Instead of all this stupid speculation, why doesn't someone simply as Seb himself???
Instead of all this stupid speculation, why doesn't someone simply as Seb himself???
Perhaps if Cam Levins would train a bit more like Lord Coe he wouldn't have been dusted in the Olympics this past year! Less is more! No point slogging out 190 junk miles per week and watching James bond all day.
See the interview with Peter Coe in "Track Coach", Fall 2001 (available from T&FN if you don't already know).
The number of times "mileage" or "training volume" appears in this interview:
Zero
People who make mileage out to be a big thing in middle distance should be ignored, period. Aouita, Coe, Lagat, Ryun, El Gurrouj, Webb, Centro, Manzano, and many others have all trained roughly in the 50-75 mpw range. It isn't about mileage. It's what they do in that mileage that matters.
ukathleticscoach wrote:
Hardly breaking news
Agreed. We knew all this 30 yrs ago...in detail. I have a 1985 book with complete details of SC's training. I have learnt almost nothing new since. How come some people still think Coe did not run miles. ???
I agree. If every single mile of these 50-70 miles/week is performed with high quality/with good speed, being recovered properly, this is absolutely enough.
But I think, these 50-70 miles are "only" the valuable miles. We still don´t know exactly the weekly total of all runs: recovery jogs and warm ups...
I read in an interview with El Guerrouj, that he sometimes did more than 110 miles to get in shape. What sort of miles?
I know a guy who trained in Kenya for a while. He told about David Rudisha running endless slow miles in the winter, pulling a tyre as a strength work out. Does he count these miles?
I would describe what you read about El Guerrouj as BS unless he himself said it. When El Guerrouj was on top, his coach, Abdelkader Kada, spoke in the UK, which was published by Athletics Weekly and the British Milers Club. Kada said that El Guerrouj ran 75 miles per week.
Rudisha trains with Brother Colm, who is NOT noted for endless slow weeks. Marius has some about the training at St. Patricks on his site.
Sorry to say, but the guy I know who trained in Kenya with elite performers during the last winter was on the same track where he SAW Rudisha running these slow miles due to pulling a fat tyre as a strength work out, believe me or not. And the same guy I am talking about was trained by Brother Colm himself. And he said, they always did quite slow miles at the beginning/ the morning run and sppeded up to the end.
El Guerrouj: look at this:
http://www.la-coaching-academy.de/2008_trainingslehre/2008-04-06-hicham-el-guerrouj-1500m.php
It´s a german website (professional). There you can read about El Guerrouj´s training focussing on quality, that´s true, but he touched the benchmark of up to 200km/week. His workouts were not of much volume, but he used to train twice.
Rbyrne wrote:
Instead of all this stupid speculation, why doesn't someone simply as Seb himself???
Have you not read the thread? Its been done.
Dorando wrote:
ukathleticscoach wrote:Hardly breaking news
Agreed. We knew all this 30 yrs ago...in detail. I have a 1985 book with complete details of SC's training. I have learnt almost nothing new since. How come some people still think Coe did not run miles. ???
Please, what is the title of this book?
Thank you.
The 100 mpw comment from Coe's own mouth, probably related to the Winter of 83-84 when he realized that he had spent the last two years doing too much intenstiy and not enough mileage.
In the winter of 78-79 he was a young runner and didn't need as much mileage.
The debate is far from over, because people want to put absolute values on his supposed mileage, and not reconize that he probably needed more mileage as he got older.
modulation wrote:
The 100 mpw comment from Coe's own mouth, probably related to the Winter of 83-84 when he realized that he had spent the last two years doing too much intenstiy and not enough mileage.
In the winter of 78-79 he was a young runner and didn't need as much mileage.
The debate is far from over, because people want to put absolute values on his supposed mileage, and not reconize that he probably needed more mileage as he got older.
