David Rudisha: Typical Thursday (Transition/Racing Period)
We spent May 2017 training with St Patrick’s athletics group in Iten, Kenya – David Rudisha’s training group.
David was there for parts of the month. He had 2 races during the month, including Shanghai Diamond League.
Nevertheless, we got down to the specifics of their training philosophies and despite David attending for only about half of the training sessions, we learnt everything about his group’s training, including base training weekly structure, strength training, speed training, race preparation workouts, and speed of recovery day runs.
Typical Thursday – Transition/Race 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.
A High Run is basically a tempo run, but they do it a little differently; you could argue less controlled and with less consistent pace. A High Run is 20 or 25 mins basically at maximum effort. They will somewhat control the pace at the start, starting at around 3:00/km and slowly blow out to 3:40-3:45/km towards the end. The goal is to run with a bit of lactic acid in your legs and your heart rate very high for 15mins or more. The average pace for most of them in this high run is 3:30/km on the hills.
Fartlek is 20-30mins (in total, including recovery) of intervals. Sometimes, they are set intervals, for example a common workout is 7 x (2mins hard, 1min jog). Other times, it is on Coach Colm O’Connell’s horn. He will drive behind them in a car and blow the horn on “go” and again on “stop”. Repetitions in this random fartlek are always between 30sec and 2min, rarely longer and recovery is typically about half of what they just ran.
