Dathan Ritzenhein and Mr. Salazar's Training Methods

Jason,

Do you realize that Mr. Salazar has NEVER had an athlete improve from their first marathon under him?

He has had very limited succcess in the marathon but those that have had success (Browne, Goucher) ran their fastest in their debut.

What this tells us is that Mr. Salazar does not understand the marathon or what it takes to get an athlete to improve in the event.

People will say that the Original Oregon Project guys were not cut out for the marathon, which may be true but why did none of them improve in the event?

Even hobby joggers improve.

Look at the Hansons runners. They all improve from their debut.

"If I were Mr. Ritzenhein, I'd forget about running any indoor track or anything, and start getting ready for London, Tokyo or Rotterdam. I hope that he runs a good one!"

Why not race while getting ready for his next marathon run? I think everyone is going to have good days and bad days in races, why limit yourself to a very small number of races?

I agree that Mr. Ritzenhein might want to run some other races, but his main focus should be Rotterdam or London. The kid's got huge talent but I think that he's got to re-jigger the training a bit.

why not Boston, Jason?

While this is great for the marathon, recall he did run one of the fastest 5k US times ever. Sure, the marathon success has not come through yet, but, it's nearly impossible to be dominant at both ends of the spectrum at the same time.

Great post, Jason.

Thanks for the compliment. I am looking at my options. I have one race in mind, but yes I'd love to run Boston someday. The race still has a lot of allure for me. I've been registered to run Boston in 1990 and 2001 but didn't make it there due to track in college in 1990 and an injury in 2001.

I am very frustrated with my performance at Berlin, and my training was very inconsistent in July, August and September.

I even have a coach now!!

history is half the story wrote:

Jason,

Do you realize that Mr. Salazar has NEVER had an athlete improve from their first marathon under him?

He has had very limited succcess in the marathon but those that have had success (Browne, Goucher) ran their fastest in their debut.

What this tells us is that Mr. Salazar does not understand the marathon or what it takes to get an athlete to improve in the event.

People will say that the Original Oregon Project guys were not cut out for the marathon, which may be true but why did none of them improve in the event?

Even hobby joggers improve.

Look at the Hansons runners. They all improve from their debut.

IS THAT TRUE? ALBERTO HAS NEVER COACHED A MARATHONER TO AN IMPROVED TIME FROM THEIR DEBUT?

history is half the story wrote:

Look at the Hansons runners. They all improve from their debut.

Huh?

How many Hanson runners debuted as fast as Ritz or had track times like him?

Isn't the Hanson program based on taking off the radar runners and giving them the opportunity to improve?

Of course all of your runners will improve if you are constantly drawing from a pool of 2:20 to 2:30 runners.

Are you saying if the Hanson's got Ryan Hall, he would drop to a 2:04 guy?

You should be the anti-Hall and consult Satan for each day of training...maybe sacrifice a live goat at the end of each successful session.

That is not how I read the post. I understood it as follows.

Kara will NEVER run faster than 2:25:53 under Alberto. Why? Because no runner ever improves from their debut under Alberto. Will Ritz run faster than 2:10? Not under Alberto. That is kind of sad knowing that you are as good as you will ever be after your debut.

I think the major reason for his crappy performance was the timing of his altitude training, his great races at the WC and in Zurich came right after coming down from St.Moritz.

There was a larger gap before NY what could be the the problem, you should end altitude training either 3 weeks before a race.

corr

you should race within 48h after coming down or wait 3 weeks

Maybe the goal is to run a fast marathon in two years.

There are certain steps you take along the way.

Let's say the earlier marathon training helped produce the 12:56 and the 12:56 can down the road give the speed base to make 4:45 miles feel like walking.

Next phase could be straight distance.

He could be in an in between spot right now where dividends will be paid later.

Don't you think if you had 12:56 speed you would have the ability to have run a faster marathon?

Sub 10s 100m speed would not help but I think 12:56 would.

It took Geb a little bit of time to adjust to the marathon and many people said that he didn't have the right stride for it and would not be successful. I think 12:39 helped him and eventually he caught on to running the marathon.

Technically Ritz just beat Gebrselassie by the way.

Also Mr Salazar doesn't need to start taking pieces of advice from different people and incorporating them into his plan.

In running, two very different plans can get the same result.

But a compromise of two plans will usually result in lessor results.

If feel that Jason is probably right on this one and just wanted to politely take issue with your comment that Salazar does not understand the marathon. How do you figure? The man was damn near the best in the world for 3 years, surely 3 New York wins & 1 Boston shows he must know something about what he's doing.

From what I've read from Dathan himself, he simply ran out of gas(as opposed to the fueling issues in all of his other marathons). This makes sense given the injury plagued year he's had and limited training, doesn't it? Give him time and some consistency and I would not be surprised to see him finally show his true promise.

Jason,

Where are you training. Thought you lived in Bangkok.

I am in Bangkok at present. I am heading back to the USA on Saturday, mainly for business. As for my long term plans, I might be making some significant changes in the near future.

Sorry I missed you in Berlin. In fact I probably walked past or bumped into you afterward and never realized it. I finished about 9-10 minutes behind you.

666EnergyDrink wrote:

Based on my own experiences, doing massive sets of mile repeats and really hard long runs is a recipe for disaster. Mr. Salazar needs to focus more on longer moderate efforts at 40-50km so that glycogen is spared during the race. One every one of my marathon PR's since college, I've run at least one run of 28-30 miles, at about 6:00/mile. The late-race strength that you can derive from this sort of training is significant. The key is being careful with the pace.

Jason

Wow weird thing is that Salazar said the exact opposite of you in this article: (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/david_epstein/11/05/Alberto.Salazar/index.html)

"Yeah, right, you're arms won't use any oxygen, but your legs will use 100 percent more. This is crazy. Get your arms up! So that helped. The other thing was just faster speed work. I always say, it's very simple, if you want to run this pace in the marathon or the 10k or the 5k, you can't just come from the top down where you just try to do stronger stuff. It's like trying to say, I want to run 26 miles at 5-minute pace, so I'm just going to keep running 30 miles a day at 6-minute pace, then 5:50, then 5:40, 5:30, you know, from the top down. I'm just going to get so strong doing all these pace runs closer and closer to marathon pace, or maybe a little faster than marathon pace or 5k pace. The key is sometimes you've got to attack from the bottom, and do stuff so much frickin' faster that that pace is a jog, and so it costs you less energy. It's like, you know what, lets go redo the alignment or the chassis or whatever on this car and pump up the wheels so that it puts so much less stress on the engine. It's like having a car with flat tires. That exact mix, how much speed or how much faster, that's what everybody will argue until the end of the Earth. But, any top 5k or 10k coach will tell you this stuff coming up, is very important, as important as [strength work]."

Same training plan as you said, distance w/ pace.

I'm not saying that to disagree with you: I actually agree with you I think Kara and Ritz would benefit a lot from stuff like that. I just think it's interesting what he said was completely in the other direction of you.