Mo Farah's 1500m Progression

Yeah but you're missing the key ingredient - push ups. Salazar said MO wasn't strong enough to do a single push up when he first trained him. Push ups were the key.

Same deal as with Cheserek: Farah got lighter, leaner, and (apparently, according to Salazar) significantly stronger in the weight room after moving out to Oregon. Dropping a few #'s **while maintaining strength** can have an enormous benefit to someone at any level, assuming it's done in a healthy way. Look at earlier pictures of Farah: more muscle mass, and at least a bit less lean. His face looks like the NOP logo nowadays.

Letsrunner wrote:

Yeah but you're missing the key ingredient - push ups. Salazar said MO wasn't strong enough to do a single push up when he first trained him. Push ups were the key.

Yeah, can you imagine if a U.S. runner manifested this type of progression. NOBODY would believe he was clean. NOBODY. Alberto Salazar himself has written that one cannot do what Mo has done without the use of PEDs.

Watch Farah in some of those old World Championship finals before Salazar where he has exactly the same strategy and goes to the front at around 400 to 500 to go, and tries to hold everyone off, but doesn't have close to the ability to do it and a bunch of guys charge around him by the last turn.

jjjjj wrote:

Watch Farah in some of those old World Championship finals before Salazar where he has exactly the same strategy and goes to the front at around 400 to 500 to go, and tries to hold everyone off, but doesn't have close to the ability to do it and a bunch of guys charge around him by the last turn.

Yeah, I chuckled watching him get chewed up in that 2007 WC video of Teg sticking it to the africans for 4th. Mo tries to gear up and gets dusted.

My kick was better at 30 than at 26 also. Better training leads to results. AlSal's patented kick improvement takes years to develop, but Rupp and Farah are living proof that it works!

Luckily for Farah, sometime in 2010, he suddenly said to himself "you know wot, I'm going to start trying hard in practice from now on, and do push-ups. Coz even though I've been doing this running thing for years and years, and been to the Olympics and World Championships and all that, working hard and building strength never occurred to me until just now, and none of my coaches knew about these advanced techniques."

And the rest is history. Just think, what a jewel in the rough he must have been. If only he'd been introduced to hard work and push-ups earlier, he'd probably have like 5 or 6 Olympic medals already. Still, better late than never, I suppose.

Complete farce. Even 3:34 to 2:28 is not believable, let alone 3:39 to 2:28.

Bill S. Preston, esq wrote:

Complete farce. Even 3:34 to 2:28 is not believable, let alone 3:39 to 2:28.

You're very right, 2:28 is a pretty unbelievable 1500m time.

From 3:34 the year before? Yes, it certainly is.

Bill S. Preston, esq wrote:

From 3:34 the year before? Yes, it certainly is.

Indeed even with a 3:29 the year before 2:28 would be very suspicious

2013 3:28.81 Monaco (Stade Louis II) 19 JUL

2012 3:34.66 Los Angeles (OC), CA 18 MAY

2009 3:33.98 Monaco (Stade Louis II) 28 JUL

peonlittlepeople wrote:

My kick was better at 30 than at 26 also. Better training leads to results. AlSal's patented kick improvement takes years to develop, but Rupp and Farah are living proof that it works!

Well, apparently it doesn't take years to develop. Mo dropped his 5000m PR just a short while after learning to do pushups.

Exactly how much better was your kick at 30 than 26? How much faster did you run a 1500m?

Many people think that athletes should progress steadily over years to improve their times if they're not on drugs, but is there any evidence that this usually happens? I can think of many more athletes who had a big breakthrough year than I can athletes whose PRs are only slightly better than their next best times.

Please name 5 elite 1500 or 5k runners that fit that example.

reader of the forums 2.0 wrote:

Many people think that athletes should progress steadily over years to improve their times if they're not on drugs, but is there any evidence that this usually happens? I can think of many more athletes who had a big breakthrough year than I can athletes whose PRs are only slightly better than their next best times.

Yes, your point is potentially valid when an athlete is fairly young, but for an older athlete to do so generates red flags. I know you know this. Look at Florence Griffith-Joyner suddenly running 10.49 and 21.34 at age 28 (she turned 29 later that year). Her progression is a bit like Mo Farah's, except that Mo does not run for fast times unless he is in a 1500m.

Ritz went from 13.18 (?) to 12.56 in one race in 2009. Maybe a bad example though, as he'd started working with Salazar before the jump. Whoops.

Links, please. wrote:

Please name 5 elite 1500 or 5k runners that fit that example.

David Moorcroft

Sydney Maree

Paula Radcliffe

Dathan Ritzenhein

Chris Solinsky

reader of the forums 2.0 wrote:

Links, please. wrote:

Please name 5 elite 1500 or 5k runners that fit that example.

David Moorcroft

Sydney Maree

Paula Radcliffe

Dathan Ritzenhein

Chris Solinsky

Well, Ritzenhein did that under Salazar, which makes it VERY suspect. Maree's breakthrough was not that big. His 13:01 was great, but in previous years he had already run a 3:48 mile and 7:33 for 3000m, so the breakthrough is as much symptomatic of his not running 5000m very much as it is of a modest improvement. Solinsky was only 25 years old when he made his big breakthrough, much younger than Farah. Radcliffe and Solinsky were also suspected dopers. Who knows about Maree and Moorcroft?