finish times ranging from 12:41 to 12:51. I’ve also swum five 1650-yard or 1500-meter races in times that ranged from 21:30 to 21:36. In itself, that remarkable consistency is a testimony to how a focus on technique can help maintain one’s performance level year after year. On March 4th, I swam a 1650 in 20:59, during which my final 1000 (from 650 to 1650) was 12:35. On March 18, at the New England Masters Championships I swam the 1650 in 20:15, with a split of 12:19 for the first 1000 and 12:12 for the final 1000 yards. So my hopes for the US Masters National Championship May 11-14 are quite high.

What lessons have I learned from this experience? While my physical capabilities will inescapably decline with age – and I do all I reasonably can to minimize that decline - my self-awareness and "physical wisdom" should only increase. And the last few months have revealed something that I find an unprecedented source of optimism as a middle-aged athlete: I now believe that, to a far greater extent in water than on land,
an increase in awareness can more than compensate for a decrease in aerobic capacity, strength, etc. Because water is such an unstable and uncooperative medium it provides a truly unique set of challenges for
applying our fitness, power, etc.

While I have focused intensively on technique for the last 16 years, and seen ceaseless improvements in efficiency and control, I believe the last two years of “training constraints” have taken me beyond simply "working on technique" to a prolonged period of solving the problems presented to a human body by an aquatic medium. I've never felt so dialed in and can do just about anything I want in the pool now. That ought to be an inspiring thought for those of us whose physical peak is a couple of decades behind us.

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