Training with Eliud Kipchoge – 5 Things That Surprised Me
Here are a few things that surprised us during our experience:
(1) He was extremely inflexible. After an easy morning run (16km in 1hr10mins), we stretched with the group. Most of them were fairly flexible in the hamstrings (ie. standing straight legged and bending over to touch your toes with your knees straight and being able to touch your toes) but Eliud could only reach to about half way down his shins. He was nowhere near touching his toes! They all found it hilarious that he couldn’t come close to touching his toes.
(2) Warm ups/cool downs. Most marathoners tend to bulk milage into their warm ups/cool downs – 5-6km or 25-30mins can be common amongst elite athletes. Eliud rarely runs more than 15mins (approx 3km) and often closer to just 10mins (approx 2km). On one fartlek sessions we joined in with on August 12th (4x10mins threshold efforts, with 2min rest), they warmed up with 1.8km (9min30sec) and cooled down with the same. It appeared that Kipchoge’s training squad to not put any emphases on adding mileage to warm ups/cool downs,
(3) He rarely pushed himself to the limit. It certainly seemed to us that Eliud rarely pushed himself 100% in training. Three times per week (Tues, Thurs, Sat – see training week for more details) he ran hard, but he rarely pushed himself to the limit. He was able to get straight into a jog within 1 minute of the end of every workout, without a problem.
(4) He ran his long tempo runs of 40km+ on an empty stomach. Every morning at 6:10am, they start their morning run. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays it’s a hard workout and on the other days, its easy-medium. Every day except Tuesdays track workout, they’ll run on an empty stomach. What’s even better, is that they’ll often wake up just 15mins before the run starts (5:55am).
(5) He drank a lot of tea (with lots of sugar). Eliud drinks a lot of tea. Before training, after training, and at least two more servings per day of tea, with at least 15g of sugar in each serving. When we asked him if there was a reason behind this, he didn’t seem to have one.
