Staying on Top of your Game: Masters Athlete

I can’t believe summer is ending. The speed of time from June to September seems to get faster every year. The kids head back to school today, which is a welcome thing for parents, me included, but I’m already missing the early morning light and bike rides without lights.

After a few more weeks of riding, Vancouver cyclists will officially enter the offseason. The Whistler GranFondo is this weekend, and for many it marks the end of their riding for the year. I’ve still got Gravel Provincials to race, and then it’s fall mountain biking for some of the best riding of the year. Some people will race a cyclocross campaign, but personally, I’m a little burned out from the rigor of road and gravel racing.

As a competitive masters athlete, I enter every offseason thinking about the same things:

I need to recharge my batteries and my desire for competition.
How do I continue to compete at my top level?
Can I even find a way to improve at age 51?

I think the answer to that last question is yes. But the way I go about improving at 51 needs to look different than it did at 31.

The Masters Athlete Has Different Needs

My plan for this offseason will be similar to other years, but with a slight tweak. I’m going to add one trail run or hike per week and double down on strength training.

The trail run will be fun and will add some “real world” athleticism to my typical routine of riding. The strength training is where I’m hoping to make the biggest difference in my performance for the upcoming season.

I’ve been strength training since I was 14 years old. That’s 37 years…yikes.

Over that time, I’ve had plenty of changes in volume and intensity. There have been years when I didn’t strength train at all for part of the year, and stretches in my late twenties and early thirties when I was lifting four times a week.

Now that I’m in my 50s, I think the secret to longevity in my sport—and continued performance—is going to come primarily from keeping my muscles and joints as healthy, strong, and capable as possible.

As we age, simply doing more of our sport isn’t necessarily enough. For endurance athletes in particular, we get very good at repeating the same movements thousands of times. What we don’t necessarily get from all those hours of riding or running is the muscular strength, power, mobility, and resilience we need to preserve as we get older.

Those qualities matter for health and longevity, but they also matter if you still care about performance.

What I’m Trying to Build

There are four qualities I’m particularly interested in developing this winter: elasticity, explosivity, resilience, and fatigue resistance.

Elasticity is the ability to absorb force and return it efficiently. Explosivity is our ability to produce force quickly. Resilience is about having muscles, tendons, and joints capable of handling the demands we put on them. And fatigue resistance is the ability to maintain force and good movement when we’re tired.

For a cyclist, those qualities show up everywhere.

They matter when you accelerate out of a corner, respond to an attack, push over the top of a short climb, or try to produce power after three or four hard hours. They also matter when you step off the bike. I want to remain an athlete who can ride hard, but I also want to be able to run, jump, lift, hike, and move well.

That becomes increasingly important to me as I get older.

Starting Easier Than You Think

My plan is to strength train twice a week, with an emphasis on mobility, maximum strength, and power.

But I’m not going to start by hammering myself in the gym.

In fact, my first few workouts will be so easy that they will probably look more like the warm-ups I’ll eventually be doing later in the offseason.

That’s intentional.

One of the mistakes masters athletes can make is remembering what they used to be able to do and starting there. Our training history can fool us into thinking we should be able to jump back into loads and volumes we haven’t touched for months—or years.

There’s very little upside to that.

Instead, I want to give my joints, tendons, muscles, and nervous system time to adapt. I’ll start easy, establish consistency, and progressively add load and speed as my body is ready for it.

The goal isn’t to prove how strong I am in September. The goal is to see how strong and powerful I can become by the end of the offseason.

Strength Training for the Long Game

This is also how we approach training at Groundwork Athletics.

Training a masters athlete isn’t about treating someone as fragile because they’re getting older. It’s about understanding that the inputs need to become more thoughtful.

We still want to train hard. We still want to get stronger. We still want to develop power and athleticism. But the progression, recovery, mobility, and overall training load need to work together.

For me, that means two focused strength sessions each week alongside riding and some trail running. For someone else, the balance will look different. The important part is identifying what your sport gives you—and what it doesn’t.

At 51, I’m realistic enough to know that some aspects of performance become harder to maintain. But that doesn’t mean improvement is off the table.

It just means I need to be more deliberate about where I look for it.

This offseason, I’m looking for it in the gym.

-Jon Bula, GWA Owner

Staying on Top of your Game: Masters Athlete