I've seen once Kevin Mayer (current decathlon WR holder) do a 9x600m session. But all the other times he seems to prepare more for all the others events. Seems like it was the same thing for Ashton Eaton.
Do they do any aerobic work on a consistent basis, or it's just "here and there" to kinda maintain ?
Kevin Mayer has a 4:18 1500 PB which convert to 4:39 mile.
Ashton Eaton has a 4:14 PB, convert to 4:33 mile.
Not totally sure but I've heard that they only do more "aerobic" focused workouts about once a week, mostly in the form of 200m-800m repeats.
They rarely if ever run many miles at a time.
i think anna hall has posted about doing middle distance type repeats fairly often. but she's a rare case where the hep 800 is a big chunk of her total points.
It's a really tough one because explosive power is important in most decathlon events, and going out for jogs or steady runs to build the base would work against this. One session of relevant intervals in 10 is probably the right training mix!
Eaton throws like a girl and still set a WR. Sprint/jump wins the dec
They have to do some preparation, because it is hard to move all that complex muscle specialized in various skills efficiently believe it or not. Seems to me that it is easier for them to get imbalanced muscularly, given the poor distance running aerodynamics of their added ability and more opportunities for non aerodynamic trainings.
By time the 1500 rolls around the winner is usually decided(as long as the person in the lead finishes the race). And since all the other events are fast twitch explosive events, it's best to train like that. Just got to have enough endurance to make sure you're not going be DFL in the last event.
As reported in the book, it was clear that Jenner did a substantial amount of 1500-ish prep in the preseason. Makes sense, because the 1500 was how Jenner made the team in 1972, and the race was always one of Jenner's best events vis-à-vis other top-drawer decathletes.
That said, I don't recall that Jenner did a whole lot of straight mileage--more like a substantial volume of moderately-paced interval work.
A 30 second improvement is worth about 200 points.
That’s equivalent to 0.9 s in the 100, 3 feet in the LJ, 1.7 s in the hurdles and 4 s in the 400.
But the specific training that helps the latter 4 events are similar. So you’d put a lot of time and effort in that.
And you need to spend time on the technical events.
It’s not worth the effort to run more distance at the expense of the other 9 events.
Running about a 4:30 mile in the tenth event in two days is not bad.