Achieving a powerful midlife fitness transformation starts when you remove artificial limits on your potential. Host Zach Gurick connects with author and ultra-endurance athlete Jeffrey Weiss to discuss how making small daily commitments leads to massive long-term results. After starting his running journey at age 48, Jeff went on to tackle marathons, 50-mile races, and full Ironman triathlons while transitioning into a high-stakes startup career. In this episode, Jeff breaks down the exact training philosophy that changed his healthspan and explains how consistent daily habits rewrite your expectations for aging. You’ll learn how to set audacious goals, protect your early morning routine, and build mental resilience that elevates every area of your life.

The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.

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Reinventing Life After 50 Through Ultra Endurance With Jeffrey Weiss

When we think about aging, many of us assume our most adventurous years are behind us, that there comes a point when we should slow down, play it safe, and lower our expectations for what’s possible. What if the exact opposite is true? What if your 50s, 60s, and beyond could become your most vibrant, courageous, and transformative years yet?

Our guest is living proof that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself. Jeff Weiss is the award-winning author of Racing Against Time: On Ironman, Ultramarathons, and the Quest for Transformation in Midlife. After running his very first 10K at the age of 48, Jeff went on to complete multiple Ironman triathlons and a grueling 72-mile ultramarathon, all between the ages of 57 and 61. Jeff’s story isn’t just about endurance sports. At the age of 50, he left the security of a successful law practice to join a startup that, after an 11-year journey filled with risk and uncertainty, sold for an astonishing $3 billion.

Along the way, Jeff discovered something profound. The courage required to push your physical limits can transform every aspect of your life, from your career and relationships to your mindset and sense of purpose. In this conversation, we’ll explore how embracing challenge can extend your health span, why getting uncomfortable may be the key to unlocking your next chapter, and how cultivating audacity can help you thrive at any age. The goal isn’t to become an Ironman. The goal is to become and discover what’s still possible. Let’s welcome Jeff Wise to the show.

 

 

Jeff, thank you so much for being with us. I’ve read your bio and gotten to know you a little bit before we start recording. It’s such a privilege to talk with you. I’m so excited to have this conversation. Some of our journeys are very similar, mine and yours together. I’m excited to learn from you. You’re an encouragement, a mentor, and someone to look up to. Thanks for being with us. I’m excited to dive into all things midlife, transformation, Ironman, and everything else with you.

Thanks so much. I’m looking forward to it. I always enjoy talking with a kindred spirit. You certainly know what this kind of journey is like. It’s always fun to talk about.

I’d love to understand your journey a little bit. You started around 47. Your father passed away. You went through this midlife transformation. Could you tell us a little bit about that experience and what led you into this journey where you made some significant changes? You’ve been an ultramarathoner, a marathoner, and an Ironman, but you weren’t always. What led you to start that at that halfway point of life?

For me, sport has been a huge part of my youth. Through my college years and even for a few years beyond, I played tennis, including Division III College Tennis. After I graduated, I took up powerlifting and did that in a pretty serious way for 5 or 6 years. Around the time that I turned 30, I got married. We started a family. Fitness from that point forward took very much a backseat.

I continued to lift weights very occasionally, not with real consistency. It was enough to maintain a bit, but not in a serious way. It gnawed at me as I got into my 40s that I knew that I should be doing more to get in better shape. In particular, I should be dealing with my cardiovascular fitness, which had never been a priority for me before.

Replacing Someday with Right Now

There was a part of me that always felt like, “I’ll deal with that when I have more time.” I still had kids at home. I’m a father of four and was still very busy professionally. I felt like, “I’ll get to it when there’s more time,” then, my dad passed away. I was getting closer to 50, and I realized, “Later needs to be now. I can’t responsibly keep putting this off if I do still want to get serious about the fitness part of my life.”

I saw a notice for a running class of all things, the culmination of which was to be the Veterans Day 10K in Washington, DC in November of 2010. I signed up for that and ran that race. That ended up kicking things off. At that point, I wanted to become a runner. I had tried a 10K when I was seventeen and ended up walking the last two miles. There was a bit of unfinished business in the back of my mind, so I took on that one at age 48. I thought, “This is cool. I can do it. Maybe I can do it faster,” and ran a few more.

