What Could Lagat Do for 2.5 Miles, 3 Min Rest, 1.5 Miles 3 Min Rest, 1 Mile

WOW I was sooo far off. I guessed much faster than that.

I guessed faster too, but I forgot he trains at altitude. For altitude that pace is fine. 7,000 ft is rough. You can't apply conversion formulas. You just have to be very very conservative with training pace, even if it means running splits that the girls are probably running down at sea level.

i had read an article on lagats training a few months ago either on letsrun and/or track and field news that he runs once a day whereas most of his peers do to, a long run of 13-14 miles at 5 minute pace (sometimes run with abdi) 7 miles at about 4:40 per mile pace, (the workout listed here 3.5 miles and 2.5 miles and 1.5 miles = 7 miles totaland the times close to 440 per mile pace, and it said once a week short intervals example 8 x 300 in 38 seconds with a 110 jog. very quality oriented. it would be interesting if he listed his workouts for a whole year as steve sott used to, i wonder if lagat has a period of the year where he runs twice a day, or more of a normal base for a 1500/5k runner of 80 - 90 miles a week?

my mistake the workout was 2.5 miles + 2 miles + and 1.5 miles for a total of 5 miles. not what i put down originally.

more relevant to his fellow kenyans may be : what aspect of his training allows him to produce that devastating kick which so many of his compatriots lack ?

if he's got it, some of them shoud try to emulate him

the dude with the funny hat wrote:

I guessed faster too, but I forgot he trains at altitude. For altitude that pace is fine. 7,000 ft is rough.

It seems to me that the article states he did the workout in Tucson, which isn\'t more than 2600ft. My guesses were too fast, so good to see they\'re only humans as well...

Whoops; I guess in that case the main point is that everybody needs to do aerobic threshold training. ie, a big part of running sub-13 is being comfortable clicking off cruise intervals at 4:40 pace.

Yeah, this was definitely more of a tempo/threshold workout. It makes sense, there's no reason for him to be doing true intervals longer than a mile or so. I, too, made that mistake in guessing his times.

There's a big difference between what he COULD do and what he DID or should do.

I guessed 11:15, 6:30, and 4:15... I was off...

It also seems like this workout was done between his 5k last weekend and his 1500 this weekend, so it wouldn't make sense for him to do anything particularly hard. I doubt he was straining at all for that.

everyone so far estimated his times to be faster...not every workout should be done at 100 percent effort.

The point of training is to race fast. Not to run fast workouts. There is 1 american miler in particular who would do well to learn this lesson.

Obviously, these workouts produce results for Lagat. Who cares how fast he runs his repeats in, and if he could run them faster.

Workout as fast as you need to workout to get the desired training benefit, not as fast as you can workout. Big difference there.

asdfasdfsdf wrote:

I guessed 11:15, 6:30, and 4:15... I was off...

Wow, I guessed the same 3 times. And to the poster above me, when I guessed these times I was thinking that they weren't near 100% effort for him, that's 4:30 pace, 4:20 pace, and 4:15, I feel like he should be able to do that without really crushing himself, even though he actually went a lot slower.

When I said to the poster above me, I was referring to "take a look around."

I was actually pretty close

12:00

7:15

4:30

I think something people are not thinking about is his 3 minutes rest. That is not a ton of rest and he is training for the olympics at the end of the summer. If he did this again in late July I would expect his times to be much faster but you have to look at the time in his season.

So this is like the opposite of all those threads about 'based on my last workout, what could I run for 1500?'

And if you posted Lagat's workout, would anyone predict 3:36?

During his time in Flagstaff, a couple of weeks before Stanford:-

Tues warm-up + 6 miles tempo 29:30

Wed 5 miles easy/steady

Thurs warm-up + 8 x 2mins hill (1 mins jog downhill)

Fri 6 miles steady 34 mins

Sat warm-up + 3 x 1.5 mile (7:01,7:20,7:14 (very windy day) 3 mins rec

Sun -