Coach Tim Rowberry Explains How Sifan Hassan Pulled Off Her 2024 Olympic Triple

This week, coach Tim Rowberry joined us as the guest on the LetsRun.com Track Talk Podcast. Rowberry is best known for coaching the Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan to two of the greatest feats in Olympic track & field history: bronze-gold-gold in the 1500m, 5,000m, and 10,000m at Tokyo 2020 and bronze-bronze-gold in the 5,000m, 10,000m, and marathon at Paris 2024.

LRC Sifan Hassan Completes Olympic Triple by Outsprinting Tigst Assefa for Marathon Gold

Rowberry, 37, traveled an unlikely path to be by Hassan’s side for her Olympic triples. A former 800m runner at Utah Valley University, Rowberry began as a pacer and errand boy for the Nike Oregon Project before he was brought on as an assistant coach for the group in 2018. He quickly became close with Hassan, and after head coach Alberto Salazar was banned and the Oregon Project disbanded at the end of 2019, Rowberry found himself thrust into the role of her lead coach.

We’ve highlighted some of the most interesting of our discussion with Rowberry below, including his connection with Hassan, how they prepared for the 2024 Olympics, and his lack of a contract with a shoe brand. You can listen to the full interview with Rowberry here.

On the origins of his relationship with Hassan

“I moved to Portland to work with her full-time [at the end of 2018]. Salazar felt like her and Yomif [Kejelcha] wouldn’t really get the attention they would need unless they had someone with them really focusing on them. I was going to Sifan’s house, I was knocking on her door trying to wake her up in the morning, make sure she gets to the workouts. I was really a personal coach, making sure that she was doing all the things they asked at the time…During that entire time, I was with Yomif and Sifan going wherever they needed to go. We went to Ethiopia for a few months before Sifan had a half marathon. I was with them every single day, sometimes from morning until night. I would usually cook dinner with them and I would go home after we were watching shows on TV eating our food together. Then I’d come right back the next morning.

Rowberry (far left) in Boston after Yomif Kejelcha’s indoor mile world record in 2019 (Kevin Morris photo)

“When the Oregon Project broke apart, we were so close that immediately she still wanted me to coach her. But Nike was like no, there’s no way this young guy, who the hell is this, is going to coach her.

“…We met again in Portland [at the end of 2019] and that’s when they started bringing in coaches for [Hassan and Kejelcha] to meet and to see if they liked them. They would bring in one coach and Sifan’s like, eh, I don’t know. And she actually did settle on a different coach. They were just like, okay, let’s start going, Tim can just help out and make this transition easier. The coach was Mark Rowland (who was then coach of the Oregon Track Club in Eugene).

“So Mark Rowland came and met with them. He was going to be their coach. He was going to have to travel from Eugene down to Portland and he wasn’t going to be able to travel with them when they went over to Europe and that stuff, that’s why they were going to keep me on. But what ended up happening is that we were getting so close to the indoor season that it just got to a point where it was just dragging her feet on everything. The way he was talking about training and that was not rubbing Sifan the right way.

“So I just started giving workouts. I went back to, okay, what did we do last winter that I’ve seen? I started giving them workouts and it became pretty obvious within a couple weeks like, wait, why do you need someone else? I’m giving you workouts, I know what you’ve been doing and no one else has been there with you. It just became a no-brainer. It was December of 2019 that I had started giving her workouts, and then by January she told Nike, no, I don’t care if you don’t know who this coach is. She knew me and so she said I’m going to do this. So she kind of took a risk on me.”

On the origins of Hassan’s 2024 Olympic triple

“If you really look back at what she did [in 2023], that was an experiment that I was doing to see if she could do that in the Olympics. We really tested the concept last year because she did the Chicago Marathon [six weeks] after Worlds, and she did Worlds [four months] after doing [the] London [Marathon]. So it was really a test: can we come back from a marathon to the track and then can we come quickly back to a marathon after that?

“I don’t think we fully had the idea formed [about tripling] until we did London. And when we did London, there was a Dutch reporter who was talking to us about Zátopek and he gave me the book about Emil Zátopek, he did the 5k/10k/marathon [at the 1952 Olympics]. I want to say he put that combination into our heads back then in London.”

On when Hassan decided to commit to the triple in Paris

“It wasn’t until three or four weeks [before the Olympics] that we were absolutely certain that okay, we’re going to make this risk. She really took the maximum [amount] of time to decide…

“We didn’t cancel the 1500 until right before. She was still thinking about quadrupling. The funny thing is, she was thinking more about doing the quadruple if she wasn’t as confident in any of the specific events. She was going to do it for fun, basically, if she felt she couldn’t win the marathon or the 10k or the 5k.”

On how Hassan trained for the triple

“Her main focus was on the marathon, above all else. When she had bias in training, it was her telling me she was worried about her marathon training…

“[Her training] was much more marathon-specific…The philosophy, we kind of learned that in the previous year. I was combining the long runs of marathons with the extreme training on the track side of the 5k, 10k, 1500 even. If I were to explain the balance, it was a really extreme approach where you do those long runs for marathon but then the speed workouts don’t feel like they’re as related to the marathon. It’s really on the extreme side of doing what you would typically do when you’re training for the 1500, 5k, 10k.