It’s a familiar story. It may well be what you went through yourself as you were climbing the ladder of different running distances. You start to think, “Maybe I could go longer. What about a half marathon?” You do that. I had always thought that a marathon was something that was not for people like me, people who were a bit on the larger side and who didn’t have a history of running. I had once told a friend that I was as likely to walk on the moon as I was to run a marathon, but after that half marathon, I was like, “Maybe it’s not so impossible.”

I ran my first marathon at age 50, also in Washington. It was the Marine Corps Marathon, which was a wonderful race. I kept going. I was cross-training. I climbed a similar ladder with a triathlon. I started with a sprint. I did a few more sprints, the shortest organized distance triathlon, and then went up to an Olympic distance, and so on from there. That’s how things got started.

Thanks for sharing that. What would you say was the mindset that helped you transform your body, but also the other areas of your life? There were a lot of other areas that changed around that time, too.

I was also taking on a new challenge professionally. I joined a startup also at age 50. In fact, I ran the Marine Corps Marathon three days before my first day at work. Having been a lawyer in private practice for 25 years, I made the leap from that to joining a startup. Those were two unparalleled paths, major changes that were going on in my life.

For me, a lot of it kicked off with that first running class. One of the features of the class was a classroom session once a week. They would bring in guest speakers. They brought in this orthopedic surgeon to talk about injury prevention, good running form, and things of that sort. He put up these two graphs from a book called Younger Next Year.

Altering Your Trajectory with Daily Consistency

One graph showed aging the way that we tend to assume that it occurs. We peak physically somewhere in our twenties, and then we decline pretty much on a 45-degree angle continuously until we hit our mid-80s, and then the story is over. The second graph showed aging as we can experience it, which is that you might well peak in your late twenties, but the drop-off from there is almost a parallel line. There’s decline, for sure, but it’s almost a parallel line. The thesis of the book was that if you train six days a week, at least 45 minutes a workout, you can dramatically alter the way in which you age. I took that to heart.

Stop waiting for the perfect time to prioritize your health. Later needs to become right now if you want real change.

For me, when I was first getting started with that first 10K, I committed myself to that program. I would train six days a week for 45 minutes. I did that at the beginning religiously. I would work out exactly 45 minutes for those six days and end the workout when I hit the 45-minute mark. I was doing a mix of running, swimming, and biking, which led me to try that first triathlon. Over time, I started to work out much longer than that.

That basic recipe or that basic formula is so powerful. It had a profound impact on me. Pretty immediately, it gave me more energy and more confidence. It made me feel like I was taking some control over a part of my life that I knew needed more attention from me, and that I knew I had been neglecting and felt guilty about that.

Shattering Self-Imposed Limits

For the startup stuff and the racing stuff, the two things fed off of each other. It was one thing after another. It reminded me that I shouldn’t be placing artificial limits on what I can do in life, and that I might be able to surprise myself, challenge myself, and do things that perhaps in the past I’d always assumed were not for people like me. That was pretty exciting.

I love that mindset shift. With our artificial limits, most of the time, we think, “We’re going to become less capable as we age.” You went against that and proved that it’s not true. We can become more capable as we age in many ways, physically speaking. I love how that fed into the other areas of your life as well. You removed those artificial limits in many ways.

That’s part of the challenge. Some folks who get involved in ultra-endurance sports can go too far in the sense that it can become a sole focus. I don’t think we want in life to have fitness be the sole focus any more than we want our work to be our sole focus. Ideally, we want to train sufficiently to be healthy, fit, and active. We want to work hard and make ourselves proud in our professional lives. We want to be the best parent or the best partner that we can be as well.

I think all of those things are equally important, and I don’t think that they need to be in competition with each other. If we’re fit, we can be more active as a parent, and hopefully, as a grandparent. We can be healthier and take care of others instead of having them be forced to take care of us because perhaps we haven’t looked after ourselves sufficiently over the years. As I aged in the startup, by the end, I was either the oldest or the second oldest employee there. It did make me feel capable of keeping up with much younger colleagues because I had energy. I was active. I was fit. I was in the game. I did feel like that translated into the office as well.

