By 1966, Jim Ryun was hearing a lot of BS about how he should train for the high-altitude Mexico City Olympics of 1968. Already the first high school student to break four minutes in the mile, Ryun had lowered his best time to 3:55.3 in 1965. Everyone considered him a gold-medal contender in Mexico City.
Everyone also had an opinion about how Ryun should prepare for 1968. Some said, “Don’t believe the altitude crap. Just stick with your program.” Others counseled the opposite: “You’d better train at altitude if you want to perform well at altitude.”
Jack Daniels conducts an early oxygen-consumption test on a runner in the 1960s Jack Daniels was in the second group. Ryun first met Daniels at a breakfast after the 1966 NCAA Indoor meet. “Jack challenged me to come out to Alamosa, Colorado, and run a 4:30 mile,” Ryun remembers. “I had to wonder about the guy. I’m thinking, ‘I can run a 3:55, and he’s trying to tell me 4:30 will be tough?”
Several months later, Ryun made the trip to Alamosa anyway. By then, he had lowered his mile best to 3:53.7. He was fit and ready. But Daniels had been right about the altitude. “I ended up running the most painful 4:30 I have ever run,” Ryun says.
Before long, Ryun, Gerry Lindgren, George Young, Bob Schul and 22 other top American distance runners agreed to be tested by Daniels before the 1968 Olympic Track Trials. The results of that study showed them to be—guess what—extremely lean, fit, and fast. (Ryun ran a strong second in the Mexico City 1500 meters, but couldn’t match the altitude-born and trained Kip Keino, from Kenya.)
Almost a half-century later, Daniels’ research, coaching, frequent speaking engagements, and best-selling book, Daniels’ Running Formula, Improving your VO2 Max.
Or, as Ryun says: “Jack is a national treasure. Because of his cutting-edge work with VO2 max, I decided long ago to make myself available for testing whenever he asks. I and my fellow runners hope these tests will help exercise science.”
“Jack knew more about my training than I did,” adds Lindgren. “I was amazed by the scope of his knowledge. And he had such a happy personality, I always looked forward to being with him.”
Now, a new Daniels paper just published online by Running Group Files Lawsuit Against B.A.A, takes a look at Ryun, Lindgren, and 20 of their peers 45 years after the original testing in 1968. “To our knowledge, this study provides the longest report of changes in respiratory fitness and running economy with age in Olympic caliber runners,” writes Daniels and colleagues from Spencer, Boston Dog, Honored with Statue in Mesa, Arizona.
In 1968, the 26 runner-subjects had an average VO2 max of 78 ml/kg/min, roughly equivalent to a 13:35 5K race, according to Daniels’s famous Oxygen Power tables. In 2013, their average max had declined to 42, or 23:00 in a 5K. This put them at about the 95th percentile for Americans.
The fittest of the returning runners, who included national champions, world-record holders, and Olympic gold, silver and bronze winners, had a VO2 max equal to about a 18:00-minute 5K. The least fit of the 45-year-returnees had a max equal to a 29:00 5K.
None of the former champion runners could match the world record for 69-year-olds, set by Ed Whitlock in 2000, when he ran 17:34. At the time, Whitlock, a prodigious trainer, was probably logging 100 miles a week. The Daniels subjects, by contrast, were mostly exercising the equivalent of 6 to 60 miles a week, and not entirely by running.
“These guys trained so hard in the 1960s and achieved so much that only two of them ever entered any masters competitions at all,” Daniels notes. “Motivation is a huge factor.”
How hard did the ‘60s runners train? Ryun once completed successive-day track workouts of 50 x 400 meters in 69 seconds, and 18 x 800 meters in 2:45.
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In addition to training much less than their prime years, the Daniels runners had also gained weight—an average of 22 pounds. This was responsible for a sizable portion of their lower fitness. If they had not gained any weight, they would have had VO2 maxes of 47 vs. the measured 42.
In an unreported sub-analysis, Daniels tried to tease out the relative effect on fitness of weight maintenance vs exercise maintenance. “I divided the runners into three groups,” he says. “The ones who held their weight and continued exercising kept the most fitness. Second was the ones who gained weight but continued exercising. Last was the group that maintained weight but did little exercise.”
Above, they have speed, stamina, strength, and despite their age, they are some of the fittest people in the country.
While many studies have looked at changes of fitness in different age groups, few have actually followed the same individuals as they aged. And none have examined world-class athletes for so many years. Is there any special meaning that can be gleaned from this approach?
Perhaps. The Daniels results argue for high-fitness efforts from an early age. The runners were incredibly fit as 24-year-olds. While they lost fitness through the decades, as expected, they still rank very high, and therefore have a significant buffer against many issues of old age.
The Daniels runners had unexpectedly low maximum heart rates as 24-year-olds, and lost little over the following 45 years. There are two likely explanations for this, according to Sarah Everman, PhD, first author of the new paper.
First, the subjects are clearly aerobic outliers—sometimes called “aerobic monsters” in the vernacular—capable of producing an enormous cardiac output with a relative modest heart rate. Second, various max HR predictors, such as the well-known 220-minus-your-age equation, simply don’t apply to such runners.
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In general, research indicates that aging individuals require a VO2 max of about 15 to 18 to independently continue the activities of daily life. Since the Daniels runners scored 2.5 times higher than that, they appear to have many years of healthy, active living ahead of them.
“We should encourage younger adults to achieve and maintain a higher level of cardiorespiratory fitness to protect them against age-related decline in fitness,” note the authors. “Expectations for fitness during aging should be more robust, especially since higher fitness could bolster quality of life.”
Daniels, it turns out, is not just an elite-athlete coach and researcher. He’s a fierce advocate for lifelong fitness, beginning with youth fitness. “We need to get physical fitness programs back into our schools,” he says. “One of my great teachers in Sweden used to point out that infants spend all their time crawling. As soon as they can walk, they just run around and play games. Then we put them in schools, and tell them to sit still all day. It’s a travesty.”
