Kiwi Callan Moody, 33, has been in London since December 2018, and his superb 2.11.38 puts him 11th on New Zealand’s All Time list (whilst also smashing Nick Torry’s Serpentine club record of 2.15.04.)

David Chalfen interviews the barrier-breaking athlete as he gets to grips with his achievement. Many thanks to Callan for going the extra mile in the level of his responses.

DC: Tell us a little about when you committed to the distance; to this particular race; and how it went on the day.

CM: Competing in a marathon has been something I have been considering for the last couple of years. My previous flatmate and training partner, Tony Payne, has been encouraging me towards the bigger distance for the past year or so. His theory was that my ultimate calling would be the marathon – yet I was always hesitant as I felt I was stronger over the 5km than I was over the 10km, so it took a bit of convincing.

In January 2021, training had not been great; I tested positive for Covid-19, and over 2020, like many runners, it was hard to justify putting my body under the stress of demanding workouts without any racing on the horizon.

It wasn’t long after my self-isolation – Tony messaged me about the announcement of the Wrexham Marathon (which eventually changed to the Cheshire marathon), this was one of the first races to be advertised again so I thought with no other racing in the near future, now was the time to give the marathon a crack.

At first, committing to a marathon during lockdown felt a bit risky. It was obviously a huge training commitment in a world where cancelations and postponements were frequent. Despite this, Reece (my training partner who was also competing) and I just treated the previous 6 – 7 weeks as if the race was inevitable.

Callan focuses on recovery

On the day of the race, you could not really have asked for better conditions. There was very little wind, and the temperature was perfect. As Tony, Reece and I made our way to the start line, we still really had no idea if there was pacing, who was pacing, or what time we were being paced for.

It was only at the start that I realised one of the pacers was Jake Smith, with a 65:45 half marathon label stuck to him – so it was at this point I knew I could be in for a good time.

We started off in the first wave along with several of the Half Marathon runners. It was nice to start off in a pack, and I just did my best to sit in the bunch and relax as much as I could. I was amazed how quickly the time went. All of a sudden, the half runners had finished, and I noticed we had gone through halfway in 65:30 – yikes. It was a little quicker than I expected. Everything was going great, but I knew at some point I was going to feel the pinch. It was not until about 10km to go I started to feel the pace a little in the legs. I still felt comfortable and I honestly thought I had the qualifying time in the bag.

Sadly, on the very last lap (last 7km) both of my calf muscles were starting to develop the dreaded cramps. Whenever I tried to speed up they would both contract and the pain was pretty immense, so I had to be content with the pace I could go at and hope that it was enough. Heading towards the home straight the cramps were getting worse.

The cramping was so bad I just couldn’t quite put in the final burst over the last 1km like I thought I could, and I watched the clock tick over 2:11.30 in front of me finishing in a time of 2:11.38. It was difficult to process at first. I remember standing at the finishing line staring at the race clock, trying to decide if I should be happy or annoyed. I think it was a little bit of both.

DC: When did you realise that Jake Smith was up for the full whack?!

CM: To be honest he had me chuckling a lot throughout the race – he was so full of energy and encouragement and he just seemed to love being involved. I think it was the start of the 2nd lap when he turned around and said “ok, I’ll just do one more lap.” And this basically repeated itself for the next 2 or 3 laps after.

I did mention to him “the longer you are in the race, the better it is for me.” And, finally, he turned around and casually announced something along the lines of “well, I may as well just finish and qualify for the Olympics”. It was incredible to watch, and I am grateful he stayed in race. Calling Jake talented is a huge understatement, such an amazing athlete.

DC: Your pacing and apparent control of effort in Cheshire looked great; had you practised drinks and gels in training?

CM: Funny you should mention that – I did practice taking on gels in training, and I’m glad I did as I had no idea how hard (and how sticky) it would be.

The very first practice session myself and Reece (both being novices to the distance) well and truly overestimated the correct amount of carbs we needed. Over this infamous 40-minute session, we had about 3 gels each + 500ml of the Maurten sports drink (which in total we discovered later equated to about 6-7 gels).

Understandably, we were both feeling rather unwell and suffered from awful cramps throughout the session. It wasn’t until afterward that we got a message from Tony telling us how insanely ridiculous that was. We decided to put it down to a decent stomach-cramp simulation session. It’s is safe to say we went a little bit easier on the carbs in the following sessions.

DC: What sort of training adaptations did you make from the 10k background you had?

CM: The most notable change in my training was the greater emphasis on recovery, longer mid week easy runs and the long Sunday tempo run. Ordinarily, I would do 2 sessions a week plus a long run on Sunday which were usually a leisurely 1.5 – 2 hours jog. Sunday runs were extended out to a 30 – 35km tempo with a gradual increase in pace.

I believe I got the best adaptation from this change in training, and towards the peak of my build up I was starting to average 3:35/km for a 35km run. It wasn’t the nice easy Sunday runs I was accustomed to, but it certainly was effective!

My other session was consistent of a long session around Battersea park (usually up to 40 minutes of workout), then the rest of the week would be building up the easy runs, usually as part of my commute.

DC: What were the longest runs and what indicated that 2.11 was on (current HM PB shown as 65.13!?)

CM: The longest run I did was no more than 36km. It was decided early on that I wouldn’t need to do any more than that, as the quality was there. This was probably my biggest concern going into the race because this meant that my debut marathon would be the longest distance I had ever run! My hope was that with a good taper and the adrenaline of the race would take my legs through the extra 6 kms my legs hadn’t experienced before.

3 weeks prior to the race, I still had no idea what sort of pace I would be realistically aiming for. Up until this point running for the Olympic qualifying time still seemed unrealistic. It was not until I ran a race simulation round Battersea park (9 laps – about 25.30km) where I averaged about 3:07 per km – that I realised going for this Olympic Qualifying time wasn’t as much as a pipe dream as I had originally thought.

DC: What was typical volume since January 2021 and how did this measure against previous norm?

CM: Throughout February I was still trying to get a proper grasp on the transition into marathon training. Up until the last week of February I was still only doing around 80 – 110km per week. Despite doing marathon sessions + the faster Sunday runs, I found I really needed to add in double days and extend the easy runs to start getting the mileage up. In the final week of February I did just that, and added about 50km+ to my training load.

I certainly would not be an advocate of this to others, as the likelihood of getting injured with this sort of abrupt mileage increase is obviously very high. Luckily however, my body appeared to adapt well to it. For the next 5-6 weeks I was doing between 140 – 155km per week, which was by far the most mileage I had ever ran.

