S3E11: The Older Runner’s Guide to Strength, Speed, and Recovery

We can be tuned in to reality without delving into negativity, if that makes sense.

When we're young, we have a lot of bandwidth.

And it's not just because typically our brain health is better when we're 20 than when we're 80.

So that might be so.

And we can talk about that.

And I've talked about that in past episodes about how we can combat even mental decline by engaging in aerobic exercise.

I talked about how people who engage in aerobic exercise over a period of months and years have larger hippocampus, better memory, delayed onset dementia.

This is actually stuff that's really, really good and pertinent to our discussions today because we do know that axonal health in the brain, protecting the memory centers of the brain, all of that stuff is a byproduct of long-standing exercise routines into our middle age.

That's the good stuff.

But what I'm talking about is bandwidth.

I'm talking about our ability to just be able to do more stuff without feeling like we're overextended.

When I was in my 20s, especially my early 20s, I was not married.

I actually was in school until I was 26, right? 25.

I did not have any dependents.

I had no significant debt.

I didn't even have a mortgage.

And so the stressors of life, and I'm not saying that they're necessarily bad.

I mean, the joys of parenthood, the joys of marriage, the joys of homeownership.

Yes, that is a joy.

Um, uh, uh, are all omnipresent for us and many of us as we creep into our early middle age.

But there are some stressors, there's financial stressors, there's stresses on our time, stresses on our neurologic bandwidth that are not there.

So when you're 23, 24 years old, and your biggest responsibility might be keeping a goldfish alive, right? And having a job, we have a lot of time to train.

We have a lot of time to go to the weight room.

We have a lot of time, perhaps, to relax at night watching Grey's Anatomy.

But we get married.