The most recent print edition of Runner’s World Magazine (2023/3) was Eliud Kipchoge centered. It had 8 stories that told us from his humble origins to his monastic lifestyle to a dissection of every detail of his record-setting running shoes to Evans Chebet as his most likely successor. It is the most detailed account I’ve seen of Kipchoge related info in one place.
Runner’s World magazine cover for the issue with the 8 Eliud Kipchoge related stories
The story that caught my attention is titled “Train Like Kipchoge (Sorta)”, by Sarah Gearhart, in which she shares five key aspects of Eliud’s training. My first thought was: how can we transfer them to us, simple mortals, to improve our running results. The article talks about how the greatest of all time (GOAT) does it, which doesn’t mean we must apply it in the exact same way. The key is to harness the key lesson of each one and make it part of our current circumstances.
These are the five principles, as per Runner’s World, with a personal commentary on how to apply it to our recreational runner training repertoire:
1 – Sleep like your run depends on it: Kipchoge sleeps 9 hours a night and takes naps. Most of us don’t have the time for that, but neither we are professionals, nor do we run 120 miles per week. The point is to be purposeful about your sleeping habits. Sleep as much as your body needs and don’t brag about your lack of sleep as a badge of honor. Our body recovers and rebuilds while we sleep, which is more valuable than all other recovery tools in your arsenal put together.
2 – Revive Sore Muscles with an Ice Bath: He takes 10-minute ice baths twice a week “to aid his post run recovery.” As recreational runners we may not have the facilities, the time or will tolerate this uncomfortable activity. But the point is that it works for him and despite the pain and inconvenience, he does it anyway because he works diligently on his recovery. Remember that you don’t become a better runner just as you finish your hard workout. You become a better runner once your body has recovered and adapted to the stress it just went through. So, be as diligent as Kipchoge in your recovery.
3 – Upgrade Your Diet with Protein: Kipchoge’s high-carb diet is essential for his training and performance, yet in 2017 he upgraded his protein intake “to aid his recovery as well as help to build and maintain his lean muscle.” The point here is that diet is key to training, performance and recovery. It is not a matter of how many calories we take in but the quality of those calories. If we fuel with a dozen donuts and a pint of ice cream, our weekly milage or our daily nap won’t really provide the benefit they should.
Stationary biking is one of the multiple options to enhance your aerobic capacity without overtaxing your system (Photo: William Adams, Pexels)
4 – Meditate to Build Mental Strength: Kipchoge is a “mindful runner” says his coach Patrick Sang. “While training and racing, he focuses on his breath and his movements, and aims to minimize outside distractions.” While not all of us can or want to live Kipchoge’s spartan life nor we have the will to perfecting the art of mindfulness, we can separate 10 minutes for daily meditation, we can read a book on mental toughness or practice the visualization of our goals without becoming Zen masters.
5 – Build Bonus Endurance on a Bike: Interesting to note that to add to his training volume “without increasing his risk of a running injury, Kipchoge rides a stationary bike for an hour twice a week after his runs.” For mere running aficionados like us, this is what we call cross training. Participating in a non-running activity once or twice a week to enhance our strength or aerobic training while resting our muscles and soft tissues from the pounding of running. Biking, rowing, weight training, yoga, elliptical, etc. Make sure you do something other than running to complement your training.
If these techniques work for the GOAT, scaling them down to our level would be beneficial. Don’t just think about it, do something about it and don’t take too much time getting started. Marathon season is around the corner.
Runner’s World Magazine, the reference media outlet for the running community for over 50 years, ran an article on April 27, titled “How to Pace a 5K So You Can Hit Your PR”. It was written by Stephen Sheehan. The expert quoted throughout the narrative was Coach Adolfo Salgueiro, head coach at Foultips.Run.
“I have been a Runner’s World reader since the early 1980s,” Stated Coach Salgueiro. “Being able to contribute to one of their articles is a dream come true. The fact they wanted my expertise on the subject is a statement to the value of the decades of experience and preparation I’ve put into this passion of mine.”
This is the second time Coach Adolfo has been in Runner’s World. A summary on his running career ran back in March 2021.
To read the full Runner’s World article you may click here.
Be aware that Runner’s World has a limit on the number of free articles non-members can read a month. If you have exceeded such a number, you may have to come back next month to read it. Or contact me and I will send you a PDF version.
In the last post I dissected the phases of the racing off-season. Through these you can properly prepare for next season and be ready in time to achieve your goals. If you haven’t read the post yet, you can do so by clicking here.