I love how it all feeds together. What were some of the fears that you had to overcome as you started on this journey in your late 40s? Were there some things, mindset shifts, or fears that you had to overcome to push into what you ended up eventually doing?

For me, it was only ever being able to get my head around the next hurdle. Running that 10K was amazing. It seemed like that was as far as I would ever be able to go. I was super proud that I had done it, and then I thought, “Maybe I could go farther.” There was a weird race, a seven-mile race in Baltimore. It was a tentative reaching out to see if I could go a little bit farther. It was like, “Maybe I can do this half marathon.”

I’ve never been as euphoric crossing a finish line as I was for that first half marathon for whatever reason. It shattered this image of myself as being somebody who couldn’t ever run a longer distance. That opened up the next level, the marathon. If you’d asked me at that point in time, “What about an ultramarathon?” I would have said, “That’s insane.” If you asked, “What about a 50-miler?” I would have said, “That’s crazy. I could never do that.”

That was the thing that I had to overcome, but you had to do it step by step, at least for me. It had to go that way. I had to do the 10K before I could conceive of a half marathon. I had to do a half marathon before I could conceive a marathon and so on. Each step successfully climbed made the next one seem possible, whereas before, it seemed like, “That’s not for me.” That part was super amazing.

Setting Audacious Long-Term Goals

When I joined the startup, I read this book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. It’s a very famous business book about how ten companies that he profiles were able to separate themselves from their competition and become the industry leader. He talks about what made that possible. There were common themes for each of the 10 companies, 1 of which was that they had set industry leadership as what he calls a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a BHAG.

The classic example that he gives in the non-business context is John F. Kennedy in 1963 setting the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, which the US was able to accomplish. He talks about how it has a focusing, energizing, motivating force on everybody that this is what we’re shooting for. It needs to be audacious, not impossible, but not easily accomplished if we do the work. It needs to be at the outer reaches of what’s possible.

Reading that, it occurred to me that could work for the individual. I set for myself a BHAG of trying to run this 56-mile ultramarathon. Knowing that that race was going to be a challenge for me, and there was a good chance I might not make it, I decided to set the next BHAG before I even set foot on the course for the first one.

The next BHAG was to do my first half Ironman a year later and a full Ironman the year after that. Those were huge stretch goals for me, but in the end, I was able to do those things. I’m sure you have a similar feeling about Ironman Arizona. You look back, and it’s something that you savor. It’s a gift that you’ve given to yourself that you can treasure for the rest of your life, which is an extraordinary thing.

You’re capable of far more than you think. Remove artificial limits and test what’s possible.

I always tell people, if I’m wearing an Ironman shirt or something and someone asks me, I’m like, “Anybody could do it.” You have to set your mind to it and give yourself the time to train. It’s not like you have to be a specialized athlete or something to pull it off. You have to commit to it, take the time to train, and break it down into bite-sized chunks. Here’s the BHAG way out there, but then you do this each day. You said, “I woke up and did 45 minutes a day, 6 days a week.” Eventually, 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months go by, and you’re at a different place than you were months ago. It all compounds. Was that a similar experience for you?

Very much so. There’s another book that I read years ago called The Slight Edge. It talks about the power, both positively and negatively, of small things that we do on a consistent basis. The positive example is working out 6 days a week, 45 minutes a time. If I start that, and I continue that, and I’m consistent, 1 year or 2 years from now, my health will be transformed.

A negative example would be that an ice cream sundae after dinner for dessert probably doesn’t make a difference, but if I do that every night for the next two years, it’s going to have a big negative impact on my life. The small things done consistently over time have this enormous power to affect how we live and what our life situation might be like.

The other thing that I love about triathlon and Ironman, in particular, is that in the business world, people are fond of this expression, which I’m sure you’ve heard. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. In many ways, life is more complicated and more demanding than that. That’s what I love about Ironman. You have to become proficient at three different disciplines.

You have to figure out nutrition and hydration. You have to pull it all together on race day. You have to prepare. You have to put in the work. You have to be prepared to endure no small amount of discomfort on race day, in particular. There’ll be training sessions during the winter that you might not be very excited about doing outside. There’s a whole bunch of sacrifices that go into it, but if you do the work, to your point, almost anybody can take on a challenge like that. You just have to be prepared to do the work. The rewards are quite immense.

