David Prince: Still Sprinting at 40, Eleven Years Into Oxygen Training
A Paralympic world-record holder who lost a leg at 18. Sprinters normally finish at 35. He is chasing a third Paralympic Games — and he is specific about what kept him in the sport.
The full conversation — 1 hour 4 minutes with David Prince and LiveO2 inventor Mark Squibb. Everything below is drawn from it.
A Motorcycle Accident at 18, Then a World Record
David Prince did not come to Paralympic sport gradually. He arrived through an accident that took his leg when he was eighteen, and he describes the transition without ceremony.
“I got involved in Paralympic track and field after I lost the leg in a motorcycle accident at 18 years old, and started running in triathlons and Paralympic track and field meets.”
— David PrinceHe made his first US team in 2009 in the high jump, then moved to the 400 metres. What followed is a progression he can recite by hundredths.
| When | What happened | 400m time |
|---|---|---|
| Before | Competing, pre-oxygen training | 50.61 |
| 2012 Paralympic Games | Broke the world record by about four tenths | — |
| 2013 | Broke his own record by almost eight tenths — first single below-knee amputee under 50 seconds | 49.87 |
| Later | Personal best | 49.33 |
He also took world records in the 200 and 400 at the 2013 national championships. He first used LiveO2 that same year, at IMG Academy, having come through a severe knee injury in 2011.
Sprinters Finish at 35. He Is 40 and Still Going.
This is the part of Prince’s account that is genuinely unusual, and he frames it against the norms of his own event.
“If you look at the life cycle of a typical track and field sprinter, they generally top out at about 30, 35 years old, give or take. I am now 40 and I’m looking at making my third Paralympic Games in the 200 metre events.”
— David PrinceHis explanation is not that he became faster. It is that his ceiling never moved while his recovery held up.
“As far as power is concerned, I’m able to maintain the same outputs as I was when I was 30, 35. The only difference between then and now is aging — when you’re aging, your body takes longer to recover.”
— David PrinceHe is precise about why that matters, and it is a training-volume argument rather than a feeling. If an ageing athlete can sustain six days of a seven-day training week instead of all seven, then across a twenty-three or twenty-four week season that is roughly twenty-four to twenty-six training days lost. Recovery capacity, in his framing, is simply how much training you get to do.
His Own Recovery Numbers, Across Three Decades of Age
Asked to score his recovery against a baseline of his own 28-year-old self — before he had ever used LiveO2 — Prince gave figures at three points in his career.
| Age | His self-assessment |
|---|---|
| 28–29 | Baseline. Peak natural recovery, no oxygen training. |
| 30 | A 22–25% increase in how recovered he felt and how much training volume he could handle — at two years older. |
| 35–36 | 30–35% above where he believes he would have been without it. In his words, “maintaining a 30-year-old recovery pace.” |
| 40 | Still recovering faster than he would without it, though structural wear — his ankle, his residual limb — is its own separate problem. |
These are Prince’s subjective self-assessments, given on a scale proposed by his interviewer during the conversation. They are one athlete’s account of how he felt and how much he could train — not laboratory measurements.
He connects the first jump directly to the times on the clock: being able to hold a higher training volume at thirty than he could at twenty-seven is, in his view, why the 50.61 became a 49.87 and then a 49.33.
The Year He Says It Would Have Ended
Prince had a repeat injury in the foot that had troubled him for years. Asked how much of his career he attributes to staying on the protocol, he does not hedge.
“I can quantitatively tell you that my career would have ended in 2014.”
— David PrinceHe extends that to what he is still able to do a decade later:
“I wouldn’t be 40 years old still running 22-second 200-metre sprints, 11-second 100-metre sprints, because my body just wouldn’t be able to handle a three or four day per week training schedule at the kind of intensities you need in order to be running at those speeds.”
— David PrinceHe is also candid that it is not the only variable. He credits physical therapy and other modalities alongside it, and notes that when his diet slips — protein, amino acids, carbohydrate intake — recovery slows “even with the LiveO2.” His framing is a stack that works together, not a single lever.
How He Actually Trains on It
Prince trains on the LiveO2 Extreme platform with adjustable hypoxia, working at an equivalent altitude of roughly 22,000 feet. His conditioning-phase session is built around holding the low-oxygen phase, not around the oxygen.
- Start at altitude, not at oxygenThe first two or three minutes are spent at altitude, deliberately depleting rather than loading.
- Hold the low-oxygen phase as long as possible“Spend as much time — I call it in suffering.” The goal is time at depletion, and he notes it feels different from a hard 15-to-30-second effort: “you don’t really feel lactic.”
- Then sprint, against everything telling you not to“Everything in your body says no. Everything in your brain says no.” He describes the finish as mind over matter — knowing oxygen is fifteen seconds away.
- Adjust volume by phase, not by habitHe runs different protocols for different phases of the training cycle, adding or removing sessions around his training load rather than keeping one fixed routine.
Note the direction of travel: Prince is not using the oxygen phase as the workout. He uses the hypoxic phase as the stimulus and the oxygen as what makes the sprint at the end possible. That is the contrast doing the work.
The Load a Prosthetic Sprinter Carries
Prince is clear-eyed about the mechanics that make his event harder to survive over time, and it explains why recovery capacity is the whole game for him.
Running on a blade, one hip sits higher than the other, because he has to compress the prosthetic to get it to return energy. As a single below-knee amputee, his sound leg carries his centre of gravity most of the time — his residual limb takes his weight around 75% of the time, and the sound foot does all the balancing and stabilising when he runs, walks and lifts.
Years of that asymmetry accumulate as adductor and abductor strain down one side. His account is that staying conditioned lets him feel those problems arriving early enough to adjust training around them, rather than discovering them as injuries.
Frequently Asked Questions
David Prince’s comments describe his own experience and opinions as a professional athlete; they are not medical advice, and the recovery figures he gives are his own subjective self-assessments offered during conversation rather than measured results. One athlete’s experience does not predict anyone else’s, and Prince himself credits physical therapy, diet and other modalities alongside his oxygen training. Individual responses vary. LiveO2 is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult your own physician before beginning any new training protocol.