Ageless Athlete — Healthy Aging for a Strong, Capable Life

At 82, Cherie Gruenfeld is still racing IRONMAN. She’s a 14-time world champion and is considered a GOAT of the sport. Wildly, she didn’t even start running until 42 or triathlon until 48. 

Her lesson after four decades of training: if you want to preserve strength, power, and muscle as you age, you can’t keep training the way you did when you were younger. We talk about what Cherie does differently now and, t...

Allison Aubrey has spent more than two decades reporting on health and science for NPR. But when she put herself through a longevity assessment, some of the results caught even her off guard. 

In this episode, we talk about what she learned from that experience, why being active and lean doesn’t necessarily mean you’re as prepared for aging as you think, and the health markers that may actually be worth paying atten...

Paul Pritchard is one of the most significant figures in British climbing. He became one of Britain’s leading rock climbers and mountaineers, with major first ascents across the UK, Patagonia, Baffin Island, Yosemite, Kyrgyzstan and the Karakoram. His first ascent of the West Face of Mount Asgard in 1994 remains one of his defining achievements.

He was also the first author to have won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Li...

We spend a lot of time preparing our bodies for the next 30 or 40 years.

Strength. Mobility. Sleep. Recovery. Longevity.

But almost nobody prepares for how sex, desire, intimacy, and pleasure may change over that same stretch of time.

In this conversation, I speak with Joan Price, one of the best-known voices on sex and aging, about what changes, what can actually get better, and what we should understand long before we think we need ...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

You can train hard, stay fit, and still lose physical abilities you are no longer asking your body to use.

Dan Edwardes has spent more than two decades at the forefront of parkour as a practitioner, coach, and movement educator. His work has helped shape parkour into a global movement practice, with coach education programs delivered internati...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

What do the world’s best athletes over 50 do differently?

After more than 140 conversations with elite climbers, cyclists, surfers, runners, mountaineers, and coaches, I went back through the Ageless Athlete archive looking for the patterns.

The sports are different. The principles are surprisingly consistent.

In this episode:

•  Why...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

If you’re over 40, one of the hardest truths to accept is that the body and training approach that got you here may not be the one that carries you forward.

In this episode, Rob Lea, 45, shares what it took to become the first person in history to complete the Double Seven — climbing the highest summit on every continent and swimmi...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

At 66, Joe Barr rode 2,448 miles along Route 66 in just over ten days and set a new world record.

What makes that achievement even more remarkable is that Joe believes he became a better athlete in his sixties.

In this conversation, Joe explains how experience changed the way he trains, recovers, manages fatigue, and responds when his mind tell...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

The fittest people do not always reach the summit.

Luis Benitez has climbed Everest six times and spent years guiding on the world’s highest mountains. What he learned is that success depends on more than strength. Patience, judgment, adaptability, and the ability to stay steady when the plan falls apart often matter more.

But this conver...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Most athletes know how to train hard. Far fewer know how to go truly easy.

Matt Fitzgerald is one of the most influential writers and coaches in endurance sports. 

After developing severe long COVID, Matt lost the ability to run for nearly three years. Then, despite the risks, he committed to running a 100-kilometer ultramarathon through t...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Sleep is not just about feeling tired tomorrow.

In this episode, Stanford sleep researcher Dr. Martin Kawalski explains why sleep often gets harder after 50, why older adults do not simply “need less sleep,” and why getting the basics wrong for long enough may affect how well we age.

One of the biggest ideas from this conversation: ...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Most people don't notice they're declining until it's too late.

Bob Becker offers a very different model.

He didn't discover running until he was 57. Twenty-five years later, at age 80, he returned to Badwater 135 — a brutal 135-mile ultramarathon across Death Valley in temperatures above 120°F — and became the oldest official finis...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Ethan Pringle has climbed some of the hardest routes in the world. But this episode is about the kind of strength climbing does not train you for.

After his father suffered a devastating stroke, Ethan found himself living two lives: pro climber on the road, and son/caregiver back home.

We talk about grief, fear, failure, aging parents, turning ...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Most of us think aging happens slowly in the background. Dr. Bill Andrews thinks we may be aging faster than we need to.

Bill is a molecular biologist, founder of Sierra Sciences, and a longtime researcher in telomere and telomerase biology. He has spent most of his life asking whether aging itself can be slowed, reversed, or even cured.

He is ...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Beth Rodden is one of the most influential climbers of her generation—known for major Yosemite free climbing, multiple free ascents on El Capitan, and routes that helped push standards forward. 

I came into this conversation expecting more about training, aging, and climbing goals. Instead, Beth took us somewhere rarer: the inner wo...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Some guests make you want to train harder. Mike Wardian makes you want to live wider — and stop postponing the things that matter. 

Mike is 52, a runner, adventurer, and lifelong “yes” person. What stood out here wasn’t a race résumé. It was how he builds a life where training fits inside the day, curiosity stays l...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Two weeks ago, I attended Vitalist Bay in Berkeley, surrounded by scientists, doctors, founders, and researchers exploring the future of longevity.

A few days later, I was in the Eastern Sierra, recovering from ankle surgery, mountain biking instead of climbing, soaking in hot springs, and thinking about a different side of healthspan: the liv...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Joe Friel is 82, still training, and still paying attention. In the last five years, he felt the shift—power fading on climbs, muscle disappearing even with a lifetime of lifting—and he’s not sugarcoating what that feels like. 

This episode is about the mistakes that quietly accelerate decline after 50: training like you...

Ageless Athlete Newsletter. Weekly longevity insights + behind-the-scenes. No spam ever. 🚨

Caroline Paul has spent decades doing things most people stop doing after 50 — flying experimental planes, surfing, skateboarding into Yosemite at 57. Her new book, Why Fly, is built around a question that follows her everywhere: what changes in us when the world suddenly feels bigger than our problems?

Astronauts call it the overview ef...