Running, aging and slowing? The NY Times discusses the effect of age on those of us who run. If you are in your 50's, there is no doubt you have noticed changed in your body. If you are an athlete, you may have noticed that you are not as quick or agile, even though you may train and keep physically fit. Runners undoubtedly fit into this category, as they find old injuries taking their toll, the ability to reduce ones running times and to get back to where we were in our training gets more difficult. On the other hand, I have had some runners as patients who actually ran faster in their 50's and 60's than they did in their 20's. Most of these people actually had either running technique issues that they later corrected or had physical ones they did not understand which we helped them with, enabling them to run faster with fewer injuries. Aging, for the runner, like everyone else is a game, and with age, the game changes. We just need to play the aging game better. Check out this article on the aging runner from the NY Times. Aging Runners Find Help for a Question: How Slow Will I Get? By GINA KOLATA APRIL 26, 2016 Not long ago, a group of aging elite distance runners got together, and as they reminisced about old times, a familiar topic arose: No matter how much they train, no matter how much they push themselves, their best times are behind them. Howard Nippert broached it first. He was running the other day, he told his friends, and feeling as if he was in the groove, feeling great, just flying along as he did in the old days. Then he made the mistake of looking at his watch. It was telling him something a lot different than what he was feeling. "œI know exactly how you feel," said his friend, Steve Spence, who is 53. Both men are still great runners and had stellar running careers. Nippert, who is 50 and a running coach in Pearisburg, Va., was a world-class ultramarathoner and a former member of the United States track and field team. Spence, who won a bronze medal in the marathon at the world championships in 1991, coaches runners at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and still runs a mile race every year in less than five minutes. But, he laments, "œI used to be able to run a marathon at that pace." Read more