I'm 70. I train year-round, mostly for cycling, a little for hiking and skiing. For the past several years, my legs have hurt every day. I can't remember a day when they didn't. I finally got curious about whether that's just because I'm old and pain comes with age, or whether it's simply that I train all the time and so I'm always sore, sometimes more, sometimes less.

So this past week I did a hard Sunday ride on the tandem, then did . . . nothing, all week. Sat around. Played on the computer. Watched movies. Did household chores. Slept well. Legs still hurt - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday - but then Sunday morning, no pain. Legs felt great. I was bouncing around the house like a kid. We went on a short 38 mile tandem ride with friends and rode it pretty hard. Stoker almost barfed on my back. My HR went up easily and stayed up without my feeling like I was killing myself to get it up there. It was fun.

Of course there are downsides: my Chronic Training Load dropped 10 points from the week's layoff. In spite of how hard we felt like we were going, we only got one Strava PR and a bunch of 2nd and 3rd bests. We were well rested, but of course can't keep that up or we'd be doing Silver Sneakers arm raises in chairs in a year.

So back to leg pain: they hurt today, Monday. We went to the gym today to do an easy 40 minutes of zone 2 on the Stepmill, which turned out not to be easy at all. I had to quit after only 1/2 hour because I'm going DH skiing tomorrow and didn't want to completely ruin my legs, which were hurting already at only 140 watts, probably overstated. Amazing how much base lost in just a week.

I'll hopefully ski 20,000' or more of vertical tomorrow, then 40 minutes of one-legged pedaling on the rollers Wednesday, an hour of VT1 on the rollers Thursday followed by an hour of heavy weights at the gym, then another 45 minutes of rollers Friday, rest Saturday, then another PNW tandem rain ride on Sunday. Yup, they'll just hurt and the heck with it. As we say, it's better than the alternative.

I get that, totally. For me, it isnt pain in the legs as much as the "pumped" feel in the mornings that remind me of strenuous activity. The hips and lower back union is another story. Stiffness. Bending over getting dressed and such is a warm morning greeting for me. Just a reminder.

Glad to see you clicking off Strava PRs. Keep it going.

Is it joint pain, muscles, or both? Have you tried foam rollers or massage? How about a hot tub?
It sounds like you know what you are doing so I assume you stay hydrated and stay on top of nutrition.

I, too, have seen a dramatic loss of fitness in a short time which gets worse as I get older (62 next month). Of course, I am a slacker and junk-food junkie.

Sounds like your lower spine is compressing the nerve outlets. A physio might be able to suggest a few exercises to target that area. Otherwise, just the cost of growing old!

I took nine days off to go to the Florida Keys for fishing, scuba, food and tequila. Of course, I didn't plan on the head cold that would knock me on my backside, but I did manage to do some lazy cycling, and a short run as a warm-up to the Saturday 5K, which nearly killed me. Back at the gym, last night, and, although I felt weak on the weights, I did manage a PR on the stationary bike, beating my time from November by over two minutes. Strength and stamina seem to dissipate much more quickly, as I get older. Taking a day off is almost more punishment than it's worth. At least I don't have to (yet!) deal with the constant pain that OP reports. Not looking forward to that, at all!

I don't train as hard as CB but still get, not exactly pain but discomfort once mileage ramps up during warmer weather. What helps quite a bit is compression tights or socks. I attribute it all to an inability to recover quickly and compression wear does the same job as a compression suit does for a fighter pilot, improves circulation. Diabetics also experience improved circulation with compression socks.

At 77 y.o., I do some work with dumbbells for upper body strength but the majority of work consists of some yoga moves to maintain flexibility and a strong core and knees.

(Not in my case)

I'm almost 70 and ride daily, between 35 and 50 fairly hard miles. When I get done with my rides my legs are often tired. Every once in a while, they actually do hurt. At one point, I would put them under an electric blanket for a little while and that seemed to help quite a bit. Unfortunately, you can only keep your legs under an electric blanket for so long. So I started doubling up a regular blanket and putting it on the bed over the area where my legs are at. I do this on top of any other blanket we may have on the bed. The idea is to keep the legs warmer than the torso for the eight or so hours you sleep. Next morning, the legs are ready to go and feel as if I've never ridden a bike at all. I've been doing this now for several years and it works like a charm. Since my wife also rides, she does the same thing and her legs are always ready to go the next morning.

