Review finds trained masters runners lose half as much performance to ageing as untrained peers

A newly published review of research into ageing and endurance performance has added weight to a message masters coaches have long argued for: the decline that comes with age is real, but how much of it you experience depends heavily on whether you keep training. The review draws together data from multiple longitudinal studies of competitive masters athletes to map how performance actually changes across the decades.

The pattern it describes is broadly consistent across the studies reviewed. Peak endurance performance holds relatively stable until around age 35, followed by a modest decline through the 50s and 60s, before a steeper drop-off sets in beyond that. Crucially, trained masters athletes show an attenuated, near-linear decline rather than the steeper curve seen in the general population, with the overall rate of decline in competitive masters runners roughly half that of untrained adults of the same age.

VO2 max, the standard marker of aerobic capacity, still falls with age even in athletes who keep training hard, with the review citing an approximate 10% decline between ages 35 and 55. But running economy, the efficiency with which a runner converts oxygen into forward motion, does not appear to decline with age in athletes who remain endurance-trained, a finding that helps explain why some masters runners hold onto competitive times even as their raw aerobic ceiling drops.

The review also examined women masters athletes specifically, finding a similar relative pattern of age-related aerobic decline but with fitness levels that remain substantially higher than sedentary peers throughout, despite comparable or greater absolute losses in some measures. The authors note that most masters research to date has still been conducted on smaller cohorts of women than men, leaving gaps in how the pattern holds at the very oldest competitive age groups.

The practical takeaway echoed across the studies is consistency: maintaining training volume and, in particular, preserving some higher-intensity work appears to matter more than any specific programme structure in slowing the decline. The findings sit alongside other recent training-science coverage on this site, including research on how sleep and training load interact and how heat acclimation affects marathon performance, reinforcing a broader picture of ageing runners as a population where evidence-based training choices carry outsized returns.