DC: Can you tell us about your work. Have you been full time throughout? What’s your employment and residential status in UK? How does it feel knowing your homeland is about the only covid free nation on earth?

CM: I am currently working as a Cardiac Physiologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital. My days are usually spent in the Cardiac Cath Lab, working with a team of doctors, nurses and radiographers to diagnose and ablate heart rhythm problems. I also work with pacemakers and ICDs, helping to optimise them to fit the individual patent.

I am currently bound by a Tier 2 Sponsorship Visa, so working here keeps me in the country. I enjoy what I do and it is very rewarding, although it can be demanding, and the hours can be long. The best way I have learnt to balance training and work is to keep my training program flexible. I often change my training program daily to fit around my work. If I finish work late, I’m usually happy to claim that day as an easy day or postpone a session to the next day.

New Zealand has coped really well throughout the pandemic. It certainly helps that the country is extremely isolated in the South Pacific Ocean, but they also did all the correct things. I think the hardest moment of the pandemic was the announcement from the NZ government calling for those that were abroad to “come home now” or else it’ll be difficult to get back. It was a strange realisation that I might not be able to go home if needed. But in saying that there was a lot of work to do here, and it certainly wasn’t the right time to leave. I was lucky that I didn’t have to worry about covid impacting my family.

DC: Being so tantalisingly close to the Tokyo QT looks like a gamechanger so have you thought yet on what may come next on road and or track? PB suggests unfinished business at 10,000m? What do you think this result may bring regarding World Champs and Commonwealth Games?

CM: It sounds crazy, but I was looking at running a marathon in Austria on the 22nd of May. It has been set-up to get as many athletes as possible to qualify for the Olympics. Cheshire was obviously only a few weeks ago, but I have recovered well, and I thought if there is a chance then I may as well have a go! However sadly, this idea has recently hit a bit of a snag.

After contacting the NZ Olympic Committee, I was informed of the existence of a shortlisted selection of athletes who were to be considered for Olympic qualifiers. To be on this list, I had to fill out a form last year, and sadly because I never did – I wouldn’t be able to be accepted for the team regardless if I run and hit the qualifying time or not.

Naturally, last year during the peak of the pandemic, filling in a form to qualify for the Olympics was certainly not on my agenda. There doesn’t seem to be much flexibility for the exceptional circumstances, so as frustrating as it may be, going to the Tokyo Olympics seems very unlikely at this stage. If I had actually hit the standard in Cheshire, I probably wouldn’t have been accepted for the team anyway, so perhaps the extra 8 seconds were a blessing in disguise… Either way, I can only control what I can control, and for now I am just looking at possible options for the future.

DC: Have you tried altitude before and, pandemic permitting, is it something you’d go for? What strength/resistance training do you do, and how does that slot in to everything else?

CM: I have never trained at altitude before and it is something I would love to try! My visa constraints make it difficult to take any lengthy time away from work, but I am starting to look at other visa options now, so hopefully in the near future I could go somewhere high and give it a good crack!

Most people are quite surprised to hear that I don’t do any strength resistance training at all.. although looking at my worm-like arms, some may not be the least bit surprised. To be completely honest I can barely do a 60 second plank…I’m all about specific training exercise but it’s not to say strength training doesn’t have a place and it’s certainly something that I should develop into my training. In saying that, I wear a lead vest and skirt in the cath lab – which can weight up to 5kg – so potentially that might have some benefit?

DC: I believe you train with the Cottage on Tuesdays, and do you have company on other key runs? Where does Tony Payne fit in?

CM: That’s right, I train with the Cottage group every Tuesday night in Battersea park. It’s such a great group and the sessions are always well planned out. The nice thing about it is, if you’re feeling up to it you can have a solid go at the pace or else if you aren’t feeling the best you can sit back in the pack. Cottage has had a huge positive impact on my running since coming to the UK.

Tony and I go way back. He’s been a training partner/mate of mine since high school. I also lived with both Tony Payne and Ben Anderson (a talented 800m runner) in Battersea. We had a solid training flat over the last 3 and a half years. Sadly, Tony has moved up north and Ben has moved out to east London. Tony is a regular voice of reason with my training and has been a huge help when preparing for Cheshire.

These days I do a lot of training with Reece Edwards, an Australian runner based down the road. We are both fairly easy-going with our training programmes, so I do the majority of my training with him.

DC: You seem to have come through middle distance (1.52 800, 3.47 1500) and top club and Uni level back in NZ. Did you do a medicine degree? Have you been coached along the way? And currently?

CM: In my younger years I had always considered myself a middle-distance runner. I ran 1.52 for 800m and 3.51 for 1500m as an 18-year-old and I never thought I’d ever even consider myself a marathon runner.

I grew up in Dunedin and went to Otago University there. I did a degree in Sports Science and then went on to a post graduate diploma in Medical Technology. I was coached by Richard Barker (who is now the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University) who was a huge influence in involving me in the sport from a young age.

When I finished University I moved north to Christchurch, where I met my current coach, Matt Ingram. Matt is still my coach to this day. Matt is very supportive and has been a huge help over the last few years. I’m really grateful that he still sends me a program every week and is happy for me to change it up to fit with things like, work, Cottage sessions or other training groups. We have a really good dynamic.

DC: Whilst in London you secured World Cross selection in 2019; how did that come about?

CMM: I had taken a bit of time off racing between 2016 – 2018. I had moved to the UK on a holiday visa for a couple of years at the end of 2015. I worked over the winter and took large chunks of holiday over the summer to travel Europe. I was 27 going on 28 at the time and I had never been to Europe, so I had an incredible time. I still kept fit, but I would take 2 or 3 months off running completely when I was traveling. As my holiday visa expired, I returned home to NZ for 11 months and started to properly train again.

I arrived back in the country in 2018, joined the Cottage group and ran my first race for a long time – the Telford 10km. I surprised myself by winning it and going under 30minutes for the very first time. It also just happened to be a qualifying time recognised by Athletics NZ for the World XC so I thought why not? Unfortunately, I was not as prepared for the hills as I should have been on race day, and had a tough time. It was a great experience though!

DC: You made your racing presence known very swiftly after arriving in the UK. What do you think of the set up here for your level, when in a non-Covid setting?

CM: The set-up here is amazing. The sheer amount of runners compared to back home is incredible, and the club racing scene is brilliant. I think the biggest stand-out compared to home is the brutal cross countries’ courses. I have never fallen over so many times in a race before, and the 1 or 2 hour journey home covered in mud on a packed out train is quite the experience.