Nothing to do with nerve compression. I know what that feels like, having gone through a bad back period, now fixed with more exercise.

It's just muscle pain, quads, hams, hip flexors, some glutes. Skied great today, 23,000'. I didn't ski for some decades and am finally remembering how to "really ski."

We have a down comforter on the bed and do put it over our legs at night. Legs are more or less ready to go each day, they just hurt a bit. I stretch most mornings, which I think helps. I've heard that ice baths after a workout help more than anything, but we don't have a tub and anyway that sounds miserable.

I don't have compression wear. Studies show it doesn't help during, but does help after. That's an idea. Anyone have a pair that have worked for them? Brand?

Ask your doctor about gabapentin (neurontin). Helps some forms of neurological chronic pain. Works well for my mom and she's using less opioid analgesics for her chronic pain due to scoliosis/lordosis, degenerative spine and arthritis, all of which were aggravated by a long bout with shingles. Doesn't seem to have any significant side effects, and at her age (77) with her long history of poor balance, falls, etc., that's crucial.

I've also spoken with younger folks taking it for chronic pain due to fibromyalgia and they say it's been effective.

Worth a try if your doctor agrees, and it should take only a couple of weeks or so to decide whether it helps.

Do you mean it is not a spinal problem, or that you are not getting old?

I have similar leg pain, that is worse some days than others, but I won't take drugs for it and it doesn't stop me doing things like cycling.

Like it or not, ageing does bring problems, but I admire you for not giving in to them.

No spinal pain. What I experience (post #2 ) is almost all activity related. Morning stiffness was my portion this past winter from the intense manner of snowrides on an ill-fitting MTB. Now that I had neglected any trainer riding on my road warrior, I am reacquainting myself with a different set of muscles. And that is where my morning back/hip stiffness occurs. This will settle down. What I feel being hit the most is hamstrings from using toeclips/restraints on the road bike whereas the winter MTB had none. Next year I will be riding the trainer once a week to stay engaged with the road bike.

The age factor is there, no doubt.

Some years ago I read an article in a magazine about the effects of doping. The author, as part of his investigation, found an MD who specialized in aging and how to ameliorate the inevitable decline. He began taking a cocktail of substances over a period of some weeks. What he found was that he got stronger and experienced a weight gain. After riding a century, on the following day he felt completely fresh and would do another with the same result. What he found was that doping improves performance but the principal benefit was a much better ability to recover and that in turn allows a competitive cyclist to train harder which further improves performance. He eventually stopped doping because he did not think it was a healthy thing to do. I wish I could remember where I read the article because it is worth rereading.

I ride 3000 to 3500 miles per year and would ride more if it were possible. Sad to say but I can only ride about 100 to 120 miles per week before needing time to recover with a space of several days rest after a long ride of 50 or 60 miles. That longish recovery period being the situation for myself, I spend time thinking about recovery and how to speed it up. All in all, no complaints as I'm healthy with relatively few aches and pains and certainly no more than when I was a lad of 50.

If I have a problem with the plumbing in my home, I don't go to a bike shop and ask what I need to do about it. Why would you expect to get competent medical advice on a bike blog? Find a gerontologist who has specialized in the medicine of aging. There aren't a lot of them but maybe you will be lucky enough to find one in your area. That's who you should be asking this question.

Gerontology (from the Greek γέρων, geron, "old man" and -λογία, -logia, "study of"; coined by Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov in 1903) is the study of the social, psychological, cognitive, and biological aspects of aging. There is a branch of medicine for this too.

Yep, read the same article. Super expensive to do that, too. I dope with whey protein. Pretty cheap. I too feel at least as good as I did at 50.

As long as my morning resting and standing heart rates look OK, I go ahead and hit it again regardless of leg pain. If those HRs come up, then I take a couple days off. That seems to work well. I too think about ways to improve recovery. I've tried everything I've come across. Some things work, most things don't.

You find us a 70 y.o. gerontologist who still does a couple hundred miles/week on his bike and sure, we'd all listen to him. Some guy sitting in an office, nope. That office doc's got nothing on the line. We put it all on the line. These folks here know more.

