Tyson Popplestone (00:00.462)
Yeah, so I wrote the book in 2014 and I realized it's probably time to take a look at it again and sure enough I decided just to rewrite the entire thing. So there's nine chapters and I'm working on chapter number four right now. I hope to have it done here by midsummer or so. And I'm really pleased that we've got some cool things we're done with it this time, the publisher and me, which I think is going to make it a really much better book than ever was before. The information will still be
will still be deep, but I'm gonna change the information, not do the same stuff again. It touches on the same thing, but it's presented entirely differently now. So anyway, it's a good time to talk about that book. That's interesting. Yeah, I've been, it's so interesting to see online how much interest there is in this particular topic. Like, fast after 50 for anyone who missed that at the very start there. But the master's conversation seems to be one that
Well, I just noticed through emails and things that I get people explaining what part of their career that they're in. It's very few elite and mostly people who have started running later in life or have just started to really enjoy it and just asking questions around how it is to actually plan and structure. So I was like, all right, let's dedicate a whole one towards that. But I mean, just for my own curiosity, what are a couple of the big changes that have taken place in the book? Like you said, it wasn't so much the information as the structure. Is that right?
Yeah, we've changed the structure considerably. The information has changed a little bit, but there's not been that much change in the details of turning old as an athlete. But the structure of book has changed dramatically. For example, one of big changes I've made is I started reaching out to try to find athletes who were in their 50s and 60s who are amazing athletes. So I've come up with this list of world-class
runners, cyclists, Nordic skiers, swimmers, growers, just amazing. Once I started looking for people, they started coming to me. It's just amazing the people I've come up with, what they've accomplished, know, and they're, you know, one guy, for example, from, just to give you example, he's Greek, so they're from several countries. This guy is from Greece. He's around his age, I think he's like 54, 55 years old.
Tyson Popplestone (02:24.534)
He won his age group at Ironman Hawaii in World Championship last year for that age group. He also that same year ran a 228 marathon and he also that year won an ultra marathon for his age group. This guy is just typical of the people I found. So I'm have a short piece like a one page, two page piece about each of these athletes. There's like 16 of them.
feature in the book and I call them super masters. They're just people who are doing things that are really remarkable. So I'm trying to find out how they train, how they eat, how they sleep, what their lifestyle is like, what's behind all this for these unique athletes. That's one of the focuses of the book which is unique. It wasn't done anything like that in the previous book.
And so that's an interesting foundation because without giving away too much of the content of the new book, I was keen to fit your brain around some of those topics. there's so many different points in this conversation that you could start. But I mean, as a potentially a bit of a scaffold for the start of the conversation, like the idea of some standout points around training with some of these elite athletes is really interesting because often
When I think of a 53 year old athlete, I'm rarely thinking of someone running a 228 marathon. And even hearing that, it like opens up a can of worms as to how much potential is in the tank. And it's exciting for athletes who may have started later as well. Like, I'm not sure if you've got a good point to start that conversation from, or if there's a real standout feature around training or recovery or rest or nutrition. Maybe we could launch one of those.
There is so much. example, let's just take one that's always, know, for all age groups is an issue, but especially I think becomes an issue for 50 plus, is the issue of intensity and training. How hard should your workouts be? You know, duration is no problem at all to figure out. Frequency is not a big deal. But intensity is really the thing that kind of messes everybody up. It's hard to get it right.
Tyson Popplestone (04:42.854)
And it's getting, I think actually in some ways it's getting more difficult because of all the all the wearable devices we have right now, plus, you know, power meters, all kinds of stuff that we have on the market. athletes can monitor their intensity while they're in the midst of a workout or a race without any problem whatsoever. But it used to be not too many years ago, well a few decades ago, guess now probably going back to the 1970s before any of stuff showed up.
Everybody did it by how they felt. And we started reading a perceived exertion. That was kind of key. And so one thing that I deal with with athletes anymore is now the athletes falling together, they've kind of lost what this feeling of perceived exertion is. They don't think about that anymore at all. They look at their wrists to see what the heart rate is, or they look at their handlebars to see the power meter says. That's the sort of stuff they look at and they take that as being
essentially how they feel, how they're doing. But really it's inside. It's what am I experiencing right now? That is the key issue, which we've kind of lost. And so I always kind of bring that up when I'm talking with athletes and that's for sure part of this book is that you've got to pay attention to how you feel. That's just as important, fact, more important than all the numbers that you can possibly produce from all your wearables. The most critical element is how are you feeling right now?
What does that mean in terms of performance, in terms of recovery, in terms of health? It's all kinds of things that go into how you feel. We've kind of gotten away from that. So that's where I am with one part of the book is really bringing that up as a critical point. Along that same line, another point is I find the masters athletes, fall into, when it comes to intensity, they fall into two categories. One category is that all they want to do is long, slow distance.
They're just going to go out and put in a long run, a long bike ride, whatever it may be. Just going do something long and slow. And that's all they want to do every day. Then there's another category, which is a little bit more competitive, and they believe the way to get faster is to do something somewhat hard every day. So if the workout calls for zone two, they're going to do zone three. If it calls for zone three, they're going to do zone four.
Tyson Popplestone (07:08.75)
They're always going to make it a little bit harder than it needs to be because they think that is the path to performance. So I've got these two categories of people in this age group. The second category is more like younger athletes. All this only run slow is probably more along the lines of what you find with older athletes. So I've got these two categories of athletes. And so that's one of my problems in dealing with athletes in this book is how do I make the point?
that there's a balance between these two. It's not one or the other. It's a little bit of both. And so I did a talk to a group here a while back and one of the points I brought up was what should your training be like in terms of intensity? Should it be all hard, all easy, mostly hard or mostly easy? And don't tell me the answer to that question yet. Just kind of put in the back of your mind what the answer is.
