Sondre Moen – Preparing for London Marathon 2020 Elite Race
On August 6th 2020, the London Marathon announced that it will set off with an elite only field. The London Marathon Organisers chose to stage the race in a more controlled environment, instead of the usual course due to Covid-19.
Norwegian’s Sondre Moen (2:05:48 PB) is currently in the middle of a high altitude training camp in Sestriere (Italy), preparing for the showdown that will take place on October 4th comprising of the strongest field a Marathon has ever staged including the two fastest men in history over the distance – Eliud Kipchoge and Kenenisa Bekele.
We joined him for a track session on Sunday 13th September, 21 days until race day where coach Renato Canova shared his thoughts on the workout, the remainder of 2020 and more.
Renato Canova: “Today was a training session specific to the half marathon and marathon, on the track. The plan was to run 20km, it’s something that we can use many times approaching a Marathon.
Two times 3000m with 3 minutes of recovery. Three times 2000m with 2.5 minutes recovery. Five times 1000m with 2 minutes recovery. Six times 500m with 1.5 minutes recovery.
Sondre didn’t finish completely, the workout. It was in any case 17.5km. He is suffering a little bit, due to some abductor pain. Earlier he was trying to see if it was possible to run a workout like this in spikes preparing for the 1 hour race at the Diamond league in Brussels. This was not possible and left him with some small problem, connected with some respiratory problems last week. So he’s coming back from that.
For Philipp (Pflieger – who is training for the Valencia Marathon on Dec 6th), this is something new. This type of volume at this altitude. Of course I am happy that he was able to do good volume in this workout and at the end he was not so tired, he was able to complete the 500m intervals fast.
We can say that the period of training is not bad, but not perfect mostly because of the weather. We had better weather last year and also in 2017 when we remained here for a long time. We normally have only a few small periods of the day when the weather is good here.
I am satisfied today with the current situation though. We’re hoping to see some good results in the coming months. This season has been very complicated; it’s never been possible to have a calendar that is guaranteed. Of course for athletes to race their best, they ideally need to know “where” and “when.” We had a lot of athletes not able to compete well. It’s difficult to maintain a high level of preparation for long time. It’s mentally very demanding. Of course everybody hopes it will become different in the near future but it’s what we have to deal with in 2020.”
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Read more articles about Half Marathon Training and Marathon Training.