It’s such a mental thing, too. It does give you that mental toughness in a lot of ways, or that grit. Putting in the work and being able to do that unlocks the human potential or lets you know that you do have this potential inside of you that’s greater than what you thought. It expands your horizons.

I love your use of grit. In the business world, people talk about the importance of grit, resilience, learning from failure, and things of that sort. All of it is true. To me, endurance sports are an incredibly great way to put yourselves in situations that will require grit and resilience, and that might lead you to fail sometimes and learn from that failure.

In many ways, it’s very low stakes. It’s about you. I’ve had DNFs in my career, or Did Not Finish. Nobody wants to have that, but you can learn from it. The only person that I’ve disappointed is me. I didn’t harm an investor, an employee, or a customer. It’s me learning a lesson that I can take forward and try to use as a basis for improvement and getting better, stronger, and faster, whatever the challenge might be. These life skills that we all talk about in all sorts of different contexts, such as grit, resilience, and learning from failure, sport is a great way to train those muscles.

I love the idea of a BHAG or the idea of signing up for a race that’s nine months away. Having that on the calendar or having that BHAG written out, they both apply. The same kind of mentality applies. I’ve seen that play out in my own life and in work, career, and business. You set a big goal out there and then break it down, like, “What do I need to do today to move towards that?”

It’s an amazing process. To me, it makes every day richer. I love this feeling that I’m on a journey, that I’m not being stagnant, and that there are exciting things out there on the horizon for me and new mountains. It doesn’t have to be necessarily progressively harder mountains to climb, but new things or new adventures.

My project is to try to do the six original world major marathons. Those are New York, Boston, Chicago, Tokyo, Berlin, and London. I’m halfway through. I’ve done the three non-US ones, which are Tokyo, Berlin, and London. I signed up for Chicago. It’s cool. It’s fun. I like having it on the calendar. Aspects of the training can be a bit exhausting and even a little bit boring at times, but you never look back after crossing a finish line with regret that you took on the challenge. That’s pretty amazing.

Having that on the calendar, at least for me, was always helpful. I’ve paid my deposits for the race. I’ve paid for the race. It’s out there. It’s on the calendar. On those mornings where I would wake up and be like, “I don’t feel like going for a swim right now. It’s cold out,” or it could be a run or whatever, it’s like, “If I don’t do it, then I’m not going to be ready on that day.” It keeps you motivated, going ahead and making that commitment to yourself.

Nobody wants to have a bad experience on race day. Coming in undertrained is a recipe for having an extraordinarily hard experience and unnecessarily so.

I imagine some of our readers might be thinking, “I’m not going to do an Ironman,” but maybe they could run a 5K or 3 miles and set that out 3 months, 6 months, or whatever. What advice do you have for someone like that who’s getting going or wants to start somewhere?

 

 

The specifics of what a person does, whether it is running, swimming, triathlon, Pilates, or yoga, the choices are virtually unlimited. I don’t consider myself an evangelist for marathons or Ironman. For me, they ended up being great choices. They’ve enriched my life and have helped me stay focused. What I do try to encourage people to do is to make a commitment to regular fitness as part of your life now and from this point forward.

If you can’t do 6 days a week, do 5. If you can’t do 5, do 4 or 3. Do it consistently. Make it a habit in your life so that you’re not fighting yourself, trying to convince yourself, “I do need to work out today.” If you do create the structure and make it habitual, it’s not going to be an endless series of arguments with yourself. Try to find activities that you can grow to appreciate, enjoy, and look forward to doing. To me, that’s the secret sauce. For the specifics of it, everybody is different. Running is not for everybody. Swimming is not for everybody. Regular physical exercise, more or less, is for everybody.

It’s amazing the compounding effects. The more often you exercise, the more you’re going to feel better because you have more energy. You’re going to have more brain clarity or mental clarity. You’re going to sleep better. You’re going to want to eat healthier foods. Everything compounds and works together.

I agree. It sets in motion a virtuous circle, which I’ve heard it referred to. There are people who think, “I’m going to become a runner so I can eat whatever I want.” Unless you’re Michael Phelps, however much he used to swim back in the day. That’s not how it’s going to work, especially as you get older. You’re not going to train to burn so many calories that you can eat without discipline.