Then let's go through the whole idea of the physiology of fitness. What happens? How's this come about? Especially endurance fitness. And then at the very end, I say, now what do you think is the answer to that question? Which is the thing? And almost everybody agreed with me at this point, but the answer really is, it turns you mostly easy. You can turn it mostly easy and occasionally hard. It's kind of like that stuff that Stephen Seiler talks about with the 80-20 polarized.
rule. That's kind of the concept. And so that's where I'm trying to get masters athletes to go is to that. So I kind of bring that only want to run slow and easy all the time up to do a little bit of testing. And I want to bring the people who want to do testing all the time down and do a lot more easy stuff. So I'm trying to bring the two together into a happy medium to get more performance out of athletes. Yeah, it's a it's really interesting to hear that dynamic. It sounds like something that
is perhaps evidence that I'm starting to move towards being a master's athlete. I'm 37, Joe nearly 38. And one of the things after a few years away from competitive running that I've noticed is obviously I have to be a little patient with the return to the sport. And so for maybe the last 18 months, I've had a lot more of a focus on training mostly easy in the sense that when I first returned to running, I trained like I did in
Tyson Popplestone (09:34.254)
2014, I'd never really had an injury. And so I was probably under equipped to effectively deal with injuries. But naturally I came out, trained like I used to and immediately just started getting calf strains and dealing with little niggles. And so I went to a period of training mostly easy or probably all easy that that first class of athlete you're talking about where it was just long, slow distance without any intensity really just building up quite slowly.
But then I realized that as my body started to become stronger, my performance had pretty much plateaued. And so I've started over the last 12, 18 months to inject a lot more what's trying to be specific speed working. And I find the balance has been interesting, but I find just the way that that faster running correlates to the longer, slower running is always beneficial, whether it's like mental or actually physiological. I feel better running at a faster pace with
less effort, but I always assume that masters athletes, this is probably a big assumption because there'd be so many new masters athletes, but in my mind, a masters athlete is one who's been through all those mistakes I just spoke about and are now older and responsible and know that perfect balance between those two things. So it's interesting to hear that it's still a theme amongst competitive master athletes that they're trying to figure out what that best balance for their own goals is.
Yeah, it's an ongoing battle, think for all ages, but I find especially so for the older athletes, the masters, they seem to be a little bit confused on how to do it. you know, what they're thinking is, the person wants to run all slow all the time. They're doing this because they enjoy it. It's fun. They're probably not so concerned about their performance, although they would like to run the faster 10 K or whatever.
But they're really doing this because they find it very relaxing in the long term. know, post-workout and so forth, you sweep better and so forth. Everything fits together very nicely. And that's great. No problems whatsoever. I like to see that. People think that, you know, the purpose they should be doing something that's harder all the time is because that makes sense. If you really want to perform, you need to push yourself to perform. You need to push yourself hard. This is the way...
Tyson Popplestone (11:58.286)
When I was a kid back in the 1950s, that's the way, when they made movies about athletes, that's what they always had the athlete doing, is doing something remarkably, very, very difficult every day, every week, every month, every year. And eventually they became Olympians. That was the way the movie projected athletes back in that period of time. That's where these people still are today. I'm gonna be hard, I'm gonna be fast. I've gotta work on being fast every day.
I just can't take a day off from working to be fast. I gotta work, I gotta push myself all the time. And so consequently, you know, it's hard to change both of them because what they're both doing makes sense in one case to the way they feel and the other case to what they believe. But neither one is exactly right. You know, there's room for both. So that's one of the points that I'm trying to make in the book. And I'm building that up. One of the things that I talked about in this book, one of the chapters,
was a something called what I call that chapter is paleo trinity paleo refers to stone age paleolithic and that's one of my interests in in life outside of sport is anthropology and so I spent a lot time reading about paleolithic peoples and there are still a few left in the world today
And so I wrote about a group of these paleolithic tribe in Paraguay. A guy back in the 1990s wrote a book about a professor from the University of New Mexico, I believe. And he went to Paraguay and eventually started living with these stone-aged people. He's a runner himself, and he wanted to see what their lifestyle was like, what they did.
throughout the day, how and what they ate, all this kind of stuff, to sleep, all that jazz. So he wrote a book about what he's discovered. He spent 30 years living with it, the 1960s on up. And 30 years of his life devoted to following these people. So he wrote this book, this little thick book about what's called the Ache, A-C-H-E, people apparently. And he talks about, he describes their lifestyle. He basically described an endurance athlete's lifestyle.
Tyson Popplestone (14:17.986)
the way it should be with this 80-20 concept. They go hunting, for example, at the start of the day. And they start out very, very slowly. They're trying to find where the animals may be that they're trying to capture. And this may take them an hour or two hours just to find the animals. So all this is really slow. It's walking, jogging, really slow, nothing fast whatsoever. Then when they finally find the animal they're looking for, they've got to run it to exhaustion.
Because humans are probably the most, one of the most endurance-abled athletes or world animals, I should say, on the planet. We are great at endurance. We're actually terrible at speed. You can take the fastest 100-meter athlete in the world and ever him up against almost any other animal in the world, and the animals will always win a 200-meter dash.