David Chalfen coaches Serpentine Running Club and is the owner of is the owner of Run Coach 1-2-1.

The post Spotlight on Callan appeared first on Fast Running.

The nudge to read this came via the recent lively Fast Running pieces on Mihaly Igloi, the ground-breaking Hungarian coach of the 1950s, and the more modern influence of some of these principles by the Dutch author.

As an athlete, Lok has excellent credentials from his peak in the late 1970s to mid 1980s, including a 7:51 3000 (and 2nd place in the European Indoors), 13:36 5000, 28:24 for 10,000, but perhaps the standout on his racing CV was 20th in the World XC in 1980 when the European and USA strength in depth was immense; he was in very close company with some undisputed world class track and road athletes mostly with 10,000 PBs far faster than his.

Interestingly he matched this grinding endurance with superb closing speed, with a swathe of Dutch titles on track, road and Cross – once closing a 5000m track race with a blistering 53.5 which for a man who couldn’t do a one off 200m in under 25 secs is outstanding.

These snippets of data illustrate that a major focus on aerobic conditioning combined with retention of relatively high speeds done without fatigue (achieved by virtue of the session design) meant that fairly light exposure to highly anaerobic stresses proved a tremendously effective balance of stimulus.

Coaching pedigree

His coaching ‘portfolio’ is at least as impressive. Put into the context that the Netherlands has just ¼ of the UK population, is all at sea level and notoriously flat, and that he never had an official Governing Body position so was, arguably, drawing his coachees from a more provincial pool around Utrecht.

Put it another way, if you’re reading this and you’re a woman who wouldn’t be pleased with a 5k PB of 15:22; or (from a separate female coachee) a 10,000m PB of 32.22, or a guy who thinks 62.29 at Half marathon doesn’t pass muster; or a Veteran aged 40 who thinks an 8:15 3000 is nothing to shout about; or a V55 Woman who is ambivalent about the merits of a 79 Half Marathon, maybe you need read no further.

Perhaps the most well-known case study is that of world class 800m runner Bram Som. In headline data, aged 26 he ran a Dutch record (still standing) of 1:43.4 using a ‘classic’ training schedule. Three years later, after injuries so significant that his running was confined to 4 days a week, he spent a season using the EIM and clocked 1:43.5 and made the World Championship final (where just 0.59 behind the gold medal placed him 7th!).

Speed without fatigue

It’s hard to summarise the approach to be both through, accurate and concise at the same time. Simplifying, the bare bones of the EIM takes in one hard session (OR race) per week, usually of a mixed pace nature – fartlek if you will – that keeps in touch with the demands and stimulus needed for the athlete’s target distance(s).

The one detailed example Lok sets out is a truly multi-faceted session and duration (for him as a 28 minute 10k athlete) was 95 to 105 mins all in, with 11 strands not counting warm up and warm down. The other days are nearly all built around the EIM which if it has one specific benefit that ‘traditional’ steady state training may lack is the preservation of ‘reactivity’; the Dutch word is ‘souplesse’ and words like ‘elasticity’ or ‘dynamism of stride’ come close.

Terminology aside, the principle is that it is based on speed (using that word quite flexibly) without heavy aerobic/metabolic fatigue, so the principle of continued recovery between truly intense efforts is not compromised. The staples of EIM are the likes of 10-12 x 200m at around 3k pace with equal distance slow running recovery; and 10 x 400m at between 5k and 10k race pace with equal distance slow running recovery; and 6 to 8 x 1000m at around Half Marathon pace with equal duration easy running as recovery.

All the faster reps have a 10 second walk before starting and after completion, which further lessens the overall intensity. It’s worth mentioning that the book covers all standard distances from 800m to marathon. Perhaps the wider base of case studies is between 3000m and Half Marathon.

It’s worth mentioning that for marathon runners the author absolutely buys into regular (but not every week) long and very long runs, always with some sort of faster shorter periodic surges peppered throughout the run.

For upper echelon runners he extends the 1000m reps to 2000m so this does become quite voluminous; and again at the similar faster end he does throw in some occasional doubles but it’s notable that the second no-interval run on such days is a solid steady pace – so about 5.45 to 6 minute miling for a 29 minute 10k runner.

Advantages

The particular advantages of the EIM over traditional methods (which he mentions in passing are often based around important and often reductive misunderstandings of relevant details of what Lydiard actually recommended) include the following:-

Too many runners run some combination of too much one paced mileage and do too many intense interval sessions at or around VO2 max, or indeed faster and harder.

Their fast interval sessions eventually, by a combination of being too frequently too hard become destructive rather than productive; and their easy recovery runs are detrimental to their fast twitch capacity and gradually lead to poorer running form and movement, and a poorer running economy (RE) which more than offsets the gains in RE that the mileage itself might be promoting by other physiological adaptations.

That the best athletes in the world by and large follow training schedules which would, in the large majority of runners, lead to the shortfalls mentioned above, is perhaps, Lok suggests, due to their very light bodyweight combined with some great genetic advantages in ‘reactivity’ of stride, keeping them from the detrimental aspects whilst retaining the benefits of the traditional approach.

All abilities

Lok has coached at a very wide range of levels so he writes as credibly about a 28 minute 10k runner as someone taking 65 minutes for the distance, and acknowledges that, for example, Anaerobic Threshold in a newer or much slower runner is not far from their 5k race pace, whereas at the sharpest end it equates more with Half Marathon pace. And indeed he is fully aware of the wide middle ground between these two levels.

A critic could argue that some of the gobbets of advice along the way are based purely on anecdote and experience though he is always candid in pointing out where a suggestion doesn’t have any cast-iron science to back it up or otherwise.

No doubt based on his experience on the coaching scene, Lok has rebuttals for most of the usual reservations about his approach. When criticised on the vast amounts of common ground across his schedules from 1500m to Marathon, he points out that ‘traditional’ coaching also shares this commonality for much of the seasonal cycle; the reason, is that both of the two schools of thought are aware that the 1500m is, simplistically, about a 70 to 75% aerobic event, whereas the marathon is about 99% aerobic; so on that important parameter they are much more similar than they are different (though they are different!).

Having played around with some maths on the weekly volume of Lok’s plans – and find a serious British distance runner who doesn’t have at least some ‘engagement’ on the mileage front – I’d very roughly suggest that if you are typically training between 40 and 60 miles per week, the EIM approach might see you clock up about 15 to 20% less distance (including warm ups and warm downs) and for those piling in more miles, I’m not sure that you can run more than about 70 miles weekly without starting to eat into the basic principles which underpin the EIM approach.

