David Rudisha Training: Typical Wednesday (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 Wednesday – Transition/Racing Period
6:30AM: Easy Run
6-9km very easy run.
The 800m runners will do 6km and the longer distance runners will do 9km. They do this run individually. We joined in with 2 of them in 2 occasions and both times the pace of the run was around 5:00-5:15/km.
10:00AM: Diagonals
30-40mins of 120m surge, 70m easy jog.
They do this on a football (soccer) pitch. From one corner, to the opposite corner, they’ll stride (at around 15sec/100m pace) for the 120m across the pitch, then jog very easily 80m to the corner on the same side. This workout isn’t meant to be too hard, but solid. The 800m guys will do 30mins continuously and the longer distance runners will do 40mins but at a slightly slower speed (but jogs will be a little quicker).
Warm up and cool down will be the same as usual – 15-20mins very easy + dynamic stretching for around 10mins.
4:00PM: Flexibility and Plyometrics
4km Warm up + 1hour of stretching and Plyometrics. There is nothing unusual about this workout, in terms of specific exercises. Stretching will normally last 30mins (standard stretches but with lap focus on the hip flexors) and plyometrics will mainly be bounding, hopping and exercises on the standard plastic ladder you’ll see at most sprint groups.