You know, we're just very, very slow, but we have great endurance. Almost no animal in the world has the endurance we have. Horses have great endurance and a few others, but we're in this rare group of endurance athletes. So what these Ache people did was they would finally find the animal, then they would start chasing it. And then we just run it into the ground. They may chase for another hour until the animal finally fatigues, and now they've got their kill. They've got their meal for the day.
So they had to spend at the very end, spend some time sprinting to get to this animal. And that's basically the 80-20 rules, what that's describing. Then they carry it back to wherever the tribe is meeting. And so now they have to carry with the animal. It may weigh 300, 400 pounds. They may cut it into pieces, but they still got big weights they've got to carry. And so they get some strength turning in it. And when they get back to the tribe, then now they'll bring in water for the tribe.
They find ways to carry water and they got to carry that back from the stream or a lake or whatever maybe close by. So there's all the stuff that they do that is basically the athlete's lifestyle. They were living our lifestyle, decades, millennia before we'd ever thought of doing this stuff. They were already doing it. So I try to use that as a point to explain that we have the genetics of Stone Age people. We are meant to live just like these people live.
Tyson Popplestone (16:45.294)
We are not meant to sit in front of a TV or a computer all day long and push buttons. We're meant to be out running, doing something with motion to it. And that's one the first things I do in the book is talk about these people. And then I begin to bring out how that applies to you as an athlete. What does this mean? How does this mean for you to live your life? Because you are basically, I made the point that
We live in what's now called the Neolithic period, which means new Stone Age, farming. When new Stone Age started about 12,000 years ago, it was farmers and people settled in villages, no longer out hunting and gathering food. Now they began to grow their food and raise animals. And so consequently, their lifestyle began to change. But that's only been, if you look at the history of man, that's only been like the last 30 seconds.
more time on the planet. you think about 24 hour clock, it represents the entire time that hominids have been on this planet which is humans. So I've been just for a few seconds that we've been doing the neolithic period. So where we've been, what we're doing is really brand new. We're still in this brand new phase and we're still adapting to this. We're still Stone Age. We're still meant to be runners. We're still meant to be outside doing things, lifting heavy objects.
moving things all the time, not just sitting under your butt watching a TV. So I'm trying to make that point in the book so I can, when I get to the point about intensity and you know easy and hard and so forth, I can relate back to what the Aceh people did. This is how they lived. This is how you're meant to live. So that's kind of what I'm doing with the book which is fun. For me it's fun. I'm hoping the readers like it too but I'm having a great time writing about it.
Yeah, for me, it's fun to hear about as well. I'm trying to think of this guy's name, Abdi Abdenerim or something, I'll butcher his name. He's a British journalist and he wrote a book called Running with the Kenyans. And the story goes that, yeah, it was a really, really good book. But the story goes that in his late thirties, he made the move from the UK to Kenya to see if there was one last shot at running improvement. And he went there.
Tyson Popplestone (19:05.058)
And essentially just delved into the world of, hey, what is it that these Kenyan athletes are doing so effectively? And naturally there is a whole heap of things. But what I found really interesting was almost all of the best Kenyans that he was training with. So the best of the best in terms of Kenyan runners was that so many of them were coming from like a farming background and their lifestyle was obviously different to what you just explained with the Paleolithic people to an extent.
But the amount of time they were spending on feet, that combination of endurance and strength training through, whether it was moving hay or moving water to moving animals, as a foundation to actually launch from being a child in that environment to being 15 and going, okay, now I'm gonna pursue this running training career. Not only the sort of ability to handle the discomfort that comes with endurance training, but just that functional fitness that they would have.
being able to bring to their actual endurance training, he believes was a really key factor in what was such a standout point for so many of these athletes. So it's interesting that, you know, whether you're looking at Paleolithic or whether you're looking at this small example of a small group of Kenyans, there does seem to be a real crossover between, okay, like this functional endurance-based strength lifestyle seems to correlate really good with endurance performance. Yeah, it certainly does. You know, you go back to their lifestyle,
is the Kenyan lifestyle is very much like the Paleolithic lifestyle. know, as children, how did they get around? They walked and ran every place. There was no cars, basically. I grew up, I had bison like to get around town on. I had to walk to school every day because there wasn't any place to park your bike at school back in those days. But I had to walk to school. It's probably maybe a mile, mile and half, something like that one way.
So got in two or three miles of ages walking to school and back. And that's what the Kenyans do throughout their entire childhood. They're walking every place they go. They walk to the grocery stores and so forth. And I looked back on that when I was a kid and I thought it was horrible that I had to do all that walking. But looking back on it now, thought, gosh, this is a great thing actually. Now the kids, there's a grade school by near our house, just a couple of blocks away. And they don't have any school buses. This is a rather...
Tyson Popplestone (21:30.208)
elite group of wealthy families, their families bring them to school every day. There's this long line of cars going to school every day. And you know, there's nothing like that else. You don't see that really anyplace else in the world. People, most other places, walk to where they're going.
These kids probably don't have to walk more than maybe at the very most half mile to two miles, certainly by the houses are arranged here. they, you know, none of do that. They all are driven to the school. And, you know, I was lucky that it didn't have that happen. My parents never drove me to school. I always walked. But when I finally turned 16, I got my own car and that was the end of walking. And that's kind of the way it is in our society. You know, when you finally get the age where you can have a driver's license, you're done with all this other stuff.
riding bicycles and walking and so forth, you're now going to be driving yourself every place you go. Yeah. I know there'd be such a range of athletes, say for the purpose of this conversation, above the age of 40, who have lived the exact lifestyle, that modern lifestyle where it's been a little bit of luxury, it's been a little bit easier, that foundation of fitness that we naturally built up, you know, however many years ago is just no longer a part of our daily routine.