Recommended for athletes and coaches

The English version has been excellently translated by Russ Mullen, himself a fine case study of Klaas’s approach, in between, one assumes, keeping his Dutch very efficiently on the go in Haywards Heath.

I’d heartily recommend the book. It even has photos of runners crawling backwards uphill – apparently a cruel but effective core strengthening drill, and which reminded this reader of Percy Cerruty’s approach in using the natural environment in creative ways.

Plus a whole host of great race photos from Lok’s peak, which reminds you that in the pre African era the Europeans were pretty damned good at distance running. Even if you decide that the approach Is not for you, it will make you think why not and question why do exactly what you do, whether as coach or runner.

David Chalfen is the coach of Serpentine Running Coach and his book has been printed in Czech https://www.kosmas.cz/knihy/196203/trenujeme-na-maraton-a-pulmaraton/ but not yet offered in Dutch…

The post Book Review: Easy Interval Method by Klaas Lok appeared first on Fast Running.

This was published in late summer 2020 when the athletics writing world was semi-furloughed and to some extent was some years after the facts – as the pan-sport international ban on Russian athletes and teams was already well in place. Thankfully.

Arguably the headline behind that ban, amidst a hugely extensive and long term list of convictions, was the doping programme focused around the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 – where the offences were so outlandish that even non-sporting people were captivated in reading of the level of misdemeanour. But The Russian Affair happens to be based around the heart of Russian women’s middle distance running, and from there it pans out into the wider world of Russian track and field athletics, Russian sport at large and, with sport being just one integral part of society, how Russia operates at a deep moral and behavioural level.

The story is at the same time amazing and entirely what we have come to expect. The author David Walsh, formerly of The Times, made his name for his exposes into the doping culture of elite cycling, and in particular the world and mind of Lance Armstrong. There is arguably a cultural parallel in that the ‘given’ in Russian athletics is that the only way to make it at elite level is to dope – as was the case in cycling for several decades. Fortunately for most of the rest of the world Russia was one of relatively few nations where this mind-set held in athletics. We hope.

A nation’s prowess & status

Other peculiarly Russian motives that underpin the doping culture were/are that individual athletes place huge importance on showing their success as an emblem of their nation’s prowess and status (as distinct from the government using it in this way); and, maybe associated, something close to paranoia that the rest of the world is united in some collective anti-Russian campaign. Walsh draws out how these factors, in a (now very long) Putin era where deceit seems to be the modus operandi for anyone who wants to rise above a life of just-about-subsistence level, lead to doping barely being a secret culture within the nation’s sportspeople.

In their own world, it’s just another form of nutritional supplement, almost a virtuous way to tilt the tables against the Rest of the Plotting World, and outside their sporting niches, it is just all of a piece with the rest of how society manages on a day by day basis. Paradoxically this candour within the ‘Four Walls’ of Russia meant that picking up swathes of recorded verbal information – an essential for the scandal to be exposed – was actually quite feasible.

For British readers into endurance running the book carries some clout. At elite level, numerous of ‘our’ leading lights, including one who has recently been prominently mentioned on Fastrunning.com, have had their careers significantly altered, to their detriment, by the battalion of Russian dopers who have swept so many medals down the decades, including the five year period that is broached within the book. Even outside the global showcases, Brits who have ploughed through the Euro XC Under 23s or, say, the Euro Challenge 10,000 B race have clearly been set back by the near-universal doping of their Russian opponents.

Gobsmacking footnotes

Unusually, the book’s footnotes are as gobsmacking as the core text. The author puts in the notes those details which are not directly linked to the book’s two central characters, anti-doping Officer Vitaliy Stepanov and his wife, the serial doper (yep you read that right) 800m star Yulia Rusanova, sub 1.57 at her very peak. So, as footnotes, we read how a multi Olympic Biathlon champion, convicted of conspiracy to murder, is given an official amnesty purely because of his ‘devotion to Russia”; how the Athletics Federation’s Head of Endurance, having been given a lifetime ban, just cracked on with his coaching anyway by relocating to Kyrgyzstan ‘having grown a beard to disguise himself’; how within 11 days two successive heads of the anti-doping agency both die mysteriously in their early 50s; and, perhaps most disturbingly for our sport, the level of corruption at the very top of the then-IAAF.

For the dazzlingly, almost Shakespeareanly corrupt father and son pairing of the Diacks the rottenness across the Russian system became the gift that kept on giving, as the verdicts at last year’s court case confirmed. Doping sanctions are based largely around the interplay of law, medicine and ethics and unquantifiable and subjective cultural aspects aren’t translatable into bans. But it struck this reader that whilst the heart of Russian sport lies within at least two generations of participants, coaches and administrators, then arguably a full generational clear out and re-education is needed for the sporting culture to reach a place that puts its ethical approach on somewhere comparable with where most of the rest of the world sits. Or as the book’s epigraph puts it teasingly, quoting Russian poet Tyutchev, ‘Russia is one of a kind – Believe in her, if you are able’.

David Walsh’s ‘The Russian Affair’ is published by Simon and Schuster and is widely available at your (preferably local) bookstore.

David Chalfen is a leading UK club coach, the owner of Run Coach 1to1, and the author of several books on endurance training including ‘Improve Your Marathon and Half Marathon Running’ (Crowood).

The post Book Review: The Russian Affair by David Walsh appeared first on Fast Running.

And so we welcome in 2021 with something else to divide the sport along partisan lines, whether it be professionalised NGB vs voluntary regional associations; male vs female (I’ll stay binary on this one for the purposes of this debate); and old, perhaps reactionary, guard vs politicised moderniser.

Yep, it’s that oh so visceral matter of the distances of cross country races. Anyone remember them?

Here are a few points, which most definitely aren’t meant to be exhaustive or indeed decisive:

– Cross country is pitched as a test of long distance running. The World Athletics federation (IAAF as was) categorises long distance running, within its Track and Field programme, as 5000m and upwards. Mr Cheptegei has whittled his long distance down to 12 mins 35 seconds – so once, at senior level we are racing for longer, that is in the realms of long distance.

I wonder how many of the supporters of distance equality would actually categorise 10k as ‘middle distance’ but it’s a significant minority, based my own chats and online surfing further down the performance pyramid.

– There is an undeniable case that as women do the same standard distances as men on track and road, equality on cross country has its merits.

