Why Speed Sessions Feel Harder After 40
- Coach Dave
- May 21
- 4 min read
There’s a conversation I have with Masters athletes all the time.
Usually it starts with something like:
“I can still train hard… but speed work just doesn’t feel the same anymore.”
The most frustrating thing for many athletes is that they still feel fit, motivated, consistent and competitive. Gone is the lightness and bounce. Instead, the legs feel heavier earlier and earlier into the session. The body doesn’t feel as reactive. In essence they are feeling more drained than sharp.
And many of those athletes quietly assume:
“I’m just getting old.”
But the reality is usually a little more complicated than just ageing.
I often find the athlete hasn’t suddenly lost the ability to run fast. Rather, the body is no longer arriving at speed sessions in the same recovered state it once did.
Speed Exposes Fatigue Quickly
One thing experienced athletes get very good at is functioning while fatigued.
High levels of motivation mean that athletes can push through sessions - “get the work done”.
But speed work has a way of exposing fatigue that slower aerobic work often hides.
When the nervous system is carrying residual fatigue, athletes often notice that ground contact feels heavier, acceleration feels more forced, coordination becomes slightly off and the body loses some of its natural elasticity.
The session no longer feels smooth or reactive - it feels like hard work.
Recovery Changes Before Motivation Does
Motivation is rarely missing for Masters athletes - they choose to be there. What changes for them is the body’s ability to recover from high-force work as quickly as it once did.
This is something many Masters athletes struggle with psychologically - they enjoyed what their bodies used to be able to do easily.
Sprint training places enormous demands on the tendons, calves, hamstrings and nervous system.
And as athletes age, those systems generally require more recovery, better load management and greater strength support than they once did.
Without that support, athletes often begin accumulating small amounts of residual fatigue from session to session. Not enough to stop training completely, but enough to gradually reduce freshness and reactivity.
That’s why many athletes notice that speed sessions begin feeling harder long before they actually stop training hard altogether.
More Training Is Often The Wrong Solution
When athletes feel themselves start to slow down the first response is often:
“I need to do more speed work.”
But many Masters athletes don’t need more speed work - rather they need to be at their best when performing it. They are more often than not under-recovered.
And that changes everything.
Because speed depends heavily on the body’s ability to produce force quickly and efficiently. That requires:
freshness
elasticity
coordination
nervous system readiness
tissue resilience
When those qualities are compromised by accumulated fatigue, sessions often start feeling progressively heavier regardless of how “fit” the athlete is. This is why simply adding more intensity, more speed work can sometimes make athletes feel worse rather than better.
For many Masters athletes, the challenge is not learning how to work hard - it’s learning how to recover well enough to express speed consistently and efficiently.
The Athletes Who Maintain Speed Long-Term Usually Train Differently
One thing that stands out repeatedly in high-performing Masters athletes is that they rarely train exactly the same way they did in their 20s.
The athletes who continue moving well later into life are usually very good at:
managing recovery
maintaining strength
preserving tissue capacity
avoiding unnecessary fatigue accumulation
staying consistent over long periods
This is where strength and conditioning becomes increasingly important. Not as “extra work” but as part of maintaining the body’s ability to tolerate high-speed movement.
A lot of athletes underestimate how important strength becomes as they age. Maintaining qualities like lower-leg resilience, tendon stiffness, force production and movement quality is critical for continuing to tolerate high-speed training well. Without that physical foundation, the body often becomes less robust under load and far less capable of recovering consistently from demanding sessions.
The goal isn’t building fitness - it's building a body that can still express quality speed repeatedly and recover from it properly.
Feeling Different Does Not Mean Decline Is Inevitable
This is probably the key point.
Many Masters athletes interpret struggling in speed sessions as proof that their best performances are behind them. But often what they’re actually experiencing is a mismatch between training stress and their ability to recover.
It raises 2 questions:
Has the body been properly prepared to cope with the load?
Has the body been given sufficient recovery both within sessions and between sessions?
If the answer is NO to either of those then this is good news - because both of these are achievable.
Ageing changes how the body adapts.
It changes recovery demands. It changes tissue behaviour. And it changes loading tolerance.
But it definitely does not automatically eliminate the ability to improve.
For many of the athletes who talk to me, performance starts improving again when training begins supporting recovery and tissue resilience properly rather than having to constantly compete against accumulated fatigue.
One thing I often notice is that many athletes still have the capacity for quality speed work — they just need to tweak the structure of the session and improve the way they recover both for it and from it.
Sometimes the solution is as simple as reducing unnecessary volume, increasing recovery between reps, or improving lower-body strength so the athlete can tolerate high-force work more effectively.
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