The nature of the post didn’t allow me to go in depth, so this week I want to dig deeper into the first phase: Rest and Recovery. I firmly believe this phase is the key for whatever goals you may set forth the next racing season. It is what will allow you to reset and restart working towards them. It is what will make them achievable.
A great time to hit the gym and start working on your strength training. Not having enough time is no longer an excuse (Photo: Andrea Piacquardio, Pexels)
I have identified six areas in which to focus during your Rest and Recovery phase. These will allow you to decompress, rest, recover, prevent burnout and make you tougher against injuries. It is not a complete list, just a handful of suggestions on which you may want to focus for a month or two (or three) so you can reset all the systems.
1 – Focus on life balance: We all love running. We chose this sport. There’s no PT teacher timing us on the mile. We run because we want to. Even if you are doing it on doctor’s orders, you have other exercise options. For most of us, running is an essential part of our lives. Our therapy, our steam relief valve, our social time outside home/work. Yet, unless we are professionals or we are planning to qualify for the Olympics Trials, it is not what brings home the bacon. Our families, jobs, other hobbies and home responsibilities require our attention and presence. An elite Kenyan runner may not be able to take two weeks off if a child gets sick, because winning his marathon is not just payday but “pay-year”. I am sure 99.9% of my readership are not in the same boat. So, keep life balanced.
2 – Work on your running form: There is not one way of doing it right. Your form is unique to you and you alone. Changing form is not needed unless it’s getting you injured but it doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. There is always an adjustment or two that may get you more efficient, less injury-prone, improve your breathing, avoid aches and pains or make your joints stronger. Figure out the tweaks you need and take advantage of this time to work on them. Four weeks prior to your goal marathon is not the time to work on your overstriding.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to catch up on your sleep as a recovery tool (Photo: Ketuf Subiyanto, Pexels)
3 – Catch up on your sleep: If you are one of my recurrent readers, you read this advice plenty of times. But if you can grasp the concept that humans have been on this earth for 200-300 thousand years and have not yet evolved to stop sleeping, then you will understand that sleep is a non-negotiable activity to keep yourself healthy. If that wasn’t enough, there is no number of massages, compression socks, percussion guns or cold plunges that match sleep as recovery tool. And I don’t mean one individually. I mean all combined. This is science. It is not open to debate.
4 – Partake in other physical activities: Since you may (and should) be running less than during training season, you could take a yoga class, go for a swim, a bike ride, a hike, or whatever else will complement your physical activity requirements. Running is a highly repetitive, high-impact activity. A 10K alone will have each leg hitting the surface about 5000 times at 2.5-4 times your weight load. Getting your movement benefits from other sources will not only help you heal and get stronger but will facilitate your brain to vary from the same moving patterns, which also provides neurological benefits.
5 – Run at a low heart rate: Running slow so you can run fast is one of the toughest concepts for a runner to comprehend. Hopefully, now that you don’t need to run fast for some months, you may take time to apply this concept and verify its benefits. When you run at a slow heart rate, and thus pace, your body will learn to burn more fat as fuel, will increase your aerobic capacity, increase your mitochondrial density and your fuel consumption economy. None of this is possible when running fast, because your body requires so much energy, and it needs it right now, that all these benefits are negated. Sure, you can run faster, but there’s a cost to that. Your body will be invoicing you for it later, during race training.
6 – Of course, strength training: Yes, I know. It is boring, challenging and takes time. I don’t like it either, it is one of the weakest points of my training. But I do it anyway. You don’t need to spend 3 hours in the gym 5 times a week. Start easily and increase from there. Thirty minutes sessions, 3 times a week during the off-season will make you stronger, more resistant to injury, increase your power and your speed. As you increase your running mileage, once you are strong, you can decrease it to two times a week. I can’t stress enough the importance and the benefits of a strengths training program. The the time to implement it is now.
Any thoughts? Please let me know in the comment box, below.
In a recent phone conversation with a runner I train, she expressed concern about two consecutive bad runs she had just experienced. She had an important race coming up in a few days, though not a goal race. She began to freak out a little bit, thinking she may not be ready, or she may fail, or she just wasn’t a good runner.
I told her that these things happen to everyone. That they are an inherent part of running. When you have good days, the bad days are around the corner. Just as when you feel on top of the world but then you feel underprepared and crappy when it counts. It is part of the process, one from which you should learn, so you can keep them at bay.
One of your running dreams will eventually come to die in porta potty (Photo Pexels)
Keep running and it will happen. “What will happen?”, you ask: Everything! Both the good and the bad.
One or more of these dreadful things happening, even simultaneously, doesn’t mean you are finished as a runner, or that your race is doomed. Just as one or more great achievements don’t mean you’ve made it. It only means you are travelling through one of the typical high-and-low cycles of life, which also reflects itself in your running.
