How to start aging like an athlete.

ByChris Ballard

Photographs byAlex Lau

September 9, 2025

From National Geographic:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/health/article/aging-longevity-athletes-exercise

These over-50 champs—and a growing body of research—show what we gain by staying active later in life.Nora Langdon, 82, started powerlifting in her 60s and quickly got hooked. Over the past two decades, she has set more than 20 world and national age-group records. ByChris BallardPhotographs byAlex LauSeptember 9, 2025

This article is part of Older, Faster, Stronger, a National Geographic exploration into the science of what it takes to live a longer and more active life. Learn more.

For Nora Langdon, the moment of truth came on the stairs. She was 64 years old. Up to that point, Langdon had lived a largely satisfying life. She’d raised two kids, had good friends, and was in her third decade as a real estate agent in the Detroit area.

But as time went by, she’d gained weight, slowly at first, until suddenly she hit 220 pounds. She’d never been an athlete—never played sports, hit the gym, or exercised consistently—but she wasn’t a couch potato either. Her dad had worked in a steel factory, waking the kids at 5 a.m. for prayer and breakfast, and at night they all helped with the family’s soul food catering business. In her world, effort had always mattered. And yet here she was, struggling to make it to the second floor while showing houses to potential buyers.

She began to worry. She’d seen retirees fall prey to a sedentary lifestyle. “Ten years later, they’re gone because they don’t do anything but go home and eat, eat, sit down, and look at the TV,” she says. “I saw a lot of my friends pass away because they weren’t strong enough.” She wanted no part of it. “I said, No, I’m not going out like that.”

At her birthday party, she got to talking with a friend’s husband by the name of Art Little. Wiry, enthusiastic, and no-nonsense, he worked as a trainer at a gym for powerlifters north of Detroit. He invited her to come in for a workout. Langdon wasn’t sure; she’d never done any weight lifting and had always considered herself “a weakling.” When Langdon showed up, Little led her to a bench. Around them, thick-necked men grunted. Weights clattered. Little instructed Langdon to lie down, then lowered a broomstick into her hands. It weighed less than three pounds. Up and down she went with it, fighting gravity the whole way.

Langdon says she can feel the longevity benefits of strength training, including increased mobility, which lowers her risk of falling. 

That night, she returned home exhausted. Her body ached everywhere, years of disuse coming to bear. She was reluctant to return, but a little voice in her head told her she couldn’t quit—not after one session. So she went back to Little’s gym later that week and then the week after. Little pushed her to add weight—from broomstick to empty barbell, then to the bar with plates. Each time, she told him she couldn’t do it. “Just try it,” Little responded. She did, finding she loved the feeling of getting stronger. Soon enough, with Little’s encouragement, she entered powerlifting competitions and began collecting gold medals in her age-group, even some for bench press—a long way from her first session. Now in her ninth decade, she is stronger than most women in their 20s and 30s.

Langdon is not alone. More people are not only exercising longer and later in life—they’re also competing and breaking records in a range of sports. In Pennsylvania, a computer programmer took up running again in his 50s and now holds the fastest marathon time for a 70-plus runner. In Idaho, a mountain biker racked up world championships while discovering that prioritizing mental health rekindled her love for the sport—and helped her stay sharp. And in Ireland, after a string of injuries, a former rugby player learned that finding the right sport for a changing body sometimes takes persistence. Today he’s the Guinness World Record holder for being the first man to swim a mile in ice-cold water on all seven continents.

These athletes are remarkable examples of a broad but quiet revolution in how we understand human potential across a person’s lifetime. Hirofumi Tanaka, a leading researcher on exercise and longevity, views “masters” athletes—typically those hardy souls who keep competing beyond the age of 35—as a compelling model of what he calls “exceptionally successful aging,” thanks to their ability to preserve strength, endurance, and cardiovascular health well into later life.

“It’s really staggering,” says Tanaka, director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you look at the world record [for any given sport], that’s basically stagnated. They haven’t changed that much over the last 10 or 20 years.” But age-group records, he says, are a different story. “They are improving rapidly.”

(Aging isn’t just about decline. Here’s how health improves as we grow older.)

