Edwin Moses's Training

Did he run an 800 ever?

Do any sprinters actually know their 'mileage'? I've been sprinting for 10 years and have never ever thought about how many miles I run in a week. it's just not what we measure our training by.

fast twitch wrote:

Do any sprinters actually know their 'mileage'? I've been sprinting for 10 years and have never ever thought about how many miles I run in a week. it's just not what we measure our training by.

Really? I guess I never thought about training like a sprinter would. If you had to take a guess, what would your average week be? 20 miles? That's a wild stab in the dark.

Kenny Moore indicated in an article than Moses trained 3 hours a day and very hard.

Check out:

http://www.ncalcricket.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=850

This interview was posted in 2004. Some excerpts:

Edwin Moses is widely recognised as the greatest 400-metre hurdler ever. By the time he retired from athletics in 1989, he had won two Olympic gold medals and a bronze, run 107 consecutive victories and broken the world record four times. Underlying that success was a strong belief in applying science to training. Now, at the age of 48, he is planning a comeback. Michael Bond asked him why

How can people of your age carry on doing competitive athletics?

The first thing is to get in condition, the second is to stay free of any major injury. Someone my age trying to do high-intensity work could have a heart attack out there. You have to be very careful how you approach the training. The key is to start a long time before the event.

So what time are you running the 400-metre hurdles in these days?

Actually I'm not running them at all right now. I have a slight problem to my knee that goes back years. I tore a meniscus in 1985 and it never really bothered me. Then last August the problems began, but it didn't get in the way until last Christmas when I started intensifying my training and running a lot of miles, including up and down hills. I can hurdle completely fine, but I cannot run the 600 or 700 miles it would take to get me in top condition. The constant grinding bothers me. I need surgery to repair it otherwise it is just going to get worse.

...

It was all about preparation. I increased my stamina by looking into diet, stretching, weight-training, biometrics and research on breathing and lactic acid. After the 1976 Olympics, I went to Finland, where a company called Polar was developing heart-rate monitors. I got one of the first they produced, and by 1980 I was collecting lots of data about my heart-rate, monitoring things during my long-distance runs such as how long it would take my heart to recover while running downhill. I monitored all this every day. Then in 1983 I bought my first computer and I fed the data into some simple graphics programs. I could see how and where I was improving and where I needed to improve further.

How did you train?

I trained totally differently from most athletes. Traditionally, the furthest you would run in practice for the 400-metre hurdles would be 300 metres, but I would run up to six miles up and down hills and across golf courses to build up stamina. I used to train with Henry Rono, the Kenyan long-distance runner, who broke four world records in 1978. He was my room-mate in California.

One of the most important things was my use of physical therapy as a rehabilitative measure. When I was training in my prime I used to go to a physical therapist, Ken Yoshino, four or five days a week immediately after practice. We used a lot of techniques that are common now but that everyone thought were really strange back then.

Such as...

We did something called "proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation" stretching, which is a dynamic stretching where a therapist stretches you while you resist. You do it after you've sat in an ice-bath for 20 minutes. It cuts down on any pain and the inflammation and swelling you get from high-intensity running. Most people think that if you stretch when you're cold you'll be stiff as a brick, but actually you get a much better stretch, because the cold anaesthetises the nerves and makes the muscles relax. In addition, as your muscles warm up all the lactic acid drains out of them as the warm blood flows back in. You get a total flushing of the whole area, which also cuts down the number of micro-capillary tears. But you need to do it with someone who knows what they're doing or you could tear a muscle.

W. Mitty wrote:

Check out:

http://www.ncalcricket.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=850

Great stuff. Thank you.

After reading about 30 posts today on this board that were total crap it's nice to find something interesting.

Keep in mind that Moses was unique, and so was his training. Kevin Young, who still holds the WR in the 400h, was coached by John Smith before Smith left UCLA and trained in a more conventional fashion.

Moses did not train. He spent 3 hours a day with Chuck Norris. Yes, Moses was that good, good enough to spend that much time with the master. They formed a bond that lasted for nine years, nine months, and nine days. After the bond between Chuck and Moses was broken, Moses lost his first hurdles race in 107 finals.