Nardas' success under Gjert proves that it was Gjert as coach that created the Ingebrigtsen boys from almost raw clay. Without him Jabob Filip and Henrik would be low level office drones sitting in a cubicle most days (or working at McDonald's after seeing Jakob's diet haha) instead of world famous athletes.
Kristoffer works at KPGM and Martin works at Tietoevry.
"Now I see the chances of a medal in the 5000 as greater. Not because I am better trained, but because there are more tactics at 1500 metres. There is more that can go wrong in tactical races. At 5,000, it is more likely that the best runner will win. A little more predictable, says Nordås.“
Kejelcha would like a word. Plenty of tactics in a 5,000 nowadays.
Having watched that entire Ingebrigtsen family series long ago - it was pretty clear to me (as a budding psychologist) that what Gjert did with his boys ( and tried to do with Ingrid) is to be a COACH first and a father second. A father can can choose a lot of different demeanors towards his children - a coach basically has one - to cajole coerce prod encourage and berate your runners to be the very best they can possibly be. To kick their ass until they do the work that makes them tough hard strong and ustoppable. Some of the boys (Martin and Kristoffer) opted out - which says a lot about the family in that they didn't seem to penalize those boys for those choices - just a bit of disappointment on Gjert's part I think. And in the end even Kristoffer came around to being a runner on his own terms - and still using his father's roadmap to do it. And of course some of the boys (Jakob Henrik Filip) signed up almost completely to Gjert as coach instead of Gjert as father.
In the end there is always a price to be paid for life choices - and the one the Ingebrigtsen's paid was that Gjert as a father didn't really exist much - there was only Gjert the coach. And of course attempting to deal with a girl in the same hard way that he dealt with his boys didn't work out so well.
But in the end I give Gjert mad props for what he accomplished with his kids. I don't think either Filip nor Henrik have a great deal of talent yet he created 3 world class runners out of 5 boys using techniques virtually no one else ever tried nor tested. Marius Bakken also deserves huge props for creating something a bit unorthodox that Gjert could grab onto and tweak until it produced the results they all dreamed of.
But it was always Gjert who had the most faith, stubbornness and belief in both himself and his family.
People always want to be the best, the fastest, the strongest - but then when the bill comes due (Ingrid and all her drama) they never like the costs that must be paid in the end. Nardas' success under Gjert proves that it was Gjert as coach that created the Ingebrigtsen boys from almost raw clay. Without him Jabob Filip and Henrik would be low level office drones sitting in a cubicle most days (or working at McDonald's after seeing Jakob's diet haha) instead of world famous athletes.
The boys did the work - but Gjert is the one who created all that from nothing more than brains and determination and faith in himself and his family.
It will be very interesting to see what William does.
Having watched that entire Ingebrigtsen family series long ago - it was pretty clear to me (as a budding psychologist)
Why did you have to state the obvious? The whole post reeks of freshman level psychology. Always surprises me how people can be so confident about something they have no clue about.
i'm buying what you're selling about Gjert making the brothers into the runners they are but why the implicit assumption that he could not have achieved the same result with a different temperament or approach, while retaining the same training methodology?
I'm just struggling to see why there needs to be an "either or" scenario: either good coach or good father, not both. Surely Jake and Goeff Wightman show that this is not the case.
If you watch the series u can see that Gjert started training those boys when they were very young - I think 10 years old or so - they did XC ski training for a while before Gjert decided running was a better path. I think a great deal of Jakob's success in particular was this early start - Gjert had already done work with Henrik and Filip (and the other boys before they quit) but I am pretty sure they started at a much older age).
It's like Conan the Barbarian movie where they chain him as a child to the grain mill with a cow and then by the time he is fully grown they dont need the cow anymore - Jakob started and flourished at a very young age and without that he wouldn't be as good as he is today. You can't take an 8 or 10 year old boy to some 'approved' coach and say to him - "here, take this kid and do whatever it takes to make him great." That ends up as child abuse in most cases. But Gjert as father/coach could do that.
A big part of the Ingebrigtsen's success was the work by Marius Bakken. You ask if another father/coach with a better personality could have done the same thing - the thing is - no one did - only Gjert. And certainly lots of other father/coach families had access to that training over the last decade - but only Gjert was the one that had success.
IMO threshold training, while it works (I use it myself) is exceedingly boring with the added advantage you are always on the knife edge of digging yourself into a lactate hole that u can't get out of. Now keep a 10 year boy motivated to do that for a decade without being a dick as a human being and let me know what kind of success you have :)
We dont really know the relationship in other father/coach families because there was a multi-year reality show crew following them around - but I come from a ice hockey culture where fathers did the father/coach thing and in many cases I saw those fathers get offered jobs by big corps if they would only uproot their families to bring the child prodigy player to a new school district. I never saw that work out well in the long run. Inevitably the kid flamed out.