These athletes aren’t just aging well; they’re redefining what aging can look like. Longevity is one thing, quality of life is another. In recent decades, scientists have turned their attention to lengthening the stretch of life spent active, healthy, and engaged, called health span. The goal is no longer just to extend life but to expand the years you can truly live well.

While diet matters, of course, and medicine and genetics play a role, exercise is the linchpin when it comes to health span. It improves heart health, lowers the risk of cancer, increases bone density, aids in cognition, reduces the prevalence and impact of Alzheimer’s, and decreases symptoms of depression. A 2024 longitudinal study in Circulation found that logging 300 minutes of moderate weekly exercise, or 150 minutes of intense activity, can lower mortality risk by roughly 30 percent. By another measure, every minute you exercise adds five minutes to your life.

Here, we highlight a handful of record-setting athletes from their 50s to their 80s. Each extraordinary competitor provides insight into the lessons and emerging science of aging athletes—and gives us all something to strive for.

The powerful impact of weight training

Only a few months into her new life at the gym, back in 2006, Nora Langdon was already feeling the benefits. She was becoming steadier on her feet, stronger through the core, and more confident under the bar.

Langdon trains three days a week at the northern Detroit gym where she had her first session.

Like many older adults, Langdon likely experienced sarcopenia—the age-related loss of muscle mass that accelerates with inactivity. Sarcopenia can lead to a host of negative outcomes: reduced mobility, increased danger of falls, a lack of independence. The good news: Lifting helps counteract those effects. A 2024 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found women who do strength training are more likely to live longer and have a lower risk of death from heart disease compared with women who don’t. Those who participate in strength-based exercises had a 19 percent reduction in mortality risk from any cause and a 30 percent reduction in mortality risk from heart-related conditions—and the benefits for women are even more pronounced than for men.

In Langdon’s case, she steadily lost body weight, dropping almost 20 pounds, but also gained muscle. Within months, she was pushing around enough weight that Little suggested she enter her first state powerlifting tournament. When Langdon arrived, she was in awe of all the strong women—most of them much younger than she was. Then she got under the bar. To her shock, she took home the women’s 60-69 age-group gold in all three events she entered, squatting 190 pounds, bench-pressing 95, and deadlifting 250.

(What lifting weights does to your body—and your mind.)

After another year of training, Langdon advanced to the nationals and then to the 2008 World Championships in Palm Springs, California, where she squatted 330 pounds and won her age-group’s gold medal. Since then, she has set more than 20 national and world age-group records, logging personal records (PRs) of 203 pounds in the bench press, 381 pounds in the dead lift, and 413 pounds in the squat—a mark she set in her 70s. (Her bench press and dead lift PRs remain U.S. records in the 70s age-group.)

Langdon started out struggling to push up a broomstick. A year later, at age 65, she entered the World Masters Powerlifting Competition in Palm Springs, California, pictured in the framed photo, where she deadlifted 336 pounds.

Now 82, Langdon still trains religiously, three days a week, for three to four hours, usually wearing Converse high-tops and eschewing headphones to better focus on the task at hand. She drinks protein shakes on the days she trains, eats beef twice a week, and swears by an elixir of a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in a half glass of water. “All I want to do is inspire other people just to get up and do things,” she says.

But the challenge for most is getting started; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found only 7 percent of American adults do strength training three times a week. If they can make the leap to take up weight training, the effects begin to compound: A study in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports found older people gain not only muscle mass but also confidence and motivation.

(When does old age begin? Science says later than you might think.)

Langdon says she feels as if she keeps getting stronger, even at her age. And she has no plans of stopping, either. Not until, as she puts it, “the Lord tells me to go on my own.” In the meantime, she’ll be in the weight room three times a week, without fail.

Calm your mind, push your limits

For most of her athletic life, Rebecca Rusch felt invincible, the rare athlete able to switch sports effortlessly and, seemingly, push past most natural limits. Then, in midlife, a freak accident coupled with the stressors of menopause forced her to make hard choices—and led to a new appreciation for her mental health.

Rebecca Rusch, 57, is a lifelong adventure racer. In her late 30s, she pivoted to mountain biking as her body started needing more recovery. Today she holds seven world championships.

