How often you should run is the third question, not the first. Get it right by answering the other two first — or stay stuck in the injury cycle forever.
In the 1950s, in a working-class neighborhood in Auckland, New Zealand, a milkman named Arthur Lydiard was coaching three young men from his street: Peter Snell, Murray Halberg, and Barry Magee. The training advice he gave them sounded crazy at the time.
Run 100 miles a week. But run them slow.
The rest of the running world was obsessed with track intervals, speed work, and “no pain, no gain.” Lydiard insisted his athletes spend most of the year at an easy aerobic pace, day after day after day, building what he called “the base.”
At the 1960 Rome Olympics, his three protégés won three medals — gold for Snell in the 800m, gold for Halberg in the 5,000m, bronze for Magee in the marathon. Three Olympic medalists from one street in Auckland.
Decades later, a doctor named Phil Maffetone would build a whole training method on Lydiard’s foundation. That method is what saved my running after my heart attacks. The frequency works — but only if you commit to running easy.
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The most common question I get from older runners is the most common question in all of running:
How often should I run?
The honest answer is: it depends. It depends on what you’re after and what your body is willing to give you right now.
But that’s a frustrating answer. Let me give you a better one.
The right running frequency for you isn’t a single number — it’s the answer to three questions you have to settle in the right order. Here are the three levers that turn “how often” into a personalized answer.
Lever 1 — Intensity: Dial It Down Before You Do Anything Else
The biggest mistake I see in older runners — and I see it constantly — is running too hard.
Every easy run becomes a tempo run. Every tempo run becomes a half-effort race. The heart rate creeps up. The recovery never quite happens. Six months in, the joints are aching, the motivation is gone, and the runner thinks, “I guess I’m just too old for this now.”
You’re not too old. You’re just running too hard.
Dr. Phil Maffetone has been making this point for over four decades. The aerobic system — the slow, fat-burning, low-heart-rate engine that powers everything from a 5K to an ultra — only builds when you stop overworking it. He puts the base-building window at three to six months of staying under your aerobic threshold, with no racing and no hard intervals.1 Months, not weeks.
That’s the commitment.
The 130 bpm Garmin Check
Strap on your Garmin. Head out for an easy run. If you can hold a steady conversation and your heart rate sits around 130 bpm, you’re in the zone where your aerobic engine actually grows.
If your heart rate spikes the moment you break into a jog, you’ve got the early signs of aerobic deficiency syndrome (ADS) — and the only way out is more low-intensity volume, not less.
Lever 1 is the prerequisite. You can’t answer “how often should I run” until you answer “at what intensity should I run.” Until that’s locked in, every additional run is a withdrawal from your account, not a deposit.
Lever 2 — Duration: Find Your Sweet Spot Between 30 and 45 Minutes
Once intensity is settled, the next question is: how long should each run be?
I prefer to think in time, not miles. Miles are deceptive — a 4-mile run at 10:00 pace is a completely different stimulus than a 4-mile run at 8:00 pace. But 30 minutes is 30 minutes, no matter what your watch says about pace.
The Sweet Spot
30 to 45 minutes per run for most of your weekly volume.
Less than 30 minutes and you’re not giving your aerobic system enough sustained stimulus to actually adapt. More than 45 minutes on a regular basis and the recovery cost starts to outpace the gain — unless you’re specifically training for a longer event.
Long runs? Cap them at two hours.
A long study by Dr. James O’Keefe, Dr. Carl Lavie, and their colleagues followed over 52,000 people for up to thirty years. They found that runners lived 19 percent longer than non-runners — but the benefits flattened sharply above 25 miles per week.2 Translation: more isn’t more. After two hours on your feet, you’re piling on stress without building proportional fitness, unless you’re specifically in marathon or ultra training.
Lever 2 is about respecting time on your feet. Quality minutes beat ego miles, every time.
Lever 3 — Frequency: Match Your Weekly Schedule to Your Goal
Now we can answer the original question.
If your goal is to maintain — to stay healthy, keep your aerobic base intact, and enjoy running as a lifestyle — two to three runs a week in the 30-to-60-minute range, all at low heart rate, is enough.
If your goal is to build — to grow your aerobic engine, prepare for an event, or get faster at low heart rate — four to five runs a week is the sweet spot, with one of them being a longer easy run. That’s the frequency that creates the slow metabolic adaptations that take months to build and decades to enjoy.
If you want to run every day, you can. But you need to be honest about what every day demands. Plan at least one true rest day a week — preferably two — or, at a minimum, a recovery week every fourth week where you cut your mileage in half. Without those resets, the wheels come off.
This isn’t optional after 50.
Dr. Peter Attia hammers the point in his longevity work: as we age, recovery capacity declines. Sleep gets lighter. Anabolic hormones drop. Tissue repair slows. The training program that worked for you at 35 is not the one your body can handle at 65 — not without breaking.3 Adjusting your frequency down in the right places is what lets you keep running for decades, instead of grinding to a halt in a few years.
The runner who runs four moderate days a week for twenty years beats the runner who runs seven hard days a week for two and a half years. Every single time.
Putting the Three Levers Together
The System
Set your intensity first. Low heart rate. Conversational pace. Around 130 bpm.
Set your duration second. 30 to 45 minutes for most runs. Long runs under 2 hours.
Set your frequency last. 2–3 days to maintain. 4–5 days to build. 7 days only if you’re disciplined about recovery.
Skip the first two and the third one becomes a guess. Worse — it becomes a guess that punishes you.
The Takeaway
“How often should I run” is the wrong first question. The right first question is “how hard?” The second is “how long?” Frequency is the answer that falls out the other end.
That’s the order Arthur Lydiard taught his Olympians in the 1950s. It’s the order Phil Maffetone codified into a method. It’s the order the Forever Runner Method is built on. And it’s the order that will keep you running into your 70s, your 80s, and beyond.
Imagine settling into a weekly rhythm that actually fits your body — four easy runs and a long one, each one finishing with you feeling better than when you started, no aches, no dread, no comeback from injury required. That’s not a fantasy. That’s what dialing in the three levers does.
You don’t have to be a milkman from Auckland to train like an Olympian. You just have to commit to the order.
You’re not too old. You’re not broken.
You’re just not done yet.
If the first question wasn’t “how often” but “how hard” — what would your weekly schedule actually look like?
What’s your current running frequency — and which lever do you think you’ve been getting wrong? Let me know.
Have a great week!
-Herb
Run Smarter, Live Longer
P.S. Ready to go deeper?
The Forever Runner Method is a proven, step-by-step framework built specifically for runners over 50 who are tired of getting hurt and are ready to run smarter. If you want to discover how, Grab a copy of my book at Foreverrunner.com.
1 Philip Maffetone, The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010); see also Maffetone’s published research on the MAF 180 formula and aerobic threshold.
2 Duck-chul Lee, Russell R. Pate, Carl J. Lavie, Xuemei Sui, Timothy S. Church, and Steven N. Blair, “Leisure-Time Running Reduces All-Cause and Cardiovascular Mortality Risk,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology 64, no. 5 (August 2014): 472–481; James H. O’Keefe et al., “Potential Adverse Cardiovascular Effects from Excessive Endurance Exercise,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 87, no. 6 (June 2012): 587–595.
3 Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (New York: Harmony Books, 2023).
Great article. I’m still doing short triathlons at 62 and finding it tough to tone things down. However, when I do, I see great gains.