Frank Shorter – Training Insights
Article by Tait Hearps.
Frank Shorter is known by many to be the father of the modern day running boom. Frank won gold in the Marathon at the 1972 Olympic Games, won silver in the Marathon at the 1976 Olympic Games, was the USA XC Champion 4 times, was the USA 10,000m Champion 6 times and won the Fukuoka Marathon 4 times. He was also the chairman of the USA Anti-Doping agency between 2000 and 2003.
At the start of 2020 Frank generously gave his time and invited Sweat Elite founder, Matt Fox, into his home in Boulder to discuss his career and the training that drove his success.
Frank started out in college as a 5000m runner and he says that this laid the foundation for his training and racing right through his career, continuing to approach his training in a very similar way even when stepping up in distance to race marathons. His training was very polarised. Frank is adamant that he never ran intervals slower than 65s/lap pace – right around 5km pace.
Looking to extend his range and move in to marathoning, he moved to Florida in 1970 to train with Jack Bachelor who was one of the preeminent US runners at the time. Bachelor’s Sunday ritual was a twenty-mile long run – Shorter joined the weekly pilgrimage.
Frank was self-coached from his junior year in college onwards but found that seeking out mentors (who often happened to be training partners) was what worked well for him.
These long runs with Jack Bachelor were very slow according to Frank; just jogging, not timing anything, chatting the whole way. He said that he learnt from Jack the importance of going very easy on easy days. One of his mottos was ‘never go so hard on your easy days that it interferes with the next hard day’.
Frank said he would run twice per day except Sundays. He would do two interval sessions per week, as well as a race most weekends. When not racing on the Saturday he would go to the track for speed work – a regular workout being 16 x 200m in 27-28s, float 200m between.
Frank’s reasoning for doing such fast workouts relative to race pace (especially when racing the marathon) was that in his mind, the greater the delta between training pace and race pace, the more comfortable and therefore sustainable running at that race pace becomes. Once he was feeling more comfortable running these workouts and was happy with how fast they were, he would begin to shorten recovery rather than increasing the pace of intervals.
Some more example sessions include:
6 x 800 in 2.08 down to 2.00 (jog 200-400 recovery – depending on altitude and fitness)
12 x 400 in ~61s average, finishing under 60 (jog 200-400 recovery)
Shortening the recovery and increasing the speed of the recovery jog in these workouts was used to simulate the surges experienced in races – improving the ability to recover quickly even at a higher pace. Sometimes the 800s would be run as 200 in 35s, 400 in 60s, 200 in 35s… Which Frank used to simulate surging in races.
Frank also theorises that running faster anaerobic intervals necessitates more easy aerobic running to recover. “We ran a lot of mileage… it took me almost a year down in Florida to get to the point where I could average 20 miles per day, I didn’t just start out and say, ‘well I’m gonna run 20 miles a day’… It’s not that running the mileage itself has some magic effect. I believe that the fitter you are anaerobically, the more you need to run slowly between those workouts to recover, and that’s why your mileage increases.”
The exercise quotient is what Frank says is his term for the amount of exercise that he feels satisfied with in a day, and that the fitter he became the higher his quotient. The easy running wasn’t to increase endurance but to enhance recovery, following intuition with no planning for distance or time. However, his long runs almost never extended beyond 20 miles – even when other athletes he trained with were going further, as this is what he felt worked for him. The 20 miles normally averaged between 1hr 50 to 1hr 55. This 20 mile run on Sunday would be followed by a hard interval session on the Monday (eg 1-3 x mile reps in 4:20 + several 1200s in 64-65s lap pace), and again on Thursday.
Franks ascribes his lack of injury to the short distance of these intervals, as he says it is less taxing orthopaedically than the long intervals some people will use for marathon training. He was relatively injury free until the lead-up to Montreal 1976. After sustaining an injury in training in February he continued to push through and train and race on a navicular fracture until well after the marathon at the games, in which he placed second.
Impressively, Frank was doing a lot of this training in Florida whilst at law school until 1974. He then moved to Boulder to profit from the altitude and favourable weather. Training followed a similar structure year-round for Shorter. He would sometimes have an easier period in the fall but most of the time his training stayed steady. Occasionally he would use hill repeats rather than track for a period of a few weeks in order to have an easier period/’off-season’. This meant he would almost always be ready to race.
Tempo runs featured roughly once per month. On Fridays he would set out for an easy run but if he was feeling really good, he would transition to a tempo. He would warm up and then go for 35-40 minutes at 10km race effort (slower than race pace). These would always follow the same course so he could establish how he was progressing at the end of the effort. These would only be on Fridays when he wasn’t racing that weekend and would generally be followed by the 200s workout mentioned above.
Tapering merely involved scaling down workouts, for example 10 instead of 12 400s on the Thursday workout. However, he would only do this for major marathons and big track meets. Leading up to the Olympic marathons his mileage was at 75 miles the week before each race.
An example of a taper week workout is a step-down workout at faster than 5km race pace on the Tuesday, consisting of 1600, 1200, 2 x 800, 2 x 400 (extended recovery), followed by 12 x 200 on Thursday (average ~27, final one in 25/26, very slow 200 jog in between).
“The one thing you can still work on right up until the race is speed… turnover. All you do is make it more and more recovery and less and less tear-down, but you can still maintain a lot of speed.”
These fast workouts leading into races were important for building confidence that he could run that fast on the day. Frank also says another way he built confidence to know he could perform come race-day, even when he woke up not feeling as much as vigour as he would like, was to never skip a hard workout day. He said even on days when he woke up feeling exceptionally ordinary he would go and at least start the workout, and work through it, rep-by-rep. In Munich he felt superb on the start line, however he was feeling terrible in Montreal. His training through the bad days was especially important in order to push through and still perform here.
He says that he always had good recovery enabling exceptional race performance on consecutive days and thinks this is partially due to the fact he would do his hard workouts at 10-11 in the morning and then be out the door for an easy run at 3-4pm. Training his body to bounce back quickly.
Another important piece of advice from Frank is to make sure to have something else in your life that truly matters to you, something that you are extremely interested in. This will allow you to truly push the limits and not be afraid to find out your limits in the sport, as you aren’t sacrificing everything to do so. Frank’s example here is going through law school whilst training for the Olympics – giving him something to focus on during periods of rest and alleviating pressure to perform to some extent, as running was not his be-all and end-all.
Frank is a student of the sport and gave extensive insights into his training. An exceptional storyteller, he shared plenty of anecdotes of his time racing on the world stage with many running legends. He has accrued a lot of wisdom throughout his many years in the sport, which he happily divulged throughout the conversation, definitely one worth revisiting (you can find it here).