Video by Julian Focareta

Born in Puerto Rico, Rusch lost her father—a U.S. Air Force F-4 pilot—at age three when he was shot down during the Vietnam War, a loss that would come to shape much of her life. After running competitively in high school, she discovered climbing, notching the first female ascent of El Capitan’s Bermuda Dunes trail in 1996, and went on to become an early champion in the emerging sport of adventure racing—a grueling blend of trekking, mountain biking, paddling, and navigation that demands both endurance and resilience over days-long wilderness challenges.

At 38, she pivoted to solo mountain biking and came to dominate the sport. She won the Leadville Trail 100 MTB, a high-altitude course in the Rocky Mountains, then won it three more times. Twice she finished first among women in a 350-mile bike race on the Iditarod Trail over ice and snow in the Alaska wilderness. And she became the only person to bike the length of the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, a feat spurred by her quest—ultimately successful—to find her father’s crash site. She’s now won seven world championships and is enshrined in the Mountain Biking Hall of Fame.

Even so, as Rusch approached and then surpassed 40, her body—the one that never failed her—began to change in real time. She needed sleep more than ever but had a harder time getting it (our sleep quality and duration decline the older we get). Recovery took longer. On top of all that, she began navigating menopause: hot flashes, joint pain, staccato sleep patterns. Then, in 2021, she crashed and hit her head on a rock during a trail ride, suffering a traumatic brain injury that left her with a host of symptoms—depression, anxiety, headaches.

In 2021, Rusch experienced a traumatic brain injury that motivated her to take better care of her mental health.

For Rusch, her crucial change came in the period after the accident, when she began concentrating on the mental aspect of training and recovery as well. She entered therapy, and, after years as a self-proclaimed naysayer of meditation, she began regularly practicing, swayed after she looked into the research. Functional MRI studies have found meditation leads to changes in brain structure and function, including increased gray matter density, which is associated with improved memory and emotional regulation, and altered brain activity patterns, which can enhance focus and resilience under stress. Meditating can be particularly helpful for athletic performance; a 2024 metastudy in Frontiers in Psychology found mindfulness training reduces an athlete’s anxiety, improves performance, and boosts what’s known as fluency—the optimal competitive psychological state, where the athlete’s attention is entirely centered on the task. “It doesn’t really cost anything to meditate,” Rusch says. “And especially for a hard-charging athlete, it’s really interesting. It’s cool to practice sitting still for 10 minutes.”

Rusch began to realize the value of that processing time. Long training rides, which she embarks on without headphones, became “moving meditation.” Along the way, she shifted her mindset, focusing on finding the joy in sport. Instead of tying her identity and self-worth to her performance, she reminded herself that she does this because “it is fun, and it feels good, and I feel better when I am doing it.” She also looked to reframe the pain, darkness, and trauma of her concussion recovery, which stretched on for years, as an emotional growth opportunity. Mindfulness helped. So did self-reflection.

Rusch lives and trains in Idaho, where she’s learned to integrate mindfulness and recovery into her training program. She says it’s helped renew her love for mountain biking.

Rusch became a frequent journaler, logging her workouts, reactions, and thoughts in a small notebook. It’s a practice now embraced by many top athletes, including Katie Ledecky, Michael Phelps, and Simone Biles, and studies show it helps with problem-solving, emotional regulation, and competitive stress, and enhances athletic performance. In Rusch’s case, she says the key step is going back and rereading her entries. She compares it to being your own coach or therapist. “It’s actually a pretty interesting way to see what’s surfacing up for you,” Rusch says. “That’s what a good coach would do. That’s what a good therapist would do is just ask the right questions.” She continues: “As I get older, I’m starting to learn that I can ask myself the right questions and be like, What was great about that experience? And just kind of reflect on it a little bit. Or, Why was I in such a bad mood after my run today? Oh, well, I wasn’t really focused. I was distracted by work.”

Today, at 57, Rusch, who lives near the Sawtooth Mountains, in Idaho, values quality over quantity. She often takes off two days a week, and when she works out, she does interval training. But it’s the internal habits—the moments of pause, the willingness to reflect—that now guide her performance. “Who cares how fast you run a 10K?” she says. “The most important part of being an athlete is to feel good and to be able to get up and off the floor and to hang out with your friends and pick up your grandkids.”

These days, mindfulness isn’t something she squeezes in between training sessions. It is the training.

She now regularly meditates, which is known to aid in athletic performance.