– Some of the more vociferous articles have been scribed by runners who probably come more from the recreational camp than the performance camp. Theirs is a valid point of view but it’s certainly no more valid than a Radcliffe, Pieterse or Yamauchi and there’s an argument that it’s a far less rounded and informed viewpoint in terms of the sport ‘ at large’. Particularly as they were in the sport as young female middle distance runners……

– A bit of contextual data – and we will leave out from the mainstream the highly outlying old chestnut about the notorious Southern XC Male Champs being 15k whereas the women do 8km. The typical Male Senior XC Course, in events which haven’t set equalised distances, is about 25 % longer than the Women’s equivalent. Women at elite level race about 12% slower than men at that level. So in terms of racing duration, that’s already gone some way to redress the balance.

Factor in that women’s depth at club level is still a little lighter than the men’s, and the discrepancy in race duration is even more diluted. As a random sample, I checked some Metropolitan League XC results for 100th place in the Men’s 8k race and Women’s 6k races – the times start to become very similar, less than 10% difference.

– An anecdote – about 40 years ago the English Men’s National, always billed at 9 miles seemed to come in at about 7-and-a-bit miles. This was the trial for the World XC Champs when in a bad year the England team might get only a minor medal – so numerous of the best distance runners in the world contested the National.

In the ever-extensive AW coverage of the race, the obvious ‘short’ course had maybe two lines of coverage, with the medallists briefly mentioning that the lap seemed a tad short on warm up. Again – the race did exactly what it was intended to do, and everyone hit the tea queue about ten minutes earlier.

Leading women at the National Cross. Credit: Nigel Bramley

– I’m a coach, I coach and have coached many men and women who do Cross country races at varying levels. Pretty much all these runners fit into the category of long distance runners – that is, they aren’t focusing on middle distance or Ultras. From all the exchanges over the years, no one has expressed any strong views on the matter to me – which perhaps goes back to them understanding the first point above. From a coaching perspective, I don’t care what the distance is, either per se, or by gender. (I expect to know what the purported distance is though!).

If it affects training, it does so only marginally if at all, and nobody has any misguided view that further is better. It’s just further – it’s not a qualitative thing. (Going back to that Southern Champs, I see no athletic need for the leading men to be racing for around 50 minutes – the point of the competition would not be weakened in any way if they chopped 30% off the distance and I doubt results would be affected in any significant way. To support this theory, have you ever heard an athlete who thinks that 5k or 10k doesn’t really suit them and they believe their destiny would be better fulfilled at 7k or 13k?).

Purely from an athlete development angle, I wouldn’t worry if the discrepancies in senior racing distances were reversed so women had the longer races – I don’t expect that to happen but if it did, the nature of what the athletic test was designed to achieve wouldn’t change.

– I haven’t chipped in to the official consultation, partly because I don’t actually care that much; partly because I believe that the decision is only heading one way; and partly because, ever delusional, I think slightly more people may view my musings if posted on Fastrunning. Though they might not read this far.

David Chalfen

The post Sweeten The Distance appeared first on Fast Running.

I blame Jeremy Harries. The highly experienced Preston based coach, whose leading elite luminaries included developing the likes of John Nuttall and Helen Clitheroe (both well established at top flight coaching in their own right) had become a leading light in England Athletics coach education and was grilling me on “my coaching philosophy”. A heavy matter.

We were seated in the cafe at Lee Valley Athletics Centre, still not fully recognised as a leading hub in western intellectual development but nonetheless a brilliant hotbed of fast twitch fibres. Although not at our table.

He was pulling apart my third draft. I should have said “Jeez Jezza, it’s just about helping some runners get from A to B a bit quicker and they and I have some fun amidst all the hard graft in the process.

If you want true philosophy then then get a PPE degree from Oxford, become a cabinet minister and tell people to stay at home and wash their hands a lot. You’ve had fricking months to tell me to ditch my Pfitzinger and Douglas and Bud’s session plan notes, and to sort out Plato and Voltaire. Why now?” I didn’t say that though, I wanted not to alienate myself more than was necessary

The Who, Why and How

What he was trying to tease out was the WHO one is as a coach; which will lead neatly into WHY one coaches, in the round ; and the HOW you go about doing what you do to achieve your objectives.

Yes, yes, the person who suggests you bang out a session of 5 sets of 1200 and 400 metres with a miserly recovery between reps and a Scroogeish break between sets may be either a very reserved humble altruist or have a monstrous ego largely channelled to gouging whatever cash is available in the sport, but how that person has evolved their coaching will probably have some influence on how you do and respond to that session, never mind how you fulfil and enjoy yourself in the sport. For the better, in most cases.

Endurance coaches are a really diverse bunch. The whole span of arts mixed with science probably goes a long way to explaining this; nobody is blocked by having the “wrong” background, experience or qualifications. On the surface, in the UK currently, it is disproportionately white and still predominantly male, but drill into the characters, and it’s a full array of humanity, like The Canterbury Tales but with much more accurate watches and less angst about the Pope.

Your host Mr Craggs, the doyen of EA endurance webinars (well it’s good to be a doyen at something) raised on air the question of whether ‘philosophy’ was really a suitable word for something as, relatively, narrow as running coaching. It’s like having a philosophy about Belgian buns, or shoplifting. He didn’t say that in the webinar, to be clear. Just as well really when the subject was Aly Dixon’s tempo sessions.

Because the sport is athlete focused, we are all aware that to get to the kernel of the athlete’s motivation we want rather more than “I’m really keen to improve ” or ” I want a few more ground records on Strava”. (Though if you get the 3000m ground record for the Rieti track, that should cover off the high motivation point). It will in all likelihood be a medley of factors, some weighing more heavily than others.

Varying motivations

So a coach who offers the time worn cliche about “putting something back into the sport” is likely trotting out the baseline, but rarely the full shebang. The specifics of coaches’ motivations and objectives vary immensely across the sector. Once you become heavily committed in it, it can soon become about trying to keep some balance in what is by most standards an unbalanced life.

Yup, like the runners themselves, particularly the ones who will casually refer to 60 mile weeks as ‘just ticking along, not really training for anything particularly’. Arguably male coaches are most vulnerable to this unbalancedness, what with our genetic inability to multi-task.

Is there a message here? Perhaps that for runners being coached it might be enlightening at some stage to learn a little about what makes your coach tick. Their Philosophy even.

David Chalfen is the owner of Run Coach 1-2-1 and coaches at Serpentine

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High time for that old conversational chestnut. Yes, it’s the crucial matter of which British distance runners are less famous than they otherwise might be, given what they actually achieved.