And so they come into running as like a form of exercise to build fitness or to see improvement or whatever it might be. But as a result, they don't necessarily have like a functional strength or any real foundation to build upon. And so the natural niggles and injuries that come along with that would I'm sure be a key factor for so many of these athletes. Is that something that's been a standout with, you know, for the sake of your book, like the fast over 50 crew?
there'd be such different groups of people making an entrance into the sport. Yeah, people come from all sorts of backgrounds and to endure sports as with all sports. And that's what I want to find out from these elite masters athletes is how they came to the sport. So all kinds of things I want to find out about these people because there's something about them that is different. you know, maybe the
Tyson Popplestone (23:47.522)
their lifestyle as we just discussed and maybe the fact that they grew up doing this their entire lives. Walking and running and riding their bikes and all this kind of stuff to get from point A to point B. But I don't know yet. We're still in the early stages of doing this. haven't started the interview process yet. All I've done is just try to find out as much as I can about each athlete. The basic information, know, what have you accomplished? What's your age? You know, lots of little things like that.
And now I've got to dig into it and find out the details of what's going on with these people. So I hope to be able, by the time I'm done with this, say, is what I found with elite masters athletes. This is what they all seem to have in common. There may not be anything. There may be totally different lifestyles, but I suspect we're going to find something unique about the way they lived their lives growing up. Yeah. I was going to ask you if there's anything that you're anticipating seeing. So perhaps...
like the way they live their lives growing up. Is there anything else that you would think would be a standout point going in before the interview process even takes place? Yeah, it could be things like, know, sleep. You know, has that ever been an issue for them? Or nutrition, what do they eat? What's their diet like? know, stress on their lives.
Some people, book, when I'm writing this book right now, I know a of these people I'm writing to are 50 something athletes. A lot of them are in leadership positions in the companies they work at. They may even be the owners. That's not unusual. By the time you're in your 50s, you're usually in a leadership role. And that begins to change your lifestyle considerably. And so I'm addressing that issue too. How do we deal with this idea that you've got the world on your shoulders every day?
because you're trying to run this company, how do you deal with that and still be an athlete, still be able to train like you should? And so I try to explain things that I've discovered along the way with topics like that. How do you deal with stress? And it's not an easy topic. It's a difficult topic, but it's the sort of thing that think a lot of 50s experience because of just the fact that you're 50 something years old, you're usually in a leadership position.
Tyson Popplestone (26:09.376)
How much has your training changed post 50 compared to pre 50? What were some of the standout features to you in terms of how, like were there noticeable differences in how your body responds to training or how athletes that you're coaching respond to certain styles of training? Like I know we touched on the start about intensity versus volume and that's one that seems to be a real key conversation at many age groups these days between like the Norwegian method and.
like the 80-20 principle and a couple of things that we've already touched on? doubt. Yeah, I'm 81 years old. So I've been around for a while doing these sorts of things. started when I was 12 years old, I started running. And so I'm track teams in junior high, high school, college. Continued after that to run, up cycling, took up triathlon.
got a knee injury which limited my running. So I'd stop running, which meant the end of triathlon. So I just became a cyclist. I did bike races for a number of years. So I've been through a lot of stuff with my training with sport. And the biggest change for me in life happened when I was like a month after my 70th birthday, it's like 11 years ago. In fact, 11 years ago this month,
I had bike crash and it was a life-changing accident. The one I just had that we talked about earlier is nothing compared to the one I had back then. That one I broke seven bones, I had a concussion, I had blood clots in both legs. I was in the intensive care for six days. It was gigantic and that changed my life.
When it was over, took me a long time to come back. I had frozen, both my shoulders were frozen, which meant you can't raise your arms. So you can't do much. It's hard to even ride a bike because you can't reach the handlebars very easily. I couldn't run because everything was just too sore and tender still. So there wasn't much I could do. I couldn't swim because I couldn't get my arms set to grab the water. there really wasn't anything I could do other than go for walks. And so I started walking a lot.
Tyson Popplestone (28:37.658)
And I realized that that was good for me. I got a lot of good out of that. And I'd never done that before because that's basically slow running is what that is. I've done essentially a lot of slow running. I was walking every day. In fact, it's very complicated, I won't go into details. But that became a key element for me in making decisions about training my athletes eventually was what I learned about myself and just all the walking I had to do because of this crash.
At the same time, this happens after the crash, start gaining weight very slowly. And so in two years I realized that my weight has gone up like five pounds. And I've been the same weight since I'd been in high school. Since my junior year in high school, I'd weighed the very same thing up until I was 70 years old, 154 pounds, 70 kg. So I was, you they never changed. And then all of a sudden my weight started going up in my early 70s.
And so that made me rethink a lot of things about my dive, for example, what I should be doing with as far as exercise is concerned to keep my weight at control. So I've gone through all this stuff over the years. I've had so many talking about your leg injuries from running. know, I've had probably every running injury you can possibly think of. Mostly Achilles and calf muscle strains and plantar fascias.
