Mo Farah’s Ex Coach: Alberto Salazar – Interview (Nike Cross Nationals) Part 1
From there, we can lead into some of the concepts and philosophies.
I think philosophically, whether a runner is training for the Olympics or training in the NCAA, the same philosophies apply.
Sure, for an Olympic Athlete, their whole life or week is scheduled around their training so they have a lot more time, but the philosophies of human performance are the same, whether you’re a 16-year-old runner or a 26-year-old runner.
My belief in that goes back to my start in high school, when I was 16, in my junior year in high school, I started training with the greater Boston Track Club and the coach there was Bill Squires.
I started training with Bill Rodgers in January of 1975 and I think he won his first Boston Marathon about 4 or 5 months later.
I always felt that a great advantage that I had in my career was that at a young age, I was exposed to current world class distance training philosophies and methods and I was doing the same basic stuff at a much reduced level, as Bill Rodgers was at that time and he was the best marathon runner in the world.
By the time I got to College, even though I went to the University of Oregon which had a very advanced level of training at that time, I was always so far ahead of most of my peers in terms of knowledge of the sport.
The more your athletes can understand about training, the better results they can get, when they understand why they are doing things. At 16, I started training with the same philosophies and ideas that the best marathon runner in the world was training with.”
On Periodisation
First of all, all of us have heard of the Lydiard system. Arthur Lydiard was a revolutionary coach, a very good coach.
My training system is very different and my belief is that the human body likes continuity. It likes repetition, doing things repetitively.
A lot of coaches believe that what you are doing in cross country is completely different to what you are doing in the spring or in the summer.
I don’t believe that.
I believe that if you are looking for maximum, optimum running performance in distances such as 5K or cross country, you are basically training your body the same way.
The difference is obviously that in cross country you are running on softer surfaces. But for myself when I was running, I was second and fourth in the cross country championships, my coach had me do the same track workouts when I was training for that, as when I was trying to run 27:30 for a 10K on the track, but the only slight difference was he had me do some stuff on soft surfaces to get ready for it. But I believe that athletes should be doing speed throughout the whole year.
If at the end of the year in June, you want to be running at certain speeds, and you want to get there gradually, the best way to do that is not to wait until January to start doing your speed work.
You should do it in the fall as well.
In my system, we have two cycles per year – I look at them as two twenty week cycles. I’m sure you’ve all heard the term periodisation.
The idea behind periodisation is that instead of having your training at one level throughout the entire year, you should get much better results if you have these high peaks and low valleys as you recover.
I don’t think anyone will argue that certain intense hard training periods lead to great performances and if someone’s going to run a world record in the 10 000m, you can usually look back over the previous month or two, and you’ll see some incredible workouts.
So we know there is a connection between great workouts and fantastic performances, but what’s your definition of great workouts?
Well, if it’s a great workout, it needs something that’s somehow much better than your other workouts.
We know that to do these great workouts, you can’t do them year round, because you’d get too tired.
You are at a real fine edge when you are doing these workouts.
The idea, I believe, is that throughout the year you need to pick your times when you want to peak, and periodisation means that you are going to look for these time periods where you are able to do maximum-volume and maximum-intensity that you can do without breaking down.
There is going to be a fine line, but if you can get away with it and you are healthy, you are going to have much better performances if you have this, for instance five or six weeks of great training prior to your national championship or whatever it is you are aiming at, as opposed to ten weeks of moderate training.
So we go with two twenty-week cycles, so that’s forty weeks.
You ask where are the other twelve weeks?
After each 20-week cycle, we have a two week period which is basically off, usually two weeks of no running whatsoever and then we have two weeks of jogging.
So that’s four weeks of recovery after each cycle and then we have another two weeks of moderate build-up training, and then we are back into the heavy training.
So once again, I believe I get much better results for my athletes by doing an early-March peak which is usually world indoors or national indoor championships, then we take our two weeks of, and we start to build back up again to aim for late August.
Within those 20 weeks, we’re normally looking for about 5 weeks of building up gradually and then 8-10 weeks at the very maximum level of volume and intensity and I find through my own experiences, that after about 8-10 weeks training all-out maximum volume and intensity athletes start to get stale and injured. So five week build-up, 8-10 weeks hard and then we go with about 4-5 week taper period into the championship races.