At some stage I’ll accept that just because most households function without heated but well-informed dialogues on the aerobic merits of, say, Glyn Tromans or Sarah Rowell, doesn’t mean in itself that we are a culturally backward nation. Reluctantly, I’ll concede there’s more to a rounded personality than reeling off the UK All Time Endurance lists.

The sport is very data driven and ever more tech-reliant. But what follows is really just back of a protein bar wrapper stuff, based on memory and personal bias, with no peer review and a kind of inverse research process by which if I googled the athlete name and not much came up, I knew I was onto something.

If you are going to be a famed world class endurance runner, you need to choose your timing well, unless you plan to be at your peak at age 12 or 45, which tends not to happen. Doing dazzling things pre-internet is a limiting factor and so is competing in that era when EPO became widely available in the sport, reasonably well ‘managed’ by those who wished to reap its benefits (though ‘stashed at the back of the fridge behind the olives’ seems to mean the same in 2020 as it did in 1987), but before any tests were in place.

Endurance running celebrity can be a strange thing. Jo Pavey became very famous after she won what was (with major respect to all) a modest depth 10,000m race from which most of the world were barred by not being from Europe, but gained no kudos outside the sport seven years earlier when placing a staggering 3rd in the World Championships in Osaka (4th across the line, you get the picture….). Perhaps also in recent years we’ve seen that journalists’ coverage of endurance running is provided largely by those who are good at getting a story but who never, really, get distance running.

So in alphabetical order:

Julia Bleasdale

Always a talented but injury prone runner through Cambridge University and early senior years, then in the lead up to the 2012 Olympics made startling progress. In London she managed a wonderful double placing 8th in the 10,000 just behind Jo Pavey and matching that in the 5000. The household fame achieved around this era by Jo Pavey serves to highlight how little attention JB received for her similar 10k prowess albeit not matching JP’s longevity. Later took up German citizenship through family lineage and didn’t reach the 2012 heights again.

Jill Boltz

You’d possibly expect that a rare Z in her surname would be enough to capture Harriers’ attention but sadly not so. Born as Jill Hunter, she made a Geordie-Sydneysider union with Australian distance whiz, Danny Boltz. She was at her peak around 1990-92 and had a stellar career on track and road at a time when the Rift Valley women had not yet fully arrived on the scene. Her best performances over 10k and 10,000 in particular would, 30 years later, still have her punching effectively for GB in global level champs and 51.40 for a road 10 mile is world class even now. Arguably the shadow of Liz McColgan, with whom she largely overlapped, kept her out of the limelight.

Jon Brown

A charismatic but media-elusive figure. Excelled across track, road and cross country in what was arguably the peak EPO era for certain nations in Europe and elsewhere. Placed Top 10 in the WXC when it was just one 12k race so no splitting of the East African posses; in 1996 he won the Euro XC by a whopping 35 seconds; his UK 10,00 record of 27.18 lasted 13 years and is still 2nd UK All Time. Two superb 4th places in the Olympics of 2000 and 2004 which I’d argue are as good as any UK male marathon performances ever, when you look at the depth of competition. Whilst always competing for GB, he became somewhat of a global villager after Yorkshire schooldays, based in USA, Germany, Canada and now New Zealand where he does great coaching things with the Federation’s elite triathletes.

Karl Keska

A relative short time at his peak, injury plagued, and perhaps the most media-elusive athlete at the exalted level he achieved. Seemed to escape any sort of Athletics Weekly profile career-long. Rumours were that he tried to make a ‘side gig’ as a poker player –one of the few lines of work with worse Annual Leave and pension stability than pro 10k racing. Excelled in the Sydney Olympics, placing 8th (3 days after a 27.48 Heat to qualify – one UK ‘record’ that will last indefinitely – the fastest Olympic 10,000 heat and final double) and 1st European; and repeated the feat at Edmonton Worlds in 2003.

Jack Lane

This is deep dive stuff and sadly brief in its details but on the cusp of transition from junior to senior this man truly shone albeit briefly. Perhaps the standout results were two 10,000m races way back in 1971, both in 28.24 when he was just 20, having just beaten the best of the nation to win the national XC and placed second in the international cross champs in the USA. After half a century, only Alex Yee has surpassed his time as a British 20 year old. He appears as a footnote in 13th in the European champs 10 000 in 1971, a race which will last down the ages for one of the most staggering last laps, as you can marvel at here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfm_lTSOjh . I think we can say, with a wink and a nudge, that the medallists were truly full blooded enduros

Jonathan Solly

He made a big breakthrough in 1985/86 after an impressive but not dazzling period as a Durham University student. A not-unsuccessful coach (linked with four of the runners in this piece) suggested that if Mr S spent a little less time at the bar and made a lesser impact on the scales he might become very good. Put simply, he did so. In 1986 he won a stacked AAAs 10,000 (the strongest ever year in UK depth if you go by 10th fastest mark) in 27.51, and this booked his slot at the upcoming Commonwealth Games. In a drizzly Edinburgh, he struck gold leaving in his wake the likes of marathon legend Steve Jones. A litany of injuries that could probably fill a medical text book kept Solly from building on this although he spent many years trying incredibly hard to show what he was truly capable of – with a couple of 2.12 marathons almost as footnotes.

Mara Yamauchi

She’s hardly an unknown but given what she achieved at her peak she’s arguably not given quite the status she merits. Perhaps it’s that surname which doesn’t leap off the page or tongue in Middle England. Her 2008 Beijing Olympic Marathon was memorable – 6th place, barely 40 seconds from the win and with the medal group until the 40th kilometre. If Paula Radcliffe had chosen a different way of life her 2.23.12 would stand atop of the UK all time lists with over a 2 minute margin – and this was in ‘slow’ shoes. One of very few modern elites who made a running career after making serious inroads to a normal career – in her case the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

David Chalfen, who really doesn’t have a spare room filled with AW’s going back to when guys did National Service.

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The numerous athlete blogs sought out by the FR crew since mid March have been great to illustrate the various ebbs and flows of leading enduros over this tough and not brief spell. If you wanted a 3 word summary, glass half full might serve. (Though I believe Lottery Funded athletes need to go for at least 2/3 full, with seasonal progression)

It seems ages ago since one tuned into the virtual 12 stage with Jake Shelley being offered a paltry 6 minutes to commentate on over 3 hours of top end aerobic shenanigans. In typical overachieving way he wrapped it up in 3 minutes, reportedly using the banked 3 minutes for a vocal chords warm down designed by Barry Fudge. Though Alan Storey probably invented it whilst waiting for some papadams in 1989.

