Mo Farah’s Coach: Alberto Salazar – Interview (Nike Cross Nationals) Part 2
On Tapering
Now going back to that idea of those great workouts that you only hold for a certain period of time.
You have that 8-10 week intense level there and if we’ve got 4 weeks of tapering down to the race, the last five weeks right before that (9 weeks to 4 weeks out from competition) that’s where we’re at, our optimum level, in terms of the very fastest and hardest workouts, and I know that if I started that too early, like 3-4 weeks before that, we wouldn’t be able to hold it.
I know we can only hold this level of training for about 4-5 weeks.
Again, my idea behind periodisation is that those is that those 4-5 weeks of incredible workouts are going to be much more closely linked to great performances than having had those 4 weeks diluted and making an 8-week more moderate block.
If you just have moderation throughout the entire year, you just have this flat line, kind of doing the same stuff year-round, you might think “well, I’m going to build up strength” and so forth, but you are not going to get the peaks in terms of great performances.
You may get better performances than you have had before, if you are getting stronger and stronger slowly, but at the elite level periodisation has proven that you are better of having those periods where you are just barely able to sustain that level of training for 4-5 weeks.
Right before you fall apart, you say “OK, now it’s time to taper” and that’s when you get your best results.
And I believe in the two cycles per year, because I think that if you are trying to do just one cycle, like a 48 or a 50 week cycle, it’s too long; you get stale, athletes get tired, they get bored, they need to race, they need to peak and then they need to rest.
I’ve seen athletes that try to do the full year-long cycle and then peak, they tend to not be successful.
The best athletes in the world, if you look and see, all the best East-African runners are running very well in February and March and then they disappear. Come June, they re-appear and start to run well again.
It’s the same idea. They do these unbelievable workloads that they are only able to sustain for a month or two that lead to these incredible performances, and now they need to rest and recover.
We all know that when you train hard it’s in the recovery that you get the real improvement.
If you have incredible hard levels of training followed by weeks of recovery and rest you’ll end up getting to higher levels than if you just have moderate training throughout.
Galen Rupp will be running his last race of the indoor season on February 16th, he is running a 5K in Birmingham and they are setting it up to be on sub-30min pace.
The workouts that he will do from 8 weeks to 4 weeks out from that race will be exactly what he does the summer before the World Championships in Moscow – not any different.
Why would it be any different?
We want him to be able to run as fast as he can. By having these two cycles per year, we have two times per year where we can continue to learn about how we respond to training.
If you just have one period per year, you try all of these things and what happens if all of a sudden come June, it didn’t work… Oh well, I guess I’ve got to wait another year before I try again.
With two cycles per year, it always gives me two chances to learn and another chance if I screw up, to not screw up again in the spring.
Last year, about 8 days before the world indoor championships, I gave Galen and Mo a workout and it was the best workout they’ve ever run.
I knew that we were only 8 days out from the world indoor championships, and I knew I shouldn’t give them any more than 3 miles of intervals. Sometimes, about 11-12 days out I’ll give them 6 miles of intervals.
So I thought, I’m only giving them 3 miles – they felt good and they were running fast and we ran on the University of Washington indoor track. We ran two sets of 1200m, 800m, 400m and they went 2.59 average for the 1200’s, 1.52 for the 800’s and 52 for the 400’s and after the workout I remember them both telling me their legs were shocked.
I thought, well we have 8 days to go. They never recovered. The next week they never came back from it and I was so mad at myself. I thought about not giving them 6 miles of intervals but I gave them 3 miles at such an intense speed that it was probably worse than what we would normally do for a 6-mile interval workout.
Neither of them ran well at the world indoors, but it taught me right there “don’t do this this summer.
No PR workouts within two weeks of the Olympics. Make sure you don’t leave it behind on the track.”
Again, only by going through that whole period (and everything had gone very well before that) but that screwup right there I was really careful that summer if I started to get carried away a week before, I reminded myself not to screw up again.
We’ve made this mistake, slow down, we’re going too fast.
So that’s one of the main things I like about peaking twice per year – you get to experiment with your training more.
Repetition of Workouts I was talking with Andy Powell, the head coach at the University of Oregon, and I was explaining to him that if your workouts vary so much, your athletes don’t intuitively know that they can compare it to what they’ve done before, how they are going to get the confidence to do what they need to do.
When I was at Oregon, we had a workout that was called the 30th Avenue drill – we ran a ¾ mile on the track really fast and then we ran 5 miles on the road, then we ran another ¾-mile on the track, then another 5 miles on the road, and then we finished with another 3/4 -mile on the track.
There was a workout that was devised in Michigan, called the Michigan workout.
They had all sorts of intervals within this long kind of tempo run, and I used to tell Andy “there’s so much variation within that workout. Maybe physiologically it’s causing something, but how is the athlete going to know if he’s improving unless he does that specific workout again and has an overall time There’s just so many variables. Maybe he ran the 400s faster this time, but the 800s were slower… there’s so much variation.”
