Endurance Seminar - Part 2 Progression

Its been great to see just how many people have been reading the first installment. It makes it worth the time and effort when that happens. And if there is anything I missed then please leave an update in the comments area.

So on to part 2 and progression.

This discussion came off the back of the first part when most of the panel were talking about developing a big aerobic base off the back of plenty of miles and targetted faster running. And how the culture of the 1990s had got us away from building this big base in search of quick fixes.

Alberto talked quite a lot about Galen Rupp's progression during the 7 years or so that they have worked together. Most of us know that Rupp has now run a mid 27min 10k and took the NCAAs by storm this year in last year of college eligibility. According to Alberto this year he will have been running 95 miles a week (what we didnt find out was if this was his 52 week average or what sort of variation there was from week to week - and more on Rupps workouts later). What he did say was that he has been increasing his volume by 5 miles a week or so over a number of years and clearly as a guy in his early twenties there are many more years of increase to come. Kara Goucher was a similar picture with a progression year on year as she built her aerobic fitness.

And interestingly Dathan Ritzenhein was the opposite ! So Alberto pointed out that as a marathoner Dathan had been up at around 120mpw in recent years under Brad Hudson's training but this season he backed down to more like 100 and focused on doing more faster running with an eye on the track again. The results are there for everyone to see with his sub13 5000m in Zurich backed up with a fantastic bronze at the World Half this weekend. And just in case the 'low mileage' guys started to get too excited Alberto pointed out that when Dathan goes back to the marathon then they will build up his volume again.

Editor's note - the athletes Salazar is now talking about are the second wave of athletes in the Oregon Project - more talented and with a bigger background than his 13.30 brigade of a decade ago. Clearly have the right raw materials help !

So back to progression and an interesting view from Liz McColgan - indeed one of the few areas that the panellists disagreed on. Liz reckons we should be identifying at a much younger age where an athletes strengths are and therefore their likely best event. The british mindset is to start with the shortest track race and keep moving up throughout our careers until eventually we get to the marathon. Of course Liz did race a pretty handy 1500m in her day but she was a 10,000m Championship runner as early as 1988. Ian Stewart shared that he was always a 5000m runner, as a junior and senior. That was where his talent lay and he stuck to it. (The day after I asked Richard Nerurkar about when he knew he was a marathon runner. He made his marathon debut in 1993 and age 29 but revealed that during 1988/89 he had been training in Boston with Pete Pfitzinger and other marathoners and had handled the long runs very well and knew even then where his future lay. Of course he stuck with the 10,000m for a few years to take 5th in Tokyo '91 and then run the final in Barcelona '92. He is also one of those athletes like Dathan who ran faster over the 10k after moving up to the marathon but thats a topic for another day).

Alberto took a differing opinion. His approach is very much to maximise his athletes potential at shorter distances before moving them up (as their aerobic base develops) as he explained through his examples of Rupp, Ritzenhein and Kara Goucher. I suspect there was some nuance lost in the big panel discussion and if you actually dug deeper both sides of the argument probably had the end goal event in mind and just a slightly different approach to getting there.

So for a completely different take on progression we had George Gandy. Talking about Lisa Dobriskey's ability to pull championship medals out of a compromised season (she won Commenwealth Gold and World silver in injury affected years) George talked about how he looks for progression every week in training. Not year to year, mesocycle to mesocycle but week to week. This certainly caused a few furrowed brows from the other panellists and as he explained because Lisa was used to that sort of progression they could handle a 6 week block knowing just how far they could her fitness. In fact he said that you are only 6 weeks from a PB, a comment met with a few sagely nods from Salazar. (What he didn't say is 'if you are in very good aerobic shape already' - which has to be implied from the earlier discussion on volume. Lisa had mentioned that during the winter she is running about 70 miles a week and has built up to this over a number of years - so clearly her aerobic base is pretty good now).

There was some interesting detail behind this - and George is good at detail :-) He explained how athletes often progress very quickly in the first couple of months after their end of season break (i'm sure many of us have been there - i was on fire from dec 98 to feb 99 without really doing a lot other than having recovered from the previous season). So one of the things he does is look to hold people back in that period by adding more miles, more reps or less recovery. Basically by keeping them tired during the winter he can control the evidence of the progression so that when he starts to reduce the load as the competition season approaches then continues to be a visible improvement. He used the metaphor of running with a sack on your backand adding or removing weight from it to control the speed.

George also talked briefly about how after 10 weeks or so with a particular stimulus performance can start to plateau and how that is a sign for him to change the direction of the training in some way. And if you are in to seriously long term evolution of training ideas based on evidence then his recollections of the Loughborough circuit sessions were fascinating if a bit long winded. The abridged version is 'from 13 stations in the 1970s when Coe was there the programme has evolved to 16 stations today - and he is less convinced of the need for conventional sit ups...'