ITBs and all the stuff that runners have problems with plus stress fractures and I just I've had it all and the reason was because I didn't know how to training. You know I didn't have learned this thing about slow training yet. I was still on the notion that I had to do hard workouts to run fast and that was the way I saw the world because that was the way I was taught to do this. That's why my coaches taught me to it. He to work out hard every day. My college coach had to do exactly the same workout five days a week.
uh, that was all called intervals to you. It was just the hardest work you'd possibly imagine. Uh, and he made it all that much worse by doing things that coaches did back in those days about testing that. didn't tell me how stupid you are. I need to be faster. No, coaches in those days were just all they were with dictators. Yeah. And so basically I had a core upbringing and consequently I had to learn all this stuff the hard way by going through all these problems.
Tyson Popplestone (31:04.428)
And so things have come together for me finally over the last several years and starting to feel more comfortable with what I tell athletes to do today. That's why I feel more comfortable writing books with them today than I did initially. You got to know it's so comforting to hear a bloke who's been in the scene and has much success in the scene as what you have speak about how long it took you to navigate your way through injuries. Because I think just by part of doing this podcast and coaching athletes, I've been
open, you know, sometimes to a fault about little niggles and things that I'm dealing with. And I often wonder, I'm like, my gosh, I can't believe I've got to be open about the fact I've done another calf strain. And even though I'm coaching, I'm still navigating my way through the process myself. So it seems that no matter how much you read, or how much you learn, there's there's no better research method than actually trying it out yourself and just seeing what works and what doesn't and making edits. I think I must have been on the tail end of what you just explained your
your college or high school experience was like, because I certainly had a couple of coaches who were very much, yeah, train until you puke. And I thought that makes sense because I'd seen the movie, I'd seen all the Rocky series and I knew how he trained. And if you wanted to win the title, that was the way that you went about it. yeah, there's certainly a point of diminishing returns, isn't there? And I think there's a lot of, I feel there's a lot of conversation in the scene at the moment, which is, it's very easy to label something
as like an old man injury and just leave it at that. And it gives you an excuse not to have to try and improve it or not to have to try and adjust your training. You just put it in the category of the old man injury. Unfortunately, it's just the nature of the game. But unfortunately, I mean, or fortunately for me, I've spoken to so many old men and women who are like, no, no, I dealt with that and here's how I fixed it. And you go, okay. So it might like your, your susceptibility, if that's a word, like how susceptible you are to that particular injury might increase.
but it's not like a death sentence to your running career just because you've hit a certain age. I agree. Yeah. I'm going to write about that in like the, I think it's the eighth chapter, I write about injuries for athletes in this fast after 50 book. And, you know, one thing that I realized about myself when I was going through all these injuries, I always thought if I just,
Tyson Popplestone (33:26.478)
back off for a few days, it'll go away. That's always what the thing that went through my head was, know, the calf is feeling really tight. I need to just back off for a few days. In about three days, I'll be back to normal again. I can do anything I want. In the meantime, I'll just do some really slow, easy running. So, you know, all I've done is trying to figure out an excuse to go out and run, but I know I can't run fast at this point. One of our tele-athletes in this book is, you, at age 50, especially, you're 50s and 60s,
When you experience something that doesn't feel right, calf muscle, Achilles, whatever it may be, knee, you need to have somebody you can go to right now. Yeah, you know what I did when I was a young athlete, a young runner, decided to get injured, would plan on going away. I just figured it would go away if I just gave it enough time. I usually involved just doing some long, slow running until it went away. then sometimes it lasted for a long, time. Sometimes I found out eventually that it was a stress factor.
you know, they had to stop running. But I didn't find that out until maybe a week or two later that the thing wasn't going away. So I finally went to see a doctor about those sorts of things. And what I suggest to people over the age of 50 especially is you need, they need to have a team of professionals they can call on when they've got a problem like this. They're going to start first off with a family doctor more than likely. The family doctor may not be very good at this. Mine isn't.
You know, she's very good. She does not really know sports injuries all that well, but she can send me to somebody else who can't. That's my starting point always is with her. used to have a, where I used to live, I had a guy who was great at physiotherapy. What's that you guys call it? I physios. We don't call them that here, we call them something else.
I had a guy who was at that. was excellent. He was an athlete himself. He took care of professional athletes. He dealt with a huge crowd of athletes. If I had a problem, I could go to him, but I found myself always kind of waiting to go to see him because I wanted to see if it go away first. So, know, or massage therapists, somebody who can actually help you with your problem rather than waiting to see if it goes away. When you're in your 50s and your 60s, it needs to be done.
Tyson Popplestone (35:54.094)
Now, you cannot wait to see if things are to get better. You need to go take it and take care of it after it just happened. Otherwise, this thing may wind up becoming chronic and then you're going to have a really hard time getting rid of it. That's probably more of a problem for those in their 50s and 60s than it is for younger athletes. If you're in your 20s, you know, when I was in my 20s, if I got an injury just like that, I'd be back at it no time at all. No problem.
But in my 50s and 60s, that began to change. It took a lot more time to come back from these niggly little injuries that I didn't think very much of when I was much younger. So I think that's the key actually for super, for all the ages. And I want to find out from the super-agers how they deal with injuries too. If they have injuries, what kind of injuries do they have and how do they deal with it? There's lots of stuff I want to find out yet from these people. But that's what I think is probably the answer is to have somebody go to
immediately as soon as it happens, they haven't taken care of. Yeah, it's, was talking to a friend about this on our long run the other day, about how as endurance athletes, you become very accustomed to putting up with mild discomfort always, and being able to differentiate between all right, what is actually a serious injury that needs attention, and what is just a little inflammation or a little tightness that's going to go away in a week, just by itself just seems to be the nature of the game. Like I
I don't know if this is just me. feel pretty confident saying it because I've spoken to enough people to know that it seems to be universal. But most distance runners, at least at any one run, seem to have something that's like slightly uncomfortable. Not necessarily a but it might be okay. But being able to differentiate between, all right, this is bad and this is going to be fine, is like a little bit of an art in itself. Well, I think the key is not to wait to try and decide. Go see somebody who can help you.
