Alberto Salazar – Interview (Nike Cross Nationals) Part 3
I like to keep things simple.
Sometimes we may have a new workout that I think up out of the blue, but for the most parts we do the same workouts throughout the year.
We just do them at different speeds.
With that, my athletes can always know “where am I, in terms of my speed; where am I in terms of my strength; where am I in terms of my tempo run, my 200m repeats, and so on”.
And from that they get so much confidence, not only when they are going to race, because they know right where they are, but as they go into the next workout.
If they know they just ran 200s in 26 seconds and now they are going to do 400s in 57 seconds, they know “wow, that should be easy, because I can split 2 seconds slower through 200 in 28 and now I just have to do another one”.
I always use a ladder analogy – imagine a ladder, and you’ve got all these runs on it.
At the bottom are 200m repeats; next one up are 400m repeats; next one up are 800m repeats; 1200s, miles, tempo runs and then maybe 20-mile runs.
There are a lot of other workouts, but these are the key workouts that we do. So whether it’s November, or whether it’s June, I’m usually going to be picking workouts out of there, but they are always going to be at different speeds.
When Galen does 6 x mile for the first time, he will do them in about 4.30. By the time he gets to June, he’ll do six of them in 4.10 – so he’ll do them considerably faster. He’ll progressively get faster from now until June.
The idea is that by the time these athletes get within a month of the Olympics, they’ll know that on that ladder on each of those runs, they’ve run their PR for that.
For example, for Galen and Mo, for 15 x 200m the fastest they’ve ever run them in is about 25.5. For 20 x 400m, the fastest they’ve run them in at that altitude is 58 with 1 minute rest. For 6 x 1 mile, 4.10. For a 20-mile run: 5:15 per mile.
For a 6-mile tempo at altitude, maybe 4:35 per mile.
When they get to two weeks out from that major championship race, I want them to know that in that preceding month on that ladder they hit as fast as they ever have.
Maybe they missed one, but overall I want them thinking “I’m faster than I’ve ever been. I ran my 200s in 25. I’m stronger in my mile repeats than I’ve ever been.”
Basically I want them to know right where they are.
You might say, you can’t, every time you go to one of these workouts, try to run faster than you did the week before, because at some point you can’t get any faster.
We run two hard workouts a week, and one long run.
That’s our basic format the whole year. Sometimes we may sneak in a third workout in there moderately.
If you graded workouts, A, B, C, D, in any week you don’t want to do two “A”-efforts.
You don’t want to go to the well and run as fast as you can for your mile repeats at that point, and as fast as you could in your 200m repeats at that point.
Let’s say in January in a given week we do an A-effort workout being 6 x mile in 4:20 and we do that on Tuesday.
Now we are coming to Friday, and we’re going to do 200s. Maybe the week before they did 20 x 200 in 28.
I’m not going to give them 20 x 200 in 27.5 – I’m going to say “let’s step backwards a little bit this week in the 200s.
At best we’ll keep it the same, so we’re going to run at B-effort.” So we’re always doing these same workouts but at different speeds and efforts.
A lot of people think if you do speed work all year, you will get burned out.
You won’t get burned out, you will get burned out if you are running all out as fast as you can at any point.
For me it is a lot easier to quantify it and to say “they just ran really fast in this workout, this next one we have to work a little bit slower”.
Matt Centrowitz, about 3 weeks ago, ran the best tempo run he has ever run.
He ran 5 miles at 4:50 pace. About 5 days ago he had another tempo run (we try to do one every two weeks) coming up and he was dreading it because he hates running them and he was by himself in Eugene.
He had just run a really fast short interval workout a few days before, so I told him to run a little slower than last week, to start at 4:55 per mile.
So we backed him of a little bit. In two weeks when we come back to the tempo run he’ll try to improve it again, to say 4:47-4:48 pace.
The goal is, by the time we get to about February 1, that he will run a 5-mile tempo run at 4:40 pace.
We take two steps forward, one step back.
By the time mid-January comes around, I’m going to want that Matt has run the best for a tempo run he ever has.
Two have run his 200s better, his 400s better, his mile repeats better, his long runs better.
He had never done more than 13 miles for a long run before I started to coach him; now he’s up to 15 miles. Gradually we’re shifting ahead, but we’re doing the same workouts so that at any 1 time, these guys know right where they are.”