Every day on the radio there's advertising from "men's clinics." We see the magazine and online ads, too. They're all in it for the money. T for cash, man. Sure, we all have low T. No sh*t. Like berner said, we can all drug up and do way better . . . for a while. So far I'm doing better than my 65 y.o. cyclist doctor who rode more and harder than I have, until he gave himself Afib and had to back it way off.

If I have a problem with plumbing at my home, I go get my tools. I designed all the plumbing for my house and did a lot of it. I don't get this thing where we're supposed to defer to some authority who knows better than we do. I refuse. I have pain, I figure out how to fix it. So far, so good. I grew up on a homestead in Alaska. You can't figure it out, you're dead.

^^^, What CFboy said, agree 100%.

It wasn't easy, but I managed to find a Primary Care Physician, and a Neurologist, that both ride. This makes it easier for the doctors to relate to what I am saying. I get some good advice from the people here, no one I am aware of takes these replies as medical gospel.

One of the reasons for establishing this forum was so we could discuss things between folks with similar experiences to what we do. It is much easier to talk about things with people my age than with someone that is younger, and has a different viewpoint about things. Including doctors. I am pretty sure most of us can decide what is best to do, and what to discard.

Bill

Benefits of cherry juice: What Can Cherry Juice Do for you? I have had success with the use of cherry juice.

Tell us more about your success.

Many antioxidants suppress the production of various cytokines during exercise. This has been well studied and is generally accepted. However there seems also to be a positive link between said cytokine production and muscle growth, i.e. while antioxidants may reduce inflammation resulting from exercise, they may also inhibit the hypertrophy of damaged muscles. It has been generally accepted that chronic use of NSAIDs for muscle pain inhibits hypertrophy due to the suppression of the factors which create inflammation. This latter has been my experience.

Thus I used to take 1g or more of Vitamin C per day until I saw a post by, IIRC Machka, that Vitamin C supplementation had been found to be negatively associated with endurance performance:
Oral administration of vitamin C decreases muscle mitochondrial biogenesis and hampers training-induced adaptations in endurance performance
I immediately dropped it from my supplements and if anything my muscles were less sore and endurance performance better. Certainly not worse. I was advised to take the antioxidant alpha lipoic acid (ALA) for my age-related macular degeneration, but that particular antioxidant has been found to have no effect on interleukin-6, an inflammatory cytokine released by exercise. https://www.academicjournals.org/jour...f/52B9D9E30666

There it is.

Oops

I think I may have experienced something similar during times when I was ramping my mileage up, having resumed moderately serious road cycling and training in my late 50s after a decade or so off the bike or just commuting. It's an annoying dull ache, which I experienced primarily at night and which sometimes merged into "restless legs," which I also have from time to time.

I certainly don't know everything, but I happen to be a neurologist with a lot of hard miles on an almost 60 yo body and have experienced nerve, nerve root, and even spinal cord compression and damage and i'm all too familiar with what they feel like. This was certainly none of them. It went away on its own, presumably when I reached some level of endurance/fitness/strength and has not recurred, even after major, exhausting, unaccustomed efforts. That makes me dubious of the cytokine theory, at least in my case. Pet theory: I was on a low dose of a statin during this time and never had any diagnosable muscle problems, but I did go off of it (in accord with guidelines) about the time the pain went away. Don't stop yours, based on my worthless anecdote!

I've been thinking about recovery again as I begin ramping up miles after the winter slowdown. This thread also put recovery front and center in my thinking. Our club publishes a newsletter three times per year that has a guest column by a trainer or nutritionist. One recent newsletter by a nutritionist, as stated above, recommended tart cherry juice as an aid to recovery. I've not yet gotten around to trying this but will soon as I need all the help I can get.

I also do not take professional advice, especially medical advice, as gospel. I know of two misdiagnosis where the patient died of cancer, one in my own family. In my opinion the MD was so incompetent as to border on malpractice. Another recent example was the claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

A gerontologist is not a 70 year old MD but a doctor who specializes in treating the complications that come with old age. It's a new branch of medicine so there aren't many of this specialty available. It's too bad because as a society with a lot of aging individuals, we need doctors who understand us. I gather that you don't trust doctors so go with whatever you get here. My own primary care physician isn't much good for this either. She's fairly young and seems to think that you just have to put up with any problem that may arise and just dispenses pills to mask the problem.

At least when a doc misdiagnoses you it's usually in good faith.