Viewing Food as Direct Performance Fuel

If you train, you will think of food differently. You’re not going to go out there, work out for an hour, and then come back, have a candy bar, and eat more than the number of calories that you worked so hard to burn. You’ll think of food more as fuel and less as something to eat to amuse yourself or to treat yourself. That’s a good thing. It put in motion a whole bunch of different positive changes. Hopefully, it’ll make you more serious about your sleep. If you’re sleeping well, you’ll be more effective as an athlete. You’ll be more effective in every sphere of your life. These things do nurture each other in a very positive way.

You also wrote a book, Racing Against Time. What led you to go down that journey and that path? Can you tell us a little bit more about the book?

Racing Against Time is my third book. Writing is another great passion for me. It’s what I do first thing in the morning for an hour before I work out. For me, a number of years into my fitness journey, I started to feel like there was an arc to the story. It had an interesting beginning, and it was moving toward a nice, climactic point that would make for a good and hopefully relatable story for people.

For me, when I was getting started with fitness, I started to read lots of fitness memoirs. I found them to be hugely motivating. I’ve read David Goggins’ book, Can’t Hurt Me, Rich Roll’s book, Dean Karnazes’ book, the Ultramarathon Man, and a bunch of others. They got me excited about fitness. They gave me ideas of races to try and things to incorporate into my training. In general, the whole thing seems so cool, exciting, and fun.

My hope is Racing Against Time can be that kind of resource or that kind of inspiration for somebody who’s maybe at the beginning of their journey and trying to get their head around, “Can I run these longer races?” or, “Can I take on a longer triathlon event? What might that be like?” The one challenge with some of those books is that some of the people who write them are such extraordinary athletes that, on the one hand, they inspire you, and on the other hand, you can’t relate to them because they are so amazing.

I’m not amazing. I’m not particularly fast in any of the distances that I have competed in. Hopefully, I can be an example to people that even somebody who’s not physically naturally suited to long course triathlon, ultramarathons, or things of that sort. If you put in the time and make the effort, you will be very surprised at what you can accomplish.

Thanks for taking the time to write that book and your other books as well and for being an inspiration. You write for an hour every morning before you work out. Are you one of those people that’s waking up at 4:00 AM, writing, and then working out? What does your daily schedule look like?

I’m getting up a little bit later. I’m getting up closer to 6:00. I used to get up at 5:00. I get up right until about 6:00 or 6:15 and then work out, depending on what I was training for, for 1 or 1 and a half hours. On Sundays, typically, that would be the day for a very long cycle, run, or something like that. All of that starts a little bit later because I don’t need to start my workday as early as I used to. I used to have to start my workday much earlier. I had to get up early to fit it all in.

Protecting Your Early Morning Routine

I love the advice that they give in the area of personal finance, which is that if you want to save money, pay yourself first. Take money out of your paycheck right when you get paid that you intend to save or invest in and put it to that use before you start spending on other things. That way, you can be certain that you will do that saving or investing that you want to do.

Pay yourself first when it comes to your time. Do your writing and workouts before the workday takes over.

For me and for a lot of us, I control the very early part of my day. Once my workday starts, I don’t control it anymore. If I had planned on training at lunch or after work, there’s always that chance that that might not happen because of things that happened during my workday. In the early morning, I can be pretty certain that I can accomplish the things that I’ve set out to do. I find that to be a good way to fit all of this stuff in.

That’s great. On the show, we talk a lot about health span versus longevity or lifespan and the focus on health span. How has this transformation or shift that you’ve gone through over the last couple of years changed your expectations for what the later decades of life can look like? What are your hopes and dreams for the future as you look out? You’re 64. What do you expect these later decades to look like?

There’s an element here of good fortune that you can’t entirely take for granted, like not having an accident or not having some latent genetic disease. There are some things that are beyond our control, but to the extent that we control things, my hope is that I can stay active and stay fit through my 70s and potentially through my 80s.