“She would do marathon-distance [long runs]. Not all the time. When we first were trying to figure out marathon training, we literally just asked [Eliud] Kipchoge and other athletes because they were in the same [agency, Global Sports Communication]. We would ask, what are these guys doing? And people are surprisingly helpful. They just would tell us, you have to do runs that are at least marathon distance and over, occasionally. That doesn’t happen all the time, obviously, but it’d be more like 30k and 35k sometimes and occasionally we’d go up to marathon distance…We wouldn’t try to push that more than once a month, doing those really, really long runs, otherwise it just wouldn’t work with the rest of training.”

On how she went from finishing 5th in a 1500 in Hengelo in 4:04 on July 7 to three Olympic medals a month later

“We went and did a performance test [after the race] with the Dutch federation. She was doing one of those treadmill VO2 max tests, I believe, and she wasn’t able to get her heart rate above, like, 160. Those tests are pretty intense, and she can hold pretty long. I had already been telling Sifan, I think you’re having signs of overtraining, and so the Dutch federation, they echoed what I said.

“So we really stepped back from training…The week before Hengelo, she was getting ready to run a fast time. So she basically didn’t do anything the week before or the week after…We [spent] the last few weeks building up in July until the Olympics, we were able to jump back into workouts, but we basically had her take two weeks off straight [around Hengelo] because of that 1500 performance. Her workouts were great, her times were great, but if that race was happening, we knew something was off. And we didn’t know she was okay until the 5,000 in the Olympics.”

LRC: So when you say two weeks off — like, two weeks of no running after Hengelo?

“The buildup to her race was probably what you’d typically see. She reduced her mileage a little bit — well, probably a lot a bit. But then the week after Hengelo, after she got freaked out by that race, yeah she basically did very, very little.”

On why he believes Hassan’s mindset is key to her ability to triple

“My approach to how we do things is that I have, maybe a naive view, that the only reason that people aren’t able to balance very extreme sides of events is because they simply don’t train for it. When someone’s trying to combine even a half marathon and a 1500, that’s almost unheard of, too. So the first thing that we did is when we started with that 1500/10k [double at the 2019 World Championships], we said oh, she can do it, this combination works. We just had to balance things better.

“And as a result of that, you can see she did that triple in Tokyo. You have to go into those things thinking, okay, I might not get a medal in anything. I might be shooting myself in the foot and destroying my performance because of this.”

On what he would say to those who believe Hassan could only achieve her Olympic triples through doping

“You can see that she was already an amazing athlete [when I began coaching her] and you can see a clear trajectory of where she’s going with these things. And it’s not like she always has great races. We have a lot of up and downs. We took [almost] a year off after Tokyo, and her performances really suffered that year. But I think once she ran those times, now you see women are breaking world records in almost every event (Hassan set world records of 4:12.33 in the mile in 2019 and 29:06.82 in the 10,000m in 2021. Those records have subsequently been lowered to 4:07.64 and 28:54.14 by Faith Kipyegon and Beatrice Chebet, respectively). I feel like the only way anyone is going to be able to accomplish something is if they believe it’s possible.

“So I guess the mindset that thinking people are doping, I feel like that in itself is a defeatist attitude. And I think people who immediately jump to thinking doping has to explain performances, they’ve already shut themselves out of the possibility of performing better because they don’t think it’s possible. There’s no way that if you think that something’s impossible that you’re going to try to do that, that you’re going to train for it.

“…In some ways, I was really grateful that people just assume that the top runners must be doping. Because those athletes that believe that, they will never get up there because they don’t think it’s possible. They’re shooting themselves in the foot, they’re limiting their own performance. I believe that mindset is one of the biggest things in performance.”

On his small training group and lack of a Nike contract:

“Right now it’s mainly Halimah [Nakaayi, the 2019 world champion in the 800m] and Sifan. It’s hard to find more athletes. Halimah just asked if she could join, and we were like, cool, come join. It’s one of those things where the only reason I don’t have more athletes is because people haven’t asked. I’ve asked Nike to send me people, but they’ve only suggested a few athletes.

“I actually have no contract with anyone. I could coach any athlete. It’s just simply that people haven’t asked.”

LRC: So what is your source of income?

“Sifan covers everything. She pays for all of our training costs and my coaching fee. And then obviously any athlete that joins me has to pay a coaching fee as well. But Halimah, for example, African athletes get paid very, very little, so she can only pay me so much for a coaching fee. I’m not making a lot of money, I’m just getting enough to get by.”

LRC: Would you want a contract to become a Nike-contracted coach or with another shoe brand?

“…I love Nike, I wish they would sponsor my group and give me more athletes. I really don’t know why they haven’t at this point. I guess I just don’t have enough friends at Nike. I’m not getting paid by Nike. I had a contract with them for a few years and that ended in 2020. Ever since then, I’ve just been independent. But that gives us a lot more freedom. I don’t have to talk to anyone, I don’t have to do anything except for what Sifan and I decide to do.”