The final word goes to Salazar who said that endurance performance is a 'culmination of years' of training.

Part 1 - Reviving distance running
Part 3 - Altitude
Part 4 - Peaking and the other bits and pieces

Notes from Endurance Seminar at the World Half

I've got a ton of notes from the various seminars and presentations this weekend around the World Half Marathon in Birmingham. Over the next few days I will try and write up as much as I can.

The expert panel on Friday night comprised (left to right in photo) Wilson Kipketer (800m World Record holder), Alberto Salazar (Head Coach of the Oregon Project, 3x NY Marathon winner), George Gandy (Head Coach at Lougborough University), Lisa Dobriskey (World Silver 1500m) and on the other side of the room out of camera shot were Liz McColgan (1991 World 10,000m Champion), Glenn Latimer and Ian Stewart (now Head of Endurance at UK Athletics). Its fair to say that most of the time was spent with the folks in camera shot ...

The first big topic was about how to revive distance running in the UK (and Europe) so Alberto gave us some insights into the American experience. After the high point of the 1980s in the US standards dropped alarmingly in the 1990s. One of the measures he used was the number of high School runners clocking sub 9minutes for 2 Miles. For many years there would typically be 30 or so but by the low point it was down to just a handful each season. And given that producing successful endurance athletes is a numbers game then having a small pool of talent coming into the college system was going to have an impact further up the pyramid. This was a theme that both George and Wilson agreed with. You had to have a large number of young athletes coming through to give you a chance to produce the Dathan Rizenheins and Galen Rupps. Encouragingly the number of sub 9s is now back to close to an all time high - although we didn't get to hear what had made running sexy again for amercian school kids.

The Oregon Project was kicked off a decade ago as one initiative to try and revive fortunes. Alberto's first experience at raising standards turned out to be a chastening one. His plan was take a bunch of mid-13 minute 5k runners, speed them up a bit and then move them up to the marathon. By recruiting guys who had competed well and had good track speed he reckoned his chances of success were high. As it turned out he only managed to get one guy into the 2.10-2.11 range and the insights were revealing. Alberto's assumptions were based on the fact that during the 1980s he trained with a bunch of guys in Boston at the GBTC who were running sub 2.09-2.12 marathons with far less speed than the guys he was planning on moving up in Oregon. Where the plan fell apart was that the 2000's generation had been running far less volume than their eighties counterparts and while this wasn't a problem at 5k when they moved up it caught them out big time. When pushed for some numbers he reckoned that the GBTC guys were probably doing 120mpw + while the Oregon guys came from a background of 90mpw plus or minus. Thats a big difference over several years training and the cumulative effect on aerobic development is huge.

He developed this idea further with a story about how kenyan kids at age 18 have 15,000 more miles in the bank than the average american high school athlete. While the numbers mights have been rough and ready the point certainly hit home. We need to run more and sooner. And expect that our athletes will peak at a later age than their east african counterparts because they will be behind in their development.

George had an interesting take on why athletes weren't running enough. Back in the 1970s and 80s there were fewer major international events. So although athletes raced a lot in low key events they really only had to peak once a year so spent the whole winter and spring just running and racing tired. These days you have the Euro Cross, Indoors, World Cross and then a summer track season where you need to make some money and try and perform in a major championship against fierce competition. So athletes are spending a lot more time preparing for races instead of just getting aerobically fit. This is a reality of a fully professional sport which we don't seem to have come to terms with.

So some big lessons for Alberto from that first experience which could be summarised as: if we have fewer runners available we need to train them smarter (and the Oregon/Nike version of that will be developed in a subsequent post); identify the talent at a younger age and start to build its aerobic capacity with progressive volume (more on this later as well with some examples).

The other panellists were in agreement on one big theme which was the need to train in groups. Lisa talked about doing some of her runs with up to 60 athletes at Loughborough under George's guidance and how that helped her to improve. Ian Stewart revealed that UK Athletics was setting up two altitude bases, one in Font Romeu and one in Kenya as well as using Loughborough as the permanent centre for endurance in the UK. A change from the previous regime was that he was keen to encourage non-funded athletes to also use these venues to start to re-create the large group concept of yesteryear.

And its not just the US and UK thinking along these lines. Outside the conference I bumped into Michel Boeting who used to work with Jos Hermans at Global Sports Communications and gave me my marathon debut opportunity in Amsterdam in 2003. One of Michel's recent projects has been to set up a privately organised group in the Netherlands with Dutch and a few Belgian runners. At present they have about 30 athletes including the likes of Michel Butters and results seem to be picking up already though funding is still proving hard work - this seems to be a difference between Europe and the more entrepreneurially minded US where a number of groups have sprung up outside 'the system'.

In the next few days look out for: Managing the volume progression, Altitude and Marathon Preparation.

Part 2 - Progression here