Peter Coe, who trained Seb, said himself he maxed out at 70
Marius Bakken who has copies of Seb's training logs have also said they maxed out at 70
everything else is bullsh!t
someone had to do it wrote:Peter Coe, who trained Seb, said himself he maxed out at 70
Marius Bakken who has copies of Seb's training logs have also said they maxed out at 70
everything else is bullsh!t
Calling BS on Seb Coe himself... interesting!
someone had to do it wrote:
Peter Coe, who trained Seb, said himself he maxed out at 70
Marius Bakken who has copies of Seb's training logs have also said they maxed out at 70
everything else is bullsh!t
Read my post again. It's common sense, not BS.
I think people are forgetting that Seb himself is known for his stories not matching the reality of what happened. Time bends and twists the memory.
Your Grandfather had that school walk that was uphill both ways and Seb's 70-85 mile max which he mentioned several times during his actual competitive career has grown by 20 miles as well.
"Running Free" specifically mentions 70 miles during the winter of '79 and a Runner's World interview in the mid 80's had Coe specifically mentioning getting up to 80-85 miles when he was going to transition to 5000.
modulation wrote:
The 100 mpw comment from Coe's own mouth, probably related to the Winter of 83-84 when he realized that he had spent the last two years doing too much intenstiy and not enough mileage.
In the winter of 78-79 he was a young runner and didn't need as much mileage.
The debate is far from over, because people want to put absolute values on his supposed mileage, and not reconize that he probably needed more mileage as he got older.
I would have thought it were the other way round! Surely if you have more years of high mileage behind you, with a large aerobic foundation, you need to do fewer miles as you get older? Speed tends to deplete earlier than endurance.
I know that Coe said himself in his book, that in the winter of 85/86 he increased the amount of gym work he did, commenting that he felt he had been adversely affected by less conditioning (& I think extra mileage) the previous winter, when he was preparing for a move up to 5000m. Also in the week before Stuttgart he was running as fast as ever in 200 reps (21.7 for the last).
I also remember reading that in the run up to the Europeans in 78 he was performing off a base of only 30 miles a week, although I think that was partly due to injury problems he had in the spring of that year.
Surely he'd have run a higher weekly average in the build up to seasons like 80 & 84, when he was doubling up at the Olympics, and fewer in seasons like 79 & 81, when he was more interested in isolated good performances.
I think we need more mileage as we get older not less,
Endurance will go down if not worked on. And oxygen upatake peaks at an early age.
I think Seb rejected the less is more approach after his awful years of 82-3 when he was becoming independent and probably not living as healthily as he should.
Agree. I think we all should keep in mind that all elite performers, though extremelly talented, have to train harder, faster and with a much higher training load over long years than the average, no matter if we are talking about Coe, El Guerrouj, the Kenyans or whoever else. It makes no sense to glorify a superb runner artificially by picking out a special year or phase of his career with a quite low mileage.
These guys work so hard and of course tell us over the years different stories about their success.
Look at the fantastic website
with details about world class training. It´s always the same: hard, fast, very much, as much specific workouts as possible, low mileage weeks are exceptional, not normal.
Again, I’d really love to know the book you are referring to. Thanks so much in advance.
In the recent BBC series - Faster, Higher, Stronger - 1500 Meters, they interviewed several 1500m olympic champions including Herb Elliott, Peter Snell, Seb Coe, Peter Rono, Noah Ngeny., etc
Seb said specifically that he and his father did not believe in slogging through mile after mile "without a whole lot of thought behind it". He said that his training didn't come from the same school of thought that Arthur Lydiard advocated.
modulation wrote:
I think we need more mileage as we get older not less,
Endurance will go down if not worked on. And oxygen upatake peaks at an early age.
I think Seb rejected the less is more approach after his awful years of 82-3 when he was becoming independent and probably not living as healthily as he should.
Coe's poor seasons in 82 & 83 had nothing to do with changes in training! He was still working very closely with his father during these winters and there was no change in emphasis in mileage. His drop in form was due to missing months training in the early summer of 82, followed by contracting a virus in the summer of 82. It was diagnosed as mono, but retrospectively it was probably mis-diagnosed and he continued to train and race for another year while suffering from toxoplasmosis.
It was only in the early months of 84 when he started training again, that he became more independent from his father and moved from Sheffield to London, changing athletics club.