I love hiking. I’d like to be able to continue to do that for the rest of my life. I’d love to be able to continue to ski. That’s a wonderful lifetime sport. There are all sorts of awesome people out there doing it in their 70s and 80s, so I think it’s entirely possible. I’d like to be able to continue to run, swim, and stay fit. All of that is possible. I’ve already had to make some accommodations, and there’ll be more, no doubt.

There’s that famous saying attributed to Satchel Paige. I’m not sure if he did say it, but age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. It matters some, but not as much as we think. You have to be cognizant of it. If you’ve never lifted weights before, I probably wouldn’t try to become a power lifter in my 70s. You can lift weights in your 70s for the first time, done under supervision. Sensibly, it could be a terrific thing for you.

I want my 70s and 80s to be as active and rich physically as they can possibly be. In my experience over the years, life is so much happier. Certainly, that has been my experience. When there’s adventure in there, when there’s activity in there, when I feel good about myself, when I feel high energy, and when I walk down the street, I feel confident and feel like I’m in the game.

That’s a nice feeling. I never wanted to be that person who is struggling or hasn’t taken care of themselves, and they’re paying a price for that. It’s unfortunate because it doesn’t have to be that way for most of us. There are some unpredictable things that we can’t control, but to the extent that we can control it, we ought to do that.

I love that. I have some similar goals of skiing in my 80s and hiking in my 90s. It’s very much possible. There are people who are doing it. Our future can be bigger and brighter than our past. That’s an important mindset to have as well.

That’s right at the core of it.

Recovery is also an important factor here. As you have aged chronologically, how do you make sure that you’re recovering properly and getting enough sleep? How do you deal with inflammation and things like that? Are there some supplements or some things that you utilize? Are there other modalities, therapies, or things that you’re utilizing to help yourself recover and combat inflammation along the way?

I’m trying to, for sure. That has been a big change for me in the last few years. I’m trying to get much more serious about my sleep. I wear a tracker, an Oura ring. I try to look at the data and make changes to improve it. I’m experimenting with what time I go to bed. I’ve improved my sleep hygiene by lowering the temperature, ensuring complete darkness in there, and that kind of thing. It has improved. My numbers are going up, and I feel it during the day.

I’ve gotten into ice baths. They seem to help with recovery. My flexibility has always been an issue, so I have finally taken up yoga. I’m doing it twice a week. I feel like that has been a real positive for me. The key, to me, is to be mindful of areas in which I could improve and to try to attend to those. To your point, I couldn’t agree more. Recovery becomes more important as you get older.

We can stay at a pretty consistent level for a long time. The big difference, at least that I’ve experienced, is that it’s a little bit easier to get hurt and it takes progressively longer to recover from being hurt as you get older. That has been the biggest change for me. It’s in my interest to do the best job that I can in heading off injuries, being proactive, taking care of myself, and hopefully, limiting the risk that I can get hurt in the first instance.

That’s all super helpful. You’re training for these six marathons. You’re focusing on one at a time. In October, there is a marathon. You’re doing yoga twice a week. How do you balance all of that in terms of time and effort? It sounds like you’re doing a lot of physical activity in a week.

Your world doesn’t have to shrink as you age. Keep setting new goals and chasing new adventures.

A typical week for me is 3 runs, 3 cycles, 2 swims, 2 yogas, and 2 weightlifting sessions. There’s some doubling up. The weightlifting I tend to do on a break in the afternoon. I deal with the control part of that by having some ability to slide those workouts. For example, I try to lift on Mondays and Thursdays, but if necessary, I can shift Monday to Tuesday and shift Thursday to Friday, and that seems to work fine. For some people, that’s probably overkill, but for me, I get a lot out of all of it. I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy what it does for my body, so I’ll keep it up for the foreseeable future.

You’ve been doing this for a long time. You’re at an elite level probably. For someone starting out, maybe they do one a week of each of those.

When I started with the 6-day thing, I was doing 3 runs, 2 cycles, and 1 swim. It was one workout a day. There was no yoga back then. There were no ice baths back then. I might not have even been lifting weights back then, or maybe I did 1 or 2 short 10-minute maintenance workouts. I was able to make it work. It was great. I thrived on that. For a lot of people, that’s fantastic. Stick with that. There’s no need to go crazy. There’s no need to be layering more on top of that.

