Andreas MF Almgren European record 58:41

The sky is the limit! Go AA

Fastest white boy for the half?

he needs to retire from the track and start focusing on the roads, no need to wait until after 2028. he's got 2 road ERs and he's barely run road races. his main weakness, the weak kick, was probably why he ended up 4th instead of on the podium today, but fortunately it doesn't matter as much on the road.

he is such an enigma with regards to this. former speedster (200m 22, 800m 1:45) so he really should be a kicker. today he seems to be roughly as competetive in all events between 3000m-HM. maybe he should just commit to road distances as you said. more price money as well.

i think the athletes who over-commit to double threshold (i. e almgren, ingebrigtsen etc) lack the speed in general. extreme base fitness but too little race-specific speed sometimes

it's the double threshold for sure. i doubt he used double threshold back when he was a 800 runner and was injured all the time. he said earlier in the season that he definitely can't go 1:45 anymore these days, maybe 1:47.

He recently kicked himself to a bronze in Worlds with like 12-15 runners in contention at the last lap. His kick is fine. The reason he is breaking all these records is because it's basically the first season in 10 years where he didn't have severe issues with injuries/illness.

true, but most times he tends to fail in the kick (see almost every other championship final). i still believe double threshold's major con is the lack of speed-specific training. however the positives might outweigh the negatives anyway, as they get so strong and reduce their injury risk so much

You are right about threshold impacting speed. In Almgren's case though he said right before Worlds that his kick is the fastest it has been since the last 8 years or so (dont remember exactly), and it was mainly thanks to 1.5 months of race specific speed work after all the base threshold stuff.

The Portuguese Jose Carlos Pinto, who is training under Gjert Ingebrigtsen’s very non speed based double threshold regime, not only PB’ed with a minute in the 10k this season, but also with more than 1.5 sec in the 800m: 1.45.12..!

”In the right conditions I can run close to 58:00. ” - Almgren after his Valencia half race.

He's a fraud

To those saying double threshold is killing Almgren’s (and Jakob’s) kick, the classic Norwegian method includes short sprints on Monday and 20 x 200m hills on Saturday. They focus on speed too.

Could be that Almgren ends his career with more European Records than Jakob. He already has the 5000m, HM, and 10k (road). I expect he'll take a shot at Farah's 26:46 10000m record next year. And would you bet against him eventually getting Abdi's 2:03:36? It's definitely a possibility though always hard to say how well athletes adapt to the marathon

A bronze medal in the space of 10 years and age 30.

I will not comment on doping, I let that to the cry babies of LRC, + he is far from being scaring.

Letsrun, the only place in the world when the current world 10000m bronze medallist is adviced to move out of the track 🤣

Age 30…

It doesn't translate like this. Guys like Hoey & Brazier can probably run 21.x hi and 45.x, but neither has ever been known as a huge 800 kicker like a Sedjati. And Almgren probably has better 200-800 PRs than Hocker, but in the 1500 and 5k we all know who'd win the battle on a last lap.

Kicking and gear-changing is a skill, and does not translate directly from fast, flashy short distance PRs.

I think a lot of people fall into the fallacy of using shorter distances PR to predict kick. Sure it's part of the equation, as in you can't run a 50s last lap without being able to run, well, a 400 in 50s, but aside from that, it's mainly about how much you have got left at the end of the race. And that's why in the 5k Geb always prevailed v.s Komen when it came down to a kick even though Komen had significantly better shorter distances PRs from 1500 to 2 miles.