The virtual full spectrum

A predictable spectrum of athlete responses to virtual races covers the gamut from “brilliant, I prefer it to the real thing” to “over my dead body” and a kind of bell shaped curve in the main (Do any human traits not have bell shaped curves?).

It’s testament to runners’ sense of social awareness and general Good Eggery that although they are clearly amongst the very lowest risk categories for the worst severity of covid 19 they seem almost universally to respect the rules and guidelines imposed to best contain it (There are reportedly other analyses of said guidelines if you dig deep on the internet. Google ‘Bojo winging it’).

David Chalfen is a coach with Serpentine and author of several books on training for endurance. Photo – Maren Urner www.visual-expressions.net

So, coaching. Yes, yes, athlete focused in that if you see a bunch of guys and women, a tad past their physical prime and just on the acceptable side of dishevelment, reminiscing round a track perimeter without a bunch of athletes on the business side of the railings, it looks, well, somehow lacking.

And as long as we get ample time to fictionalise our PBs to inspire athletes; to bang on how the Reading Half is fine but things were miles better in 1985, to motivate athletes; and to moan about the fing parking ticket we picked up last week, to steer them towards optimal and prudent lifestyle planning; then yes I’m all for athlete focus.

Obviously we wrap the technical stuff around the softer aspects; if there’s anything better than a Beer Mile video to cover off both pacing and hydration strategies, with a side order of spatial awareness thrown in, well, I clearly haven’t read my Daniels properly.

Still a long way short of the real thing

But it isn’t always easy. Two of the absolute big beasts of why coaches coach is that we like spending time with keen runners and we really like watching them and countless others racing, all together, for real. Especially at Parliament Hill.

Virtual things are better than nothing, no doubt, but still a long way short of the real thing. (Speaking of the real thing, the BBC’s ‘live coverage’ of Jacob Ingebritsen’s startling 4.50.0 2000m seemed to amount to live notes from a reporter. I cry foul. I reckon he could push for medal at the Euro U23s if things fall into place.)

Engaging content

In the meantime, big thumbs up to England Athletics for a diverse and very helpful series of endurance webinars and masterclasses set up since the world changed. For marathoners with only 33 minutes to pick up some top advice, Aly Dixon being hosted by that Craggs dude is well worth a listen.

If you want to hear how a highly driven coach can successfully combine maverick tendencies with a structured system, there’s Mark Rowland, and if you want someone else to confirm that there was some heroic and memorable stuff going on around 40 years ago, tune into blunt-speaking Kiwi Rod Dixon.

I’m not sure quite what people expect for those less-than-gargantuan EA affiliation fees and if you think they are steep, I guess you’ve never ordered the partridge and endive on bruschetta in Islington. Right, must catch up on the latest swathe of race cancellations before asking a glute-weak runner why being furloughed still doesn’t offer a suitable time window for those scintillating glute bridges.

David Chalfen is wondering how the Met League will work with social distancing, especially the fiddly bottlenecks.

The post Coaching Blues in (Easing Of) Lockdown appeared first on Fast Running.

It’s clearly going to be a quiet time on the endurance PB front with maybe a postponement of debate about those shoes or whether some uber-fast marks were sourced via correct “course landscape” (Jeez, all the runners just wanted ten thousand metres, not vistas of wildebeest darting across the savanna under a crimson sun).

It was Alex Lepretre that got me thinking. Not the runner himself, though it’s always a pleasure to see a Barnet athlete making waves, but the circumflex in his surname that so stymied Mr Britton’s diligent research.
So the thought process is as follows with both “thought” and “process” applying in only the very loosest way.

Our whole approach to record breaking has become sooo staid. Men, women, age groups, it’s all too narrow. At some point soon, though perhaps not as soon as before the world took a swerve from the usual track season ebbs and flows, I expect this interestingly appellated Highgate hero will go sub 14 for 5k and I think that the barrier breaking circumflex should get full media focus when this happens.

There are quite a few others to add too; the acute and grave accents over the French ‘e’, the German umlaut, that really hard to pronounce Scandinavian O with the slash through it, and to avoid it all becoming too Northern European, fastest times by Spaniards with that double L pronounced y.

Yes, yes I know what you are thinking.. ….this will just open up the floodgates for what I believe government policy calls “tens of thousands ” of runners pitching up to tear into our cherished athletics records just because they have a VO2 max north of 65 and a borderline quirky name.

So, to make the whole process equitable and robust, they’d have to be UK citizens, as per UKA criteria, so the standard critical tests of giving a toss about The Ashes and marmalade, and putting a pin in a map correctly on the old county of Westmoreland. From thirty paces.

There’d need to be birth certificate validation otherwise we could see no end of abuse. It would be just too easy for say, plain Ernie Ballbuster, the Viz AC relay stalwart, to dip under 30 minutes for 10k and then suddenly reappear as Erne Ballabuse, little accents all over the shop (although sadly not on this author’s laptop keyboard), and claim undue record status.

I know this might all look a bit premature and you may just spot it hasn’t been fully thought through yet (too right,Ed, but not the real Ed. You really ought to get out more, but not just yet). But if sometime next summer you are sitting there thinking it’s all gone a bit quiet since Paula, Mo, Laura and Mark (yes, youngsters, Mark; no clues) were hacking into the mighty UK endurance records in yesteryear, don’t say nobody warned you.

David Chalfen currently has some time on his hands in between single daily strolls across the Highgate and Shaftesbury heartlands

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Thank the running heavens for the blessings of sports science and technology to enable the best distance runners to truly max out their great ability. Otherwise, we’d be stuck back in the dark ploddy days of the 1980s when the best that a British male – or pretty much anyone else, from anywhere at sea level – could muster over 5000m metres was 13.00.41 (1982 – imagine that, 13 flat for 5000 being seen as a great benchmark!), 27.23 at 10,000 (1988) or a clanky 2.07.13 marathon (1985).

Hey; hold on a minute; aren’t those times pretty tasty, around 35 years later? Where does this fit with all the reams of academic papers, books and now digital information on what we usually call ‘cutting edge’ or ‘state of the art’ advances?

Cast your eye down the IAAF All Time lists, and look away from the many altitude reared athletes who have sensibly and lucratively turned their tremendous natural and environmental advantages to long distance running. You’ll notice that the numbers of sea level runners, from the whole planet, over 4 decades, who have surpassed these landmark performances (Dave Moorcroft, Eamonn Martin, and Steve Jones, for the uninitiated) is truly tiny, as are the margins by which they have improved what were all pre-Mo UK records.