40+ years in running have taught me that if it hasn’t happened yet, it is only because you haven’t run enough. Keep running and it will happen. Guaranteed.
The Bad:
You will fall. Hopefully, you won’t break a bone, but you will fall.
You will underperform in a race, just when you thought you’re PR was in the bag.
You will crap/pee in your pants.
You will twist an ankle. How bad, that’s another conversation, but it will happen.
You will have a close call with a car. Hopefully, it won’t go beyond that.
You will have a close encounter with an angry dog. Be prepared.
You will have to stop a run far from your finishing point and require help getting back.
You will eat something that unsettles your stomach and spend a pre-long-run night throwing up or sitting on the throne.
You will have a bad night of sleep, or two, or three; just before your goal race.
You will experience uncooperating weather during your key training run or goal race.
You will miss an important run because life just got in the way.
If any of these hasn’t happened yet, just keep running.
Remember: Experience is what we get when we don’t obtain what we originally set out for. Make sure you take advantage of the inevitable and learn a lesson, so you minimize the chances of it happening again.
Good things you haven’t experienced will happen if you keep running. Here is a small sample of them.
One day your battery will die and you will need help getting back to the start. (Photo Pexels)
The Good:
You will experience an unexpected PR on a race when you thought it wasn’t even a possibility.
You will overcome obstacles to realize you are stronger than you thought.
You will reap the rewards of having embraced the lesson from a previous failure.-
You will find the assistance from a running angel at the perfect time, or even better, you will be that angel for a runner in need.
You will run farther and longer than you once thought possible.
You will inspire someone who didn’t know he/she was a runner to fall in love with the sport.
You will become friends with people you couldn’t believe you had much in common.
You will find some of the best friendships of your life by hanging out with likeminded people.
You will surprise yourself and your doctor with the results of your annual physical.
If any of these hasn’t happened yet, just keep running.
Anything you may want to ad to these lists? Let me know in the box below.
Last week I was talking to a friend who is helping his brother train for his first half marathon. He told me the toughest part of the process is making him understand that the “no pain, no gain” old-school mentality no longer applies to running. The days of alchemy are over. The collective thought has evolved and adjusted to new science studies or discoveries, thus, we understand matters in a new way, one that 5, 10 or 50 years ago was unheard of.
In 1968 Kathrine Switzer had to finagle her way into the Boston Marathon because back then women were thought to be so fragile, they could not endure such physical punishment. The carb depletion pre-marathon protocol was the rage in the mid-1980s, today we know it makes no sense. The “I run through pain” approach that showed bravado 20 years ago, displays recklessness, today. And like that, many more running ideas that once we thought gospel, today are barely gimmicks.
A good book worth the time and the money. Highly recommended.
In his book “Do Hard Things” author Steve Magness, one of my coaching role models, talks in depth about getting over of this old-school thinking. He explains how toughness is navigating through your training, not bulldozing through it. This how we avoid overtraining, and even worse, injuries. It is about being smart.
He goes through eight strategies to develop real toughness as a runner. I am not going to go through all of them, of course. If you want to go in depth into them, that’s what the book is for. But I will briefly touch on three that caught my attention and that I now teach my coached athletes.
A – Our alarms are adjustable: “Being tough gets easier the fitter you are.”
What an avant-garde concept! Think about it this way: If you spent the last 10 years on the couch watching TV and eating Doritos but decide to go for a 5K run, most likely you will suffer through it, regardless of your commitment or toughness. But, if you got the running bug, you trained smartly, diligently, and two years later you complete a marathon, it is not because you have multiplied your toughness. You reaped the benefits of your work and got better at it. Just like the first time Bruce Springsteen picked up a guitar, which these days is an extension of his body.
B – We need hope and control: “The key to improve mental toughness doesn’t lie in constraining and controlling individuals. It doesn’t lie in developing harsh punishments to teach a lesson. It doesn’t lie in screaming at the person to complete the task in front of them.”
The era of “I am not done when we are tired, I am done when I am done”, is done (pun intended). If you are training for a marathon, you need to run 18 miles but you are feeling unwell, stressed at work, just had a fight with your spouse last night, didn’t sleep well, it is a hot/humid summer morning and you are beat up at mile 15… what’s best? Calling it a day and be happy you completed 80% of your workout despite the circumstances, or pushing through while destroying yourself, to prove your machismo and then having to take 7-10 days to recover from the effort? … Exactly!