It's literally a meme - the parents who invest everything in their child prodigy athlete and the kid ends up nobody in nowhere-ville totally hating the sport he grew up with.
So again - it was a rare thing to pull off for Gjert. And in the end all it cost him is his relationships with his children. Honestly as much as I admire the Ingebrigtsen's I don't think the cost was worth it in the end.
Jakob would probably heartily disagree with me tho.
This post was edited 21 minutes after it was posted.
You ask if another father/coach with a better personality could have done the same thing - the thing is - no one did - only Gjert. And certainly lots of other father/coach families had access to that training over the last decade - but only Gjert was the one that had success.
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Now keep a 10 year boy motivated to do that for a decade without being a dick as a human being and let me know what kind of success you have :)
When you can conduct your experiments on your 4 oldest sons, the chance are, the 5th son just might come to success. Also, Henrik and Jakob are dicks as human beings.
“- There was fierce competition here. Did you believe in victory beforehand? asks NRK Nordås. - Yes actually. It sounds "cocky", but at least when it was as tactical as it was. I felt extremely light. The first half passed in maybe 3.50 and it feels like jogging. And then I make some bad tactical assessments, but when you are in so much better shape than the others, you can allow yourself some tactical blunders.
Now I see the chances of a medal in the 5000 as greater. Not because I am better trained, but because there are more tactics at 1500 metres. There is more that can go wrong in tactical races. At 5,000, it is more likely that the best runner will win. A little more predictable, says Nordås.“
Kejelcha would like a word. Plenty of tactics in a 5,000 nowadays.
i'm buying what you're selling about Gjert making the brothers into the runners they are but why the implicit assumption that he could not have achieved the same result with a different temperament or approach, while retaining the same training methodology?
I'm just struggling to see why there needs to be an "either or" scenario: either good coach or good father, not both. Surely Jake and Goeff Wightman show that this is not the case.
The difference is more like Peter Coe with Sebastien - he had no background in the sport (cyclist) and did make mistakes along the way as well (Seb lost a year in HS to stress fractures). Peter sought the influence of Frank Horwill (the 5 pace method), and later Seb was influenced by George Gandy at Loughborough.
Wightman had two influences, his Dad and coach and his mother (the former Susan Tooby) was a British international runner. Much like Liz Lynch coaching her daughter Eilish McColgan to a world-class athlete level, there can be advantages - if it works out at all.
The unique aspect was the TV series, that exposed to any interested viewers the good and bad of Gjert's demeanor. We don't know what was edited out that might have given us a different perspective (good or bad). It is sad that the family relationship has fallen apart, but exposing the children to that level of intrusiveness, while presumably lucrative, was ill-advised in hindsight.
He was talking about the 5000 in the european championship, not the olympics.
Fair enough. I think his phrasing is a bit off (maybe translation). A European 5,000 in the heat will probably be slow and come down to a long kick. This doesn't necessarily mean the best runner wins. It will go likely to the strongest 1,500m runner as their speed will be sufficient to beat the pure 5,000 guys like Lobalu, and Ndikumwenayo. Those guys are in the position of a Kejelcha, Barega or Aregawi. They can run faster than maybe the 1500 guys, but the slower and longer before it hurts the more in trouble they are. If they're going to beat Nordas or Mills, they need to outfox them before the kick and make it harder earlier. At the World stage, you'd put Jakob and Krop in that Nordas/Mills position.
So to sum it up, I don't think there're less tactics overall. I think there's just less for Nordas to do in a European 5,000. He just stays up in the mix and waits until the last 400 and lets his speed take over. But for someone like Lobalu, he's going to be trying to do a lot of things to get a gap on the 1500m runners, hold them at bay and see if that's enough.
Pretty hard to imagine Jakob losing the 5,000. Even in the 1500 if Jakob leads it out and makes it fast, Nordas will have to make several positioning decisions etc. with more guys in/around his finishing abilities. So I get that from his perspective.
Fair enough. I think his phrasing is a bit off (maybe translation). A European 5,000 in the heat will probably be slow and come down to a long kick. This doesn't necessarily mean the best runner wins. It will go likely to the strongest 1,500m runner as their speed will be sufficient to beat the pure 5,000 guys like Lobalu, and Ndikumwenayo. Those guys are in the position of a Kejelcha, Barega or Aregawi. They can run faster than maybe the 1500 guys, but the slower and longer before it hurts the more in trouble they are. If they're going to beat Nordas or Mills, they need to outfox them before the kick and make it harder earlier. At the World stage, you'd put Jakob and Krop in that Nordas/Mills position.
So to sum it up, I don't think there're less tactics overall. I think there's just less for Nordas to do in a European 5,000. He just stays up in the mix and waits until the last 400 and lets his speed take over. But for someone like Lobalu, he's going to be trying to do a lot of things to get a gap on the 1500m runners, hold them at bay and see if that's enough.