Strip out those runners who in all likelihood had the benefits of some clandestine ‘Mediterranean red wine’ and the pool of progression is even tinier. (If you wish to play Aerobic Sherlock, EPO tests came into play from 2000/01)

So barely 1% of progress, by my maths. Which is interesting given how many different one per centers we must have been offered over the years. This brings to mind one of the many gems in Alex Hutchinson’s tremendous book Endure, where he quotes leading Canadian coach Dr Trent Stellingwerff’s reference to “ 1% + 1% + 1% +1% = 1%”.

That is, put facetiously by yours truly, with all these one per centers popping up yearly, we should surely be down to about 25 minutes for 10,000m or 1 hour 55 for the marathon. And that’s for the U20 women…. .

Mike Gratton victorious in London in ’83 – he spoke Shaun on a recent Let’s Get Running Podcast

Eamonn Martin and Jon Brown, the two UK 10,000m record holders before Mo Farah, have both gone on record stating bemusement and disappointment in the GB context but the relative stasis applies to 99% of the world’s nations – the world that isn’t the Rift Valley.

Makes you wonder – are there really 200-plus nations where youngsters have been subjected to too much TV or screen time, too many fry ups and takeaways, or local councils selling off playing fields for a mock Tudor housing estate?

Put it another way; set aside the sports medicine advances which thankfully keep runners’ careers going for longer than was often the case 35 years ago; and the more meticulous use of altitude training, and look just at what running the very best current runners do. Go through the detail of volume/intensity/pace/recovery/periodization. Then go and look at what their counterparts did more than a generation ago, and then flag up what you see as the relevant advances.

Even if we treat the marathon as a special case for training advances over the decades (in 1985 sub 2.10 was still a benchmark of world class in a way that it really isn’t anymore), the Steve Jones legend (interestingly achieved with a half way split of 61.50) has moved on barely 1% by barely a dozen athletes.

What has changed significantly from the 1980s is that the sport (coaches, managers, sponsors primarily) has become much more adept at identifying, nurturing and retaining the best endurance running talent in the species and incentivising and rewarding performance.

Any coaching points? Perhaps, twofold. Firstly, ‘wood for the trees’ – don’t get blindsided by tiny marginal aspects before fully embracing the fundamentals. Well you can, but if you are training 25 mpw and angsting over the concentration of your beetroot juice maybe step back for a moment.

Secondly, just because it happened 35 years ago and in many ways the world has moved on hugely, that doesn’t mean it may not still be best practice, at least for the specific individual concerned. So, Dave Moorcroft’s West Midlands canal networks or Jacob Ingebritsen’s Sandnes small town idyll; Steve Jones’s RAF St Athan flexi day job or Sondre Moen splitting his peak training between Sestriere and Kenya?

David Chalfen  supports beetroot juice, designer mattresses and Nike Next%; and also just heading out the effing door with your kit on, frequently.

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Younger readers may look away now. 1977 has gone down in history, depending on which side of the establishment you sit, as both the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and The Year That Punk Broke, with the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen synergising the two.

If you want one running highlight from the year, check out Steve Ovett’s World Cup 1500 metre win on youtube, get your stopwatch set up and see what he does for the last 200 metres.

What has bewilderingly escaped the notice of cultural historians, thus far, is that it also marked my first subscription to Athletics Weekly. Ah, those weekly heights of expectation as the A5 shaped envelope popped through the letter box on a Friday. It meant sneaking the initial read at school.

The boys who didn’t partake of this scintillating fare – and there were many such – would instead make up suburban myths about having sex, with a person (or, in some not entirely savoury cases, species) other than themselves, or hanging out with The Clash. I really doubt that this was a better gig than the Under 15s race at the North West London League in Freezywater, Enfield.

The basics are exciting enough

Remember, before the internet, this was the only source of following the sport to the extent that it wasn’t covered at national newspaper level. The two abiding memories of what the magazine was like are firstly that it was extremely well written, to a level that has been very rarely matched in the sport since, and secondly that there was no ‘angle’.

It didn’t see 5000m running as any more exciting or attractive than triple jumping – it just focused on what was being done very well in the sport – by whoever, and wherever that was. The only angle was to get people to love the sport and want to know more and understand more about it. Implicitly, if they did this, they’d sell more copies.

The doyen of the staff – and he still remains unsurpassed in his knowledge, passion and skill in communicating these was the long term Editor Mel Watman. In a fitting and well deserved footnote to the moderately remunerated life of an athletics journalist, in his retirement Watman recouped substantial funds with some canny betting on athletics.

An illustration of the heft of AW was that there are many men (always men; no comment) of a certain age who have a spare room in their house that is fully given over to storage of decades of old AWs. It’s always sad to hear that their visiting grandchildren have to sleep in the garden so as not to unsettle the pristine 1984 Rankings Annual.

What still holds, 40 years later, is that the basics of track and field are exciting, simple, and primal enough that, with the competition rules as they are (give the IAAF credit where it’s due, eh), the disciplines of running, jumping and throwing as fast or as far as one can, should be plenty exciting enough. Ideally we can layer on the human interest aspect via a commentator, whether written or verbal, to draw out the athletes’ backstory.

An eclectic sport

It’s a difficult task to write about athletics with content and style that is appealing to all – and the range of ages, events and backgrounds that make up the sport make this, arguably, more challenging than almost any other sport. Even just within the endurance spectrum, what your 18 year old 800 metre runner gets excited by may be very different from what tickles the fancy of your 58 year old Marathon des Sables hero.

It’s illuminating (or sometimes frustrating) to see what pops up on those perennial lists about the best running books. Yes, there’s subjectivity and personal taste but there’s also, surely, some aspects of depth of insight, application of knowledge, hell, even a bit of wit or original turn of phrase to raise something above the ordinary.

To take one example from the niche world of marathon training books (can’t imagine why you chose that niche – Ed, but not the real Ed), I suspect that the reason why Pfitzinger and Douglas’s Advanced Marathoning has deservedly captured such wide and lasting appeal is because the duo convey with such vitality how well they understand the event, runners, and how the sport actually fits into runners’ lives: we take it very seriously but not too seriously. The technical content and multi-tiered training plans are, with all due respect, on a level with what numerous other volumes offer.

Anyway, the draft of “Cocaine and Jagermeister Monster to Sub 2 Marathon in 16 weeks” awaits, a memoir-cum-training-manual-cum-lifestyle inspiration, though the ‘recipes’ section may need to be edited for legal reasons.

Serpentine Coach David Chalfen likes paper, CDs, and the Frank Horwill weights drills that use ‘Telephone Directories’ for resistance.
Copyright 2019

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