It’s certainly not my intent to send the message to people that if you’re not working out an hour and a half, two hours, or more a day, you’re somehow missing out. I don’t think that’s true. I think everybody has to figure out what’s going to make their life as balanced and rich as it can possibly be. There will have to be some experimentation in there, especially finding the activities that will work for you. You can’t necessarily decide based on one attempt at something.

A new activity will feel awkward. It may make you very sore the next day, even the first few days that you try it. Sometimes, you have to get a little bit better before you can judge, “Do I enjoy this?” Certainly, for me, yoga was something that I tried a bunch of times, gave up on it, and then came back. In the last few months, I finally broke through. Now I get it. I do find enjoyment in it even though I’m one of the least flexible people you’ll probably ever meet. I’m improving. Now I get it, and I enjoy it.

That’s great. I love that. You’re already speaking to this. You were talking about doing this Ironman, and then the next one, or this next big challenge. It can become maybe an unhealthy obsession at some points, or we’re too solely focused on it. How do you distinguish that line between a healthy challenge and unhealthy striving?

Honestly, it’s a challenge. I’m not sure I’ve always come out on the right side of that. I’ve gotten a little bit smarter. One of the things that I’ve committed to myself is no more than one marathon or ultramarathon a year. I was starting to get a bit carried away with it. In 2025, I did a 50K and 2 marathons over 8 months. There was a 49-month period from 2021 to 2025 where I did 2 half Ironmans, an Ironman, 5 marathons, and 5 ultramarathons. It was too much.

My body, by the end, let me know that I had gone too far, so I had several months of having to cut way back. For a few months, the only thing I was able to do was to cycle or spin. That was it. I couldn’t run or swim. I had to give my body time to heal. I resolved not to let myself do that again and not to fall prey to wanting to keep doing more things. I’ve got to be a little smarter than that. Sometimes, we don’t know that we’ve gone too far until we go too far.

Thanks for sharing that as well. That sounds like a busy 49 months. I’m glad that you’re taking a little more balanced approach now. What would you say is a belief about aging that you’ve completely changed your mind about through this whole journey?

Certainly, I believed that first graph that the orthopedic surgeon put up in that class. I believed it before that class that I was on a downward descent, and there was no changing it. That was life. I was going to get progressively weaker and slower, and there was not a whole lot I could do about it. Now, I do believe that we can achieve a level of fitness and more or less maintain it potentially until the end. That’s extraordinarily exciting.

Expanding Your Horizons at Any Age

It gives me so much more hope about my later years or about my future. I don’t see it in a dark, sad way in which my horizons are going to get progressively narrower, and my world is going to get smaller. I don’t think our worlds have to get smaller. I think they can still be big and exciting. There can still be surprises and amazing things. I probably would not have said that remotely when I was 48 and starting with that running class, but now, I passionately believe that. I feel like I’ve been experiencing it for the last couple of years, and it’s amazing.

I love that as well. That’s such a good way to think about aging. Our world can continue to get bigger. Our horizon and our mindset can continue to expand. What’s one challenge that everyone should attempt or one type of challenge? What would you encourage readers to do if they’re over 40, over 50, or whatever?

It’s very individual. I don’t think everybody has to run a marathon. It’s a very popular bucket list thing for folks to do. Honestly, to me, the biggest thing is to sit down and figure out, “How can I make this commitment to myself to exercise regularly multiple days a week consistently from this point forward?” That’s going to be a process of finding a gym and finding activities. There’s some trial and error in there. Maybe group fitness classes are for you. Maybe Pilates is for you. There’s so much out there. I don’t think there’s any one particular thing other than making this commitment to physical exercise because it brings so much to it.

The nutrition piece, which we talked about a bit before, in many ways, it’s important to separate the two. There are some folks who feel like, “I’m overweight. I need to lose the weight first, and then when I’ve lost the weight, I can start to exercise.” I would, in that sense, separate the two. We want to be exercising regardless of where our weight is at. If we’re lighter, exercise will be easier and all of the rest, but it’s independently important to be physically active. We should all make a commitment to do that. We should make that commitment, especially if we’re in our 50s.

