Coach Colm O’Connell loathes the cult of analysis—all the metrics like VO2 max and stride length—that dictates the regimens of most of today’s elite athletes. “If it works, it works,” he told me. “Why must we analyze everything?”
One of the most surprising things we learnt in our month in Iten, was that David Rudisha and his training group don’t do much weight training at all. As described in the individual typical training day articles..
A few important points about the below 17 week training diary from St Patrick’s Athletics Group. #1 (most important): Almost all of the times and paces below might not seem overly impressive at first. The reason for this is the hills and track surface in Iten. Every single run – high run, fartlek – is on a hilly loop.
Base training for David Rudisha’s training group involves quantity of around 50-60 miles per week (80-96km), lots of steady state running and a large focus on stretching and core stability work, to prepare them for the track work beginning in late February.
Typical Friday – Base Period. 6:30AM: Easy Jog 6-9km very easy jog. The 800m runners will do 6km and the longer distance runners will do 9km. They do this run individually.
Typical Thursday – Base Period 9:00AM: “High Run” or Fartlek. The workout cycles: one week it’s High Run, the next week it’s fartlek and so on.