You know, maybe just, you know, it's like a tight calf muscle, maybe you just need a massage therapist to work on it for you. I don't know what that would cost in Australia, here in the US, it's about a hundred bucks to have a massage therapist do something like that, spend an hour with a massage therapist working on the tightness of your calf muscle, whatever it may be. That's the sort of thing you need to have, kind of like at your disposal. These are people I can call on.
Tyson Popplestone (38:14.286)
when I have problem and I'm not gonna wait until it becomes chronic, I'm gonna take care of it now when it happens because otherwise I'm gonna wind up missing a lot of time, a of training and that's gonna hurt me also in the long term. When I come back, I gotta start step back and start over again on some of the same stuff I've been doing and I had the risk of having the same injury coming back again. So my proposal to a 50 something athlete says, get it taken care of now, don't wait.
Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of waiters. I know I put myself in that category. I'm a little bit younger. I've got 12 years up my sleeve, but I already noticed that in my own sort of running journey, a massage therapist has been a real benefit to me. I've actually taken a mental note that I'm going to book in with him after this session, because I've probably left that break a little bit too long. So like we've sort of touched on training, touched on assembling your own sort of personal team, like
From your perspective, have you got a certain group of people? I know you said the word physio before. think you guys call them PTs, don't you? You've got a certain group in your team. Like when you had your bike accident a couple of weeks ago, you got a couple of people on call. Yeah, well that one was no brainer. I had an emergency room and got, it was a long story. was six hour drive from home when it happened and I had to give a speech that night.
spoke to a clinic, you know, with broken bones and my elbow bleeding. And the next morning I got up and drove six hours back home, immediately to the emergency room. And they put me back together again. you know, the tremendous job of getting me back on my feet again, everything working just as it should. And now I'm in this process of healing because you just can't speed up the healing of broken bone.
But you know with other enabling little things I've had and I've had so many of them I've lost count which is probably in the hundreds by now. You know the thing that we should be doing all of us but especially 50 plus is see somebody who knows what they're doing to take care of now. Once it becomes chronic if it becomes chronic it can really be a problem then to get rid of it. So you might wind up missing a hell of a lot of training just because of something you thought was an innate little injury it may wind up being something that's
Tyson Popplestone (40:41.678)
really very serious for you. When you say fast after 50, why is it that chose 50 as the barrier to entry for the title of the book? that when, because I hear different points of when things, whether it's muscle strength or whatever starts to diminish if you're not on top of it, was that a strategic thing? I mean, the title flows nicely. It does. I'll tell you where I came from. When I composed the book to my publisher back in, I think it was about 2012,
I proposed that I wanted to write it for, I wanted to write for older athletes. I didn't really nail it down to an age. They came back to me and said, why don't we make it fast after 40? I said, absolutely not. People in their 40s are not old. We have a long ways to go yet. I wanted to make it 60, fast after 60. I'm sure that by the age of 60, there are problems you're dealing with on daily basis if you're an athlete.
So it kind of compromised on 50. then when I started going, then I started back on the research on 50 year old athletes and started piecing together this book based on what I could find out about the aging process. 50 turned out to be a pretty good point in time. For example, give you little things like, for example, you lose something like about 2 % of your muscle mass in your 30s. Not even noticeable. You're not aware of it.
That doesn't change much in your 40s. But in your 50s, it becomes 8%. You lose 8 % of your muscle mass on average, this is, know, across the population. This is not everybody. But this is the general average. You lose 8 % of your muscle mass by the time you're in your 50s. Bone mineral density, we can look at the same sort of thing. That's changing on the same sort of scale. It doesn't change much, but when you get in your 50s, it takes a change.
up, really starts happening at a much faster rate. And I go through all kinds of stuff I've discovered like this, type 2 diabetes mellitus, you know, because much higher risk in your 50s than it does any time prior to that. So it seems like a lot of stuff is happening to us in our 50s. That's it's a concerning point in time for most athletes, as it should be.
Tyson Popplestone (43:02.766)
And so I think the compromise we made on making it fast after 50 was a good one. And I'm really happy we did that because this, think is really a good place to start pointing out to people, we're, we're a stage right now in life where you can still make changes to improve. Not necessarily your performance, but improve your health, improve your, lots of aspects about your life, your lifespan, for example, because things are happening right now that are going to threaten your health and threaten your lifespan.
And we can turn that around right now if you start doing things that we found to be helpful in preventing that from happening. Yeah, I listened to a number of people who start to, I mean, there's so many different philosophies or so many different approaches. I know you said that it was just on average across the population that 8 % of the muscle mass sort of drops off. So what I'm about to say is not counter to that, but you see some people in their 50s who they're doing something right. Cause you look at them.
and they look as good as ever, they look as strong as ever, they look as fit as ever, which I find really encouraging. But like, are you speaking about just being focused on things like your strength training, being focused on flexibility, recovery, that kind of stuff? Like what would be a couple of other key standout points that you're like, all right, this is just your non-negotiables. Now you're at this age bracket, you cannot overlook this. from the, we've got the medical team on our side, we've got the training structure set up.
