Des Linden has a milestone birthday coming up on July 26, when she’ll turn 40.
Well-meaning acquaintances often tell her that “age is just a number,” but she scoffs at that talk. Age, she says, has real consequences for her running. “Age is not a mindset; that’s silly,” she told Runner’s World. “It’s a physiological thing.”
Acknowledging the Shoes & Gear doesn’t mean she has to give in to it, though. She’s not calling it quits. Linden is trying to be smart as her body changes and adapt her training to account for the 24 marathons she has finished in her career.
Last November, she thought she was very fit heading into the New York City Marathon, and she was frustrated when she finished 16th in 2:32:37, almost 6 minutes slower than her best time on the New York course in 2019. She ran the first half in 1:12:37, the second in 1:20.
For the Boston Marathon on April 17, Linden and her coach, Walt Drenth, took a different approach in her training.
It seemed to work: She ran 2:27:18. True, she finished in 18th place, but she was much more evenly paced, with halves of 1:13:06 and 1:14:12. “After New York, I was like, it just has to be solid,” Linden said. “It was not a day to take big risks. I thought I ran really solidly, so I was happy with it.”
Here’s what she changed between the two marathons:
She ran fewer miles
Before New York, Linden ran the high mileage that she has throughout her career, culminating in five weeks at 120 miles per week. Drenth usually plugs in Linden’s training schedule with a long run and either one or two hard workouts per week and leaves her on her own to fill in the other days. But when they broke down what went wrong after New York, Drenth thought her total volume might have been the part of the problem.
“I kind of kept getting the sense that she might be running too much,” he told Runner’s World. “In my opinion, it is a matter of being able to train at a level that will keep her competitive, but not so much that she can’t recover from the work she is doing.”
For Boston, Linden’s mileage was consistently 95–105 miles per week, and she maintained that for 13 weeks. Cutting her mileage back by 12–15 percent made a dramatic difference, she said. She had a lot more energy. She bounced back more quickly from the hard days. Her legs felt fine when she first got out of bed in the morning.
She focused on intensity
What degrades fastest for runners as they age isn’t their endurance, the ability to grind out the miles. “It’s the power,” Linden said. “That’s your speed, coming off the ground, that’s what springs you forward. You’re going to lose more of that.”
So maintaining power became the area of focus for Linden and Drenth, primarily by making sure she was hitting a range of paces in workouts. She did many intervals before Boston at perceived 5K effort—and some even faster than that.
As she juggled a publicity tour for her new book, Choosing to Run, and marathon training, Linden did many of her workouts as fartleks on the roads. Drenth didn’t want her to spend time traveling, wake up in an unfamiliar city and then stress if she wasn’t hitting exact splits. Instead, she did a lot of perceived effort: run hard for anywhere from one minute to four minutes, with easier paces in between. She’d go as fast as 4:40 per mile pace for one minute to 5:05 per mile pace for four minutes. (At Boston, she averaged 5:37 per mile.)
After those types of workouts, when Linden returned to marathon pace, it felt easier. “I have the power and speed to make this feel comfortable,” she said. “It’s opening the range of what we’re working on.”
She made sure she was recovered for the hard days
Drenth’s schedules for Linden typically has two hard workouts per week, but if she has a long run, or a workout within a long run, she might have only one hard workout. And if she wasn’t feeling recovered, she was supposed to push the workout off an extra day or two.
Simply put, there were no hard-and-fast rules. She decided when she was ready to get the most out of the work. “A super rigid schedule didn’t seem necessary,” Drenth said. “I don’t think anybody who looked at the work would think she was slacking, that’s for sure.”
This was the opposite of how Linden trained earlier in her career. When she was in her 20s and early 30s with the Hansons-Brooks team, a hallmark of that program was doing a lot of hard sessions on tired legs. It brought her success then. But it doesn’t work now.
“At some point you have to make some adjustments,” Drenth said. “You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over. You’ve got to give some deference to the work you’ve done and the cost of that work and your age and all of those things. So my argument was that, if we can do quality work that gives you the confidence to run fast, that might be the higher priority than running 125 miles per week and having those hard workout sessions be a little bit compromised because you’re tired all the time.”
She trusted that she could change course
Drenth points out that aging athletes in many cases have to accept that what brought them success when they were younger doesn’t work for them now.
Running high mileage was important for Linden’s development a decade or more ago. “But now, I don't think so,” he said. “For most highly competitive marathoners, it is hard to pivot from that formula they followed to become really good and still keep your confidence. To a large degree, it’s a matter of just trusting.”
Linden, however, doesn’t seem to lack confidence. For decades, she ran doubles on non-workout days, typically 14 miles in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. As she cut back her mileage, she got rid of some of the doubles, doing a single run of 12. Other days she ran doubles of 10 and 4. She didn’t let that create doubt about her fitness.
“I’m great with it. I’m, like, this is awesome,” she said. “I have so much more time. And I have so much more energy.”
Her past achievements also make it easy for her to experiment now, and keep a mindset of: let’s try it. “I think that’s the fun part of where I’m at in my career,” she said. “I’ve Choosing to Run and made two Olympic teams. If it doesn’t work, who cares?”
She’s studying and learning as she goes
Drenth, Linden said, is frequently sending her podcasts and research studies about older athletes. Together they bounce ideas off each other.
“She's really good at looking for ways to grow all the time,” Drenth said. “It may be counterintuitive to think that doing less is growing, but in a way it’s growth, because you have to accept what you are and maximize what that is.”
After Boston, she and Drenth were toying around with doing a short segment of training focusing on gym sessions and having that be the priority. “Really working on power and strength and then coming back to the running,” Linden said. (They floated that idea before Linden was in a boating accident that caused a gash on her right hand that required 34 stitches.)
Linden has not yet made any fall marathon plans. She said if she does a fall marathon, she might make it something flat and fast, to mimic the conditions for the Olympic Marathon Trials in February, 2024, in Orlando. And if that fall effort does not go well, she might scrap the Trials.
It’s all open for debate, still. There are few examples to follow. The sample size of people who have remained world-class into their 40s, after decades of uninterrupted running, is small. (See: Keflezighi, Meb; Kiplagat, Edna; and Abdirahman, Abdi.)
But Linden knows she’s not alone in this quest, as Sara Hall Boston Marathon Jacket Announced, Keira D’Amato push the envelope for masters runners. And today’s 30-year-olds stand to benefit from what they learn.
“Maybe there will be this really great blueprint in 10 years from people who are running well into their 40s,” Linden said. “And that will be phenomenal.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World won the Boston Marathon, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