 

 

It’s never too late. If somebody is in their 70s or 80s and they haven’t worked out before, it’s not too late. It will limit the amount of change that it can bring into your life, but it will change whatever life you have still to live. I passionately believe that. In your 50s, there are still so many incredible things you could do depending on what tickles your fancy.

One of my good friends has become a mentor. He’s 87. He still rides his bike 20 to 30 miles a day. He’s on this journey to complete a circuit to ride his bike all the way around the world 20 to 30 miles each day. On his 85th birthday, he wanted to ride his bike 8,500 miles. He accomplished that over the course of his 85th year. His next goal was to circumnavigate the world by the time he was 90. He’s not quite 88, and he’s going to finish. You keep setting those BHAGs and put it out there. Break it down into day-to-day activities and get going.

You think about how so many folks who are his age, if they’re even still around, might be sitting at home, watching TV all day, and not living life in an exciting, meaningful way any longer. It doesn’t have to be that way. He’s perhaps an outlier in the sense that he’s so extraordinary. If you’re doing 20% of what he’s doing at his age, that’s amazing.

It’s helpful to have those people like yourself who are an inspiration. It’s like, “If they can do that, I could do at least this and get going.” It unlocks that potential. You said, “I did a sprint and realized I could do that. Now, let me go up to the Olympic distance, then the half, and then the full.” That’s the journey. As you unlock one step, you realize that you have a lot more potential in there.

It’s such a cool process to open your mind to new things. There’s a classic book by Carol Dweck called Mindset. She talks about growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. We want to cultivate a growth mindset that we can take on challenges and learn new things, even things that we might have thought we’re not strong at. It’s not so much about what we’re born with. We’re not born mathematicians, linguists, or great athletes. These are skills that we can acquire through effort. We need to be open-minded, and then we need to do the work.

This is such a fun, inspiring conversation. You’ve written three books. Where can people find you? Where can they connect with you? Where can they find your latest book, Racing Against Time?

Thank you so much. As I said at the beginning, I love talking with a kindred spirit, somebody who gets this stuff. It’s always fun. For Racing Against Time, it is probably best to find it on Amazon. They’re in paperback, Kindle, and audio versions. I have an author website, JeffreyWeissAuthor.com.

That’s easy enough. On Amazon, Racing Against Time, and then JeffreyWeissAuthor.com. Thank you so much for being with us. Thanks for being an inspiration and someone who inspires us to look at what’s possible. Let’s start doing it, whether that means going for a walk around the block or signing up for your first marathon, half marathon, or 10K as you did. That’s a great distance to start with. This has been so much fun. I appreciate it. Thank you for who you are, what you’re doing, and the way you’re inspiring those around you.

Thanks so much. Thank you for what you’re doing. Your show is amazing. The way that you’re approaching health span and putting the primary emphasis on that is so important. It’s so powerful. It’s exactly what we need to hear as we’re entering or in middle age. If we haven’t done it before, it’s the time to start to take these things seriously. Thanks so much for the opportunity. I loved our conversation.

Me as well. Thanks so much for being with us. Have a great day.

Thanks.

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Thanks for tuning in to the show and that conversation with Jeff Wise. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got a few nuggets out of there. Mostly, I hope you got some inspiration from Jeff’s story that it’s never too late. Our best years can be ahead of us. Our future can look brighter and bigger than our past. He’s living proof that that’s true. We can reinvent ourselves at any stage and any age.

There were a few nuggets that stuck out to me about this. I loved that he talked about the virtuous cycle of if you start exercising or increasing your exercise, there’s a virtuous cycle in all the other aspects of your life with food and seeing food as fuel and sleep, but then also transforming your sense of purpose and meaning in your life and what’s possible. As we push ourselves a little bit further, we discover that we can do a lot more than we thought or imagined.

I hope that you found his story as inspiring as I did. You can connect with him on JeffreyWeissAuthor.com. You can find his book, Racing Against Time, on Amazon. It’s available in all versions there on Amazon. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll see you back here next time on the show. Have a great day.

 

 

Important Links

• Jeff Weiss
• Racing Against Time: On Ironman, Ultramarathons, and the Quest for Transformation in Midlife
• Younger Next Year
• Good to Great
• The Slight Edge
• Can’t Hurt Me
• Ultramarathon Man
• Mindset