Pretty hard to imagine Jakob losing the 5,000. Even in the 1500 if Jakob leads it out and makes it fast, Nordas will have to make several positioning decisions etc. with more guys in/around his finishing abilities. So I get that from his perspective.
Nordås has historically really struggled in hot temperatures when it comes to the 5000m. Might be a factor here…
Ingy was unbeatable, because the field was weak when he won last year. No Barega, no Chep.
Oh, yeah! Have you ever written anything positive about Jakob?
How did Chep do in the 2021 Florence 5000m? And how did Barega and Chep do in the WC final in 2022? And how did Barega do in the 3000m in Eugene last year when Jakob ran on tired legs?
Do you, by the way, consider Krop, Aregawi, Gebrhiwet and Kejelcha to be weaklings?
I suspect that you have been beaten heavily in your head with your username?!
He was talking about the 5000 in the european championship, not the olympics.
Fair enough. I think his phrasing is a bit off (maybe translation). A European 5,000 in the heat will probably be slow and come down to a long kick. This doesn't necessarily mean the best runner wins. It will go likely to the strongest 1,500m runner as their speed will be sufficient to beat the pure 5,000 guys like Lobalu, and Ndikumwenayo. Those guys are in the position of a Kejelcha, Barega or Aregawi. They can run faster than maybe the 1500 guys, but the slower and longer before it hurts the more in trouble they are. If they're going to beat Nordas or Mills, they need to outfox them before the kick and make it harder earlier. At the World stage, you'd put Jakob and Krop in that Nordas/Mills position.
So to sum it up, I don't think there're less tactics overall. I think there's just less for Nordas to do in a European 5,000. He just stays up in the mix and waits until the last 400 and lets his speed take over. But for someone like Lobalu, he's going to be trying to do a lot of things to get a gap on the 1500m runners, hold them at bay and see if that's enough.
Pretty hard to imagine Jakob losing the 5,000. Even in the 1500 if Jakob leads it out and makes it fast, Nordas will have to make several positioning decisions etc. with more guys in/around his finishing abilities. So I get that from his perspective.
TL?!
Do you doubt that Jakob could have run mid 12:30s when he was in his 2 miles/ 2000m shape last year?
And do you think the East Africans can run away from him in a 1500m final if they managed to cooperate about holding a very fast pace from the gun IF JAKOB IS IN HIS ABOVE SHAPE?
Having watched that entire Ingebrigtsen family series long ago - it was pretty clear to me (as a budding psychologist) that what Gjert did with his boys ( and tried to do with Ingrid) is to be a COACH first and a father second. A father can can choose a lot of different demeanors towards his children - a coach basically has one - to cajole coerce prod encourage and berate your runners to be the very best they can possibly be. To kick their ass until they do the work that makes them tough hard strong and ustoppable. Some of the boys (Martin and Kristoffer) opted out - which says a lot about the family in that they didn't seem to penalize those boys for those choices - just a bit of disappointment on Gjert's part I think. And in the end even Kristoffer came around to being a runner on his own terms - and still using his father's roadmap to do it. And of course some of the boys (Jakob Henrik Filip) signed up almost completely to Gjert as coach instead of Gjert as father.
In the end there is always a price to be paid for life choices - and the one the Ingebrigtsen's paid was that Gjert as a father didn't really exist much - there was only Gjert the coach. And of course attempting to deal with a girl in the same hard way that he dealt with his boys didn't work out so well.
But in the end I give Gjert mad props for what he accomplished with his kids. I don't think either Filip nor Henrik have a great deal of talent yet he created 3 world class runners out of 5 boys using techniques virtually no one else ever tried nor tested. Marius Bakken also deserves huge props for creating something a bit unorthodox that Gjert could grab onto and tweak until it produced the results they all dreamed of.
But it was always Gjert who had the most faith, stubbornness and belief in both himself and his family.
People always want to be the best, the fastest, the strongest - but then when the bill comes due (Ingrid and all her drama) they never like the costs that must be paid in the end. Nardas' success under Gjert proves that it was Gjert as coach that created the Ingebrigtsen boys from almost raw clay. Without him Jabob Filip and Henrik would be low level office drones sitting in a cubicle most days (or working at McDonald's after seeing Jakob's diet haha) instead of world famous athletes.
The boys did the work - but Gjert is the one who created all that from nothing more than brains and determination and faith in himself and his family.
It will be very interesting to see what William does.
What do you mean by Ingrid and all her drama? Sorry i didn’t watch the last couple seasons yet.
and is William still running? He looks a bit chunky now.
Last time we heard about William in "Team Ingebrigtsen" he was a very accomplished soccer player (a young Haaland?)