Eliud Kipchoge Training: A Typical Thursday
The Sweat Elite team spent the month of August 2017 training alongside Eliud Kipchoge and his training group, in the lead up to the Berlin Marathon (September 24) where Eliud Kipchoge will attempt to officially break the Marathon World Record. Eliud Kipchoge is the man who ran 2:00:25 at the Nike Sub2 Project in early May 2017.
Eliud Kipchoge Training – A Typical Thursday
A thursday for Eliud Kipchoge involves 1 long steady tempo run, cycling between 30km (18.6mi) and 40km (24.8 mi) and sometimes a second run, depending on how he feels / if a major race is approaching.
6.10 AM: 30km or 40km tempo run
Again, it’s a 6:10am start for the group, from out the front of the Global Sports camp in Kaptagat. The first 1-2km are, as usual, a build into the run. They’ll clock the first km at around 5:30km (often slower) to get warmed up and by the 3rd kilometre, the pace is on.
From there on, it’s 3:00-3:25/km pace (4:50-5:20/mi) depending on where they are. The route they’ll take normally involves 90% hilly trail and around 10% road (mostly flat, sometimes small hills). On the flat road sections, the faster sections, the pace is right around 3:00/km (4:50/mi). When they hit the hills in the forest, the average pace is hovers between 3:15-3:25/km (5:10-5:25/mi) depending on how hilly it is.
At first, this sounds fast, but many might think “this isn’t his tempo pace, 3:20/km”. But again, as mentioned in previous articles, the location they train in sits at 2400-2500m altitude (7800ft) and the terrain is very tough. We estimate that you would expect to be running at 20-25sec/km slower at Kaptagat in the forest, than you would expect to run at sea level on a flat course. On the flat road sections up in Kaptagat, expect to run 10-15sec/km slower.
Here are the times of the tempo runs leading into the Berlin Marathon 2017:
Thur August 10 – 30.8km in 1:42 (3:20/km average) * on this run, one section of the run was so wet, they needed to change course and they ended up just running back to the starting point, which ended up being an extra 800m.
Thur August 17 – 40km in 2:26 (3:39/km average) – very tough conditions today, poor weather, hilly cross country course.
Thur August 24 – 30km in 1:38 (3:16/km average)
Thur August 31 – 40km in 2:13 (3:19/km average)
Thur September 7 – 30km in 1:42 (3:22/km average)
Thur September 14 – 40km in 2:15 (3:22/km average)
PM: Usually they’ll rest and not run at all in the afternoons on Saturday, but sometimes when they’re preparing for a big race, they might run 10-12km in the afternoon, fairly easily for them (around 4:30-5:00/km average), so just a recovery jog.
[This is an excerpt from the Eliud Kipchoge Edition – a 33 page e-book on the training on Eliud Kipchoge]
