I Feel Like a Hippo Running Through Peanut Butter
A few years ago I was chatting to one of my athletes about how running fast feels now compared with years ago.
“I feel like a hippo running through peanut butter.”
It made me laugh, but I also knew exactly what she meant. There are days when you remember exactly what sprinting is supposed to feel like: quick off the ground, sharp, reactive, everything happening almost before you have time to think about it. Then there are other days when the legs feel slow, the ground feels like it is holding onto you and you feel as though you are working hard without really going anywhere. Hippo. Peanut butter. Pretty accurate, really.
The obvious explanation is that you are just not as strong as you used to be. Sometimes that is part of it, but it is not the whole story. One of the things that changes as we get older is the nervous system itself, particularly the way it controls muscle. We have motor neurons that connect to groups of muscle fibres and together that motor neuron and the fibres it controls are called a motor unit.
As we age, we gradually lose some of those motor neurons. The muscle fibres they controlled can then become disconnected, although the body does try to compensate. Surviving motor neurons can sprout new connections and take over some of those fibres. That helps preserve function, but it also means we can gradually end up with fewer motor units controlling larger groups of fibres.
That is only one part of a much bigger ageing picture, but it matters when we start talking about sprinting because sprinting is not simply a test of how strong you are. You have to produce force, produce it quickly, put it in the right direction and coordinate all of it in a very short space of time. At maximum velocity your foot is only on the ground for a fraction of a second. You do not get much time to organise yourself.
That is why someone can still be strong in the gym and not necessarily feel fast on the track. I see that quite a bit. An athlete can squat well, deadlift well and clearly not be weak, but when they sprint they feel as though they have lost some of the snap they used to have. The gym often tells us how much force someone can produce. Sprinting asks how much of that force they can produce almost immediately.
That ability to produce force quickly tends to decline with age. There are also changes in motor unit firing, muscle fibres, tendons, coordination and the way we interact with the ground. Ground contact times often get longer and stride characteristics start to change. All of that contributes, but this is where I think we can get ourselves into trouble because once we start talking about ageing it becomes very easy to explain everything with ageing.
If somebody stops sprinting for ten years and then comes back and feels slow, how much of that is actually ageing? Some of it, obviously. But some of it is also the fact that they have not sprinted for ten years. If you stop exposing the body to speed, it gets worse at speed. If nearly everything you do becomes slower, more controlled and more submaximal, eventually you get very good at moving slowly, under control, at submaximal effort.
That is fine if that is all you need. It is less useful if you are trying to run 100 metres quickly.
This is probably the part that interests me most with Masters athletes. We cannot stop ageing, but we can influence what happens around it. We can keep strength in the program, keep some genuine speed in there and continue to train explosive qualities where it makes sense. Not because we are somehow going to beat ageing, but because if we stop training those qualities completely, we are almost certainly going to lose them faster.
A lot of Masters training gradually drifts the other way. More caution, more steady work, more controlled training, less speed and less exposure to high-force, high-velocity movement. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. Injury history matters. Tendons matter. Training history matters. But sometimes we over-correct.
Speed training is a good example because running hard and running fast are not the same thing. You can run very hard without actually moving particularly fast. Take a 60-metre sprint, have 60 or 90 seconds rest and then go again. Keep doing that for a few reps and it will become a very hard session, but by the third or fourth repetition are you still training maximum speed? Probably not. You are now training the ability to keep running while tired. That may be useful, but it is a different quality.
If the goal is speed, I would rather have fewer repetitions and enough recovery for the athlete to actually run fast again. That can feel strange to some Masters athletes because they finish the session thinking they have not done enough. They have spent a lot of time standing around and they do not feel smashed. But if the reps were genuinely fast, the session has done what it needed to do.
The gym is similar. I still want Masters athletes strong, but I do not want everything in the gym to become slow, heavy grinding. There needs to be some attempt to move quickly as well. Depending on the athlete, that might mean jumps, medicine-ball work, lighter loads moved aggressively, plyometrics or Olympic-lifting variations. And if they are a sprinter, then sprinting itself remains the most specific version of that.
None of this means every 60-year-old should suddenly start doing maximal flying 30s and depth jumps. Age on its own is a poor programming tool. A 38-year-old with twenty years of uninterrupted sprint training is one athlete. A 58-year-old returning after twenty years away from the track is another. Two athletes can be exactly the same age and have almost nothing in common from a programming point of view.
Recovery matters too, although I think this is another area where we sometimes make things more complicated than they need to be. You will hear statements such as, “Masters athletes need 72 hours for their CNS to recover.” Maybe. Sometimes. But it is not that clean. Four short accelerations do not create the same fatigue as a hard speed-endurance session. A heavy lower-body gym session is different again. Add sleep, work, stress, soreness and training history and the idea that everyone reaches full recovery at the same point 72 hours later starts to fall apart.
I am much more interested in what the athlete can actually produce. If today is supposed to be a speed day, can they run fast? If it is a strength day, can they produce the force and movement quality we expect? Do they look sharp, or do they look flat? Are we getting from the session what we intended to get from it? That tells me much more than simply counting hours since the last hard session.
Ageing does change things. We lose motor units. Fast force production becomes harder. Muscle changes. Tendons change. Recovery changes. The answer, though, is not to stop doing the things that make someone athletic. For Masters athletes, I think the challenge is to keep enough strength, speed, power, elasticity and coordination in the program to give the body a reason to hold onto those qualities for as long as possible.
And yes, there may still be days when you feel like a hippo running through peanut butter. It does not mean you have to train like one.
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