Like what else would go into that same kind of category of non-negotiables? Stress training, you mentioned is number one. You gotta be doing stress training. You gotta be doing flexibility training. It should get over. You lose that flexibility. You gotta be doing mobility training, which is the ability of a joint to rotate or move easily through a wide range of motion. That's something we started losing in our 50s also. It starts going downhill. So there are these things like that that we need to be very...
focus on physical things that we can be very focused on to make sure that we're maintaining our body because if we don't, it's going to catch up with you. For example, if you don't strength train, you're not strength training in your 50s, I feel sorry for you when you're in your 60s. It's going to be a real problem for you at that age. Strength training not only provides more muscle, it also provides more bone density. Runners like yourself,
Tyson Popplestone (45:27.502)
Don't have to worry about this so much from the waist down. But upper body, yeah, you do. Upper body for a runner, for a swimmer, there's not much there as far as bone density, muscle mass. I saw a picture the other day of a woman, I forgot her age now, but think she was in her 60s maybe, and she ran a 28 minute 10K.
and showed her coming across the finish line. And I was amazed at how little muscle she had above the waist. Below the waist, she looked really good. Her legs are obviously strong, but above the waist, her biceps were smaller than my wrists. There just was nothing there. What did you say she ran? Was it 38 minutes, you said? I think it was 38 minutes, I saw, yeah. That she ran in her, and I forgot exactly, and she was either
Late 60s or early 70s and she ran 38 minutes in king. And it struck me as being that's really a good time. And then I looked at the picture after I read the article, was, I realized that she's not, she's not taking care of her upper body. That's going to be a problem for her. gets older. So that's the sort of thing that we need to be focused on as you're, as you're aging is you've got to have your, your muscle taken care of, bone taken care of and
Strength training is a key to that. Mobility, flexibility, these are all things you need to be focused on. So it's not just running or riding your bike. It's also the gym. You've got to be doing things to take care of your body. You can't put it off until you're 80 years old. It's got to be done now because you wait until then it's too late. You had a very hard time making your body go through any kind of change at all when you get in your 80s. But you can maintain things very nicely all the way through if you keep working at it.
Yeah, I was speaking to Lawrence van Lingen. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He's sort of a movement coaching, a variety of sports. But one of the things that him and I were speaking about was the difference between sort of flexibility and mobility. And it is interesting because yoga has become very popular amongst a lot of athletes today and flexibility has. mobility is one that I think, at least to me,
Tyson Popplestone (47:49.27)
It's a newer concept on my radar and something that I've been trying to implement a little bit. But when you say mobility, is there certain movement patterns that you're focused on specifically like, or is it just making sure like whatever your weak points are or potential weak points are targeted? Well, I'd to find out what the athlete's weak points are. For example, hip mobility is really fairly common in older athletes.
They just can't move their legs at the hip through a range through a broad range of motion. But there are things they can do to improve that. It takes some time, not a lot of time, but it takes some time to do it. But you got to be very dedicated to it. You got to do it like probably at least twice a week, preferably three times a week you're working on on hip mobility. Or maybe it's lower back mobility. Your lower back is very tight. That happens to a lot of people when they get in their 50s.
is their low back is just very tense all the time. So they don't have mobility there and that shows up in running especially shows up in cycling also. If your hips are tight, if your lower back, sorry, is tight. And so this thing's what you can be doing for that to improve that mobility, that range of motion of your hips being able to move around the spinal column at the lumbar area. That's a key one.
Swimmers, I see a lot of swimmers, look at really young swimmers, you'd just be amazed at their shoulder mobility. You watch like the Olympics, you watch the swimming performances and you see before the swim, you'll see swimmers getting warmed up before they get on the blocks and they've got this amazing shoulder mobility when they're in their 20s. They can just do amazing things. They can touch the middle of their back, know, from any angle you want. And they do these exercises that show that
tremendous mobility. But when you're older, you find you can't do that anymore. It goes away. So that swimmer, maybe in his 20s, he can do this. But I would guess if they don't do anything about it between now and then, by the time they're 50s, they won't be able to scratch their back anymore. Because then we lose that mobility if you don't do it. So it's use it or lose it. If you don't use your joints, they don't move through the same range of motion anymore. Yeah.
Tyson Popplestone (50:10.176)
One thing that I was listening to Tom Brady's book on longevity, or it's more of a book about his own career in the NFL and how he achieved such a long, have you read it? No, it's- know Tom Brady does though. Yeah, so he's, I'm not a huge fan of NFL necessarily, but I like Tom Brady and I was looking at his, I wanted to hear about how he achieved such longevity. And he speaks a lot about pliability, like your muscles ability to contract and release and-
how that's been so beneficial in him copping like heavy impacts week in, week out for so many years. And he speaks about a number of the exercises that he does for that. I noticed this as well, like, and I wondered how much it was to do with my calf strains is like, there's a certain amount of tension that my body just seems to not be able to navigate its way through. And it is interesting because I'll look at my young boys, I've got a four year old and a two year old and the idea of playability and mobility, it's just, it's so foreign to them because it's so natural to them. It's not something they would ever think about.
But I look at my boys jumping on a trampoline or sprinting or moving and the range of motion that they have in like that swimmer, they can touch their back from any angle as well. The middle of their back. It's kind of unbelievable and really it's been a reminder to me to really invest in this part because there's certain things I'll see them do without even thinking that I'll try and do it. go, my gosh, like that range of motion is a little limited in me at the moment.