Finishing exhausted after a training session could lead to injury. Be smart and always live to run another day. (Photo: Pexels)
C – Feelings and Understanding need interpretation: “The power through mantra only makes sense if you take stock in what you are powering through.”
I want to make sure my readers understand I am not saying you need to be complacent when training gets difficult. We need to learn how to power through difficult trainings, races, cross training and life. The key is to understand why we are doing what we are doing. If we are trying to run at race pace, then race pace sessions will be difficult. But we need to push through them if we want to understand and teach our bodies how to run at that pace. When we start strength training, or add yoga to our plan, everything will hurt, but there’s a good reason to keep going despite the aches and pains. It is not about suffering for fun; it is about reaping benefits in the near future.
These is my take on three of these principles, I fully recommend the book. “Do Hard Things” is a good investment of time and money for any runner out there. And it is not just for runners, but for every person wanting to get better at leaving their comfort zone behind and actually going for what they want, for their life goals, not just the athletic ones.
Please leave me your thoughts nn this blogpost, in the box below.
As the fall and winter marathon season starts heating up, and as the preparation for the spring marathons approaches, I feel appropriate to repost an article I wrote last year, that it is still relevant at this time of the running season. Enjoy!
By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro
Tapering time approaches for those about to run the Abbott World Marathon Majors this year. Training time approaches for those eyeing their marathon towards the end of 2021 or start of 2022. So, seems like a good time to review some basic mistakes that runners, from beginners to experts, should avoid. This way they can reap the most benefits out of their efforts.
Training for a marathon is a process that involves multiple moving parts that need to work in sync. It needs to reach a point where the body can be stressed enough to compensate its deficiencies and adjust to the workload-thus improving- but not to a point where it becomes too much, and it can’t recover to do it again. This means overtraining and, most likely, an injury if intend to tough it out and train through it.
No need to overstress yourself if you avoid these basic mistakes in your training (Photo by Pexels.com)
The following are nine of the most common mistakes runners incur into during a marathon training cycle:
1 Running the long runs too fast: There is a time to go fast and there is a time to go slow. The long run has that name because it is designed for you to go long. It is not called the “fast run” for a reason. They are intended to build up your aerobic system, which, for a marathon, it is used 99% of the time, even if you are the world-record holder.
2 Focusing too much on the long run: The long run is an important part of your training, sure, but it is just one element, not the bulk of it. The success in your race will depend on the accumulated effect of all the elements in your training, not just one.
3 Doing the same workouts all the time: Because about 80% of the training needs to be done at a slower speed, there is a small number of hard sessions available, usually no more than two per week, so distance, speed, intensity, and other parameters, need to be worked so the body can benefit and adapt.
4 Poor fueling and hydration plans: if you don’t test strategies during training, you won’t know what works for you. The time to find that out is during training, long runs, especially. The time to realize a certain gel upsets your stomach, is not during the race. Same applies to hydration. What to drink and when needs to be part of race plan, shouldn’t be improvised on race day.
5 Skipping rest days: Not running on a specific day is part of your training. These days should be written into your schedule and followed to the tee. No amount of ice baths, compression socks or protein shakes will do you any good if you don’t give your body a break to recover so it can run again.
Rest is as part of your training as your work. Don’t skip it!
6 Not scheduling cutback weeks: During training you build up endurance, aerobic capacity, Vo2Max, and multiple additional parameters. But you can’t build up forever. Your body has a limit and needs time to actively rest so it can adapt to the benefits provided by your workouts. Programming a week to cut back on your training provides your body with time to adjust and recover, is key.
7 Cutting sleep: Remember you don’t improve when you work out, you improve while you sleep. The long run the tempo, the weightlifting, or the speed session damage your body. It is when you sleep that your body gets repaired. If you skip on sleep, you won’t realize all the benefits of the training, but you will keep the muscle damage.
8 Screwing up the tapering: Physiological adaptations after exercise, take between two and three weeks to adapt. So, there is no benefit on one last long run in the last couple of weeks. You need to actively rest and recover your body so it will be in its best shape for race day. During tapering there is nothing to gain, yet a lot to lose.
9 Following someone else’s training plan: There is nothing wrong with talking to your buddies about what they are doing, but they may not have the same goals as you and you do not have the same physiology as them. Set up YOUR PLAN, adjust as needed, and stick to it. Trust your coach. Trust your plan. Trust yourself.
Of course, there are more than nine mistakes you can incur during a marathon training cycle. These are just some of the most common and they mostly apply to any distance. As you finish your training for your Abbott Marathon Major or get ready for your upcoming goal race, make sure you are on the lookout for the aforementioned mistakes, so you won’t screw up your hard work.
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