What's the quote? I'm trying to think of it. yeah. Things that you don't touch essentially turns to chaos. Like that's for lack of a better description. Like there's gonna weeds get gonna grow in your garden if you don't pay attention to it. So essentially it's just, okay, become aware, come up with a practice, be consistent. Like results will come. It's not, you're not a victim of your age necessarily. I mean, eventually we all are, aren't we? But like when it comes to performance.
At this particular age group, there's plenty that we can do. That's true. Yeah. There are people actually who are much, older than I am, who are amazing athletes, uh, because, know, and the reason why is because they've done it their entire lives. Yeah. Um, so age doesn't have to mean that it's the end of your career as a runner. Yeah. It doesn't have to mean that at all because you can continue doing this for, for general, for decades.
Tyson Popplestone (52:33.55)
And a friend who just died here, I've told you about this before, forgotten, who died last summer at age 92. He was a triathlete. He held the course record for the age 70 group at Ironman Hawaii. Tremendous athlete. He worked out every day, swam, bike and run. The day he died at age 92, the day he died, he'd done a run on the treadmill and rode his bike that day. And he had a, he died that same day.
So he was healthy right up until the very end, within minutes of his death, he was still training. And he was a good athlete. It wasn't like he was just some old slow guy going out there walking all the time. He was still an athlete, age 92. There's a guy in France named Robert Morchand, who was, when he was 103 years old, he set the world's record for the hour time on the track, bicycle. How far can you go in an hour on the track?
And he set the age group for his, for for 130, which is not a big deal because it really wasn't much of a time record for that. But it's size when he's at 105 to come back and see if he can go faster. So he finds some coaches to work with him. They improved his VO2 max by 13%. And he winds up taking several minutes off of his or several, several clock tick, taking almost a kilometer off of his previous best time, two years older, two years earlier.
He did something like, I've forgotten, like 34, 35 kilometers in an hour at age 105. So, you know, this is not just luck. This is because these people did this. This guy trained every day. He rode his bike every day. In the time he was like in his 20s, he was a cyclist dedicated to it. And I kept on going right till the very end. My friend who died at age 92.
Same thing, he was an athlete his entire life and right up until the very end he was an athlete. So this age doesn't mean it's the end. Eventually there will be an end, but you can still do things that are quite remarkable for your age. Regardless of what your age is, you can still do it if you keep it going. If you stop for 10 years, forget it, it's all over. You've got to be dedicated to it. You got to keep on doing it every day, any day you can.
Tyson Popplestone (54:56.238)
You are out there exercising, working out, watching your diet, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. What does your own training routine look like at the moment, Joe? Like, I'm not sure if it's a little bit, a little different based on the accident a couple of months ago or whether you're right back into it, but have you got a pretty solid structure in place? Yeah, I do. Summertime is when I live in Northern Arizona, the mountains of Northern Arizona. In the wintertime we get quite a bit of snow, but our summers are really nice, except they're really, really hot.
And so my summer, I'm a cyclist. And so I spend, I put in two to three hours a day, six days a week. I take one day off every week, six days a week. I'm doing that on the bike in the summer months. And that usually runs from like April until November, something like that. So I'm like two to three hours a day on the bike, six days a week. And then I'm turning just like I did when I was, I don't race anymore, but if I was.
I trained exactly the same ways that when I was racing. And then the winter time, things are getting changed. weather becomes a little difficult around here to ride your bike a lot. So I wait until the afternoon to ride my bike. And it's usually just going to have a very short span of warmth. Around 2.30, 3 o'clock it's warm. And so I'll put in an hour, hour and a half on the bike in the afternoons to take advantage of that warm weather.
In the morning, I take my wife for a walk. We walk for about an hour. We'll cover something like five kilometers in an hour, which is nothing great, but it's very good because it's also aerobic and it's developing the same aerobic system that the bike is developing only in a slightly different way. It doesn't overlap 100%, but we're getting some overlap in the tube. So that's my winter routine is I walk an hour in the morning.
briskly with my wife and then I ride an hour in the afternoon or hour and a half in the summertime, two to three hours on the bike every six days a week. Wow. I do that all the time. It's just been that way for years. And are you doing much strength of your own? Yeah, I strength training twice a week. I've got a gym in my garage. When we buy a house, I'm more of this, which doesn't happen real frequently, I'm proud to say.
Tyson Popplestone (57:15.95)
When we buy a house anymore, one of the things we look for is working. We had a gym in the house and so we bought a house with a three bay garage here back about six years ago. So one of the bays in my garage is my gym. And so I've got everything I need in there for all the work I'm going to do, upper body, lower body, mobility, stretching, all that kind of stuff. I've got all the equipment out there in the garage. So good. That's so good.
Joe, I'll have to get a link to the book so I can put it in the show notes when it's released. When did you say the middle of the year you reckon it'll come out? I think it'll be late 2025. Okay. I'll have it written probably by mid-summer, but it takes a while to get it published. Yeah, for sure. No, awesome. It's exciting. Well, Joe, I know it's getting... What is it? Probably evening over there. You'd be wrapping up the day. No, it's about 5.45 p.m. I'll let you go and enjoy your afternoon or your evening. Okay.
I've been looking forward to it. Thanks so much for making the time and it's always great to talk to you. I've had the Triathlon Training Bible on repeat on Audible recently, which I've really enjoyed and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this Fast After 50 and I'm pumped forever on to hear this episode. So Joe, thanks again. As always, really appreciate it. Thank you, Dice. Any time this time. I enjoyed it. Awesome. I'll cut that off there, Joe, you're a legend. Thanks so much. Thank you.