Canova, Sondre Moen and the lack of marathon progress in the USA

  My training is still very much the same jogging 4 miles once or twice a day so it hardly seems worthwhile to post it here so instead I figured I would talk about something else.

   At Fukuoka last weekend Sondre Moen of Norway ran a European record of 2:05:48.  This followed up a sparkling 59:48 half marathon in October.   Sondre has been a successful runner for a few years having run in the 62 minute range for the half marathons each of the last few years and he had run 2:11 before he started working with Renato Canova last fall.  I want to talk about him because of two factors.  First the jump from 62/2:11 to 59/2:05 is shocking and almost unheard of outside of the rift valley.   When I see a jump like this mid career my first thought is sadly drugs.  In this case it is certainly possible.  Despite my personal admiration for Canova I do not know him well enough to say for sure that he and his athletes are totally clean.  I am also aware that some of the released schedules from his athletes have recovery intervals are shockingly short.   That said my personal experiences of breakthroughs with his methods tell me that huge breaks are possible without chemical enhancement.

  It is also not that I think Canova has a corner on great running training, I don't.  In fact I think an argument could be made that the best training for the 1500 to 10k is currently available from coaches in the US.  When you consider the success that USA athletes have had at the Olympics and world championships in those events over the last couple of years and that many of the coaches in charge of those athletes are working with very small stables of athletes thanks to are inability to find a financially viable way of creating large well funded training groups, in comparison to Ethiopia, Kenya and Japan where literally a thousand or more post collegiate age athletes are able to give professional training a go and training groups of 30 or more are fairly common. 

  What I do think is that as a country we have massively underachieved in the marathon. Rupp and Flanagan's wins this fall notwithstanding.   There are a number of factors that I feel have a play in this.  The first is that most americans run marathons in the US and there are very few fast courses with consistently favorable conditions.  According to ARRS Houston is the fastest marathon in US based on race time bias and it is only the 16th fastest in the world and it is one of only 3 USA races considered faster than the average or break even time point.   So often we have great American marathoners who is not viewed as being as successful and fast as they would be if they were running races like Berlin, Dubai, Tokyo or Fukuoka instead of New York, Boston, Twin Cities or, with the dropping of pace setters, Chicago.  Also when Boston gets a tailwind we are quick to dismiss a fast time by an american, IE Halls 2:04:58, while we don't tend to put non-american times under the same scrutiny.  I actually read an article once that made a point in saying that Hall's real PB was 2:06:17 from London and then went on to refer to Gebre Gebremariam as a 2:04:53 man.  This is funny because that time for Gebre was run at Boston the same year as Hall ran his 2:04.
 
  This judging of americans by time when they generally run on much slower courses means that often very good americans are judged as being less than they are.  To think that calling Meb a 2:08 guy or  Rupp a 2:09 runner, or Jason Hartmann a 2:11 man is a fair assessment of their success as a marathoner is ridiculous.  These men could easily have PB's 3 to 5 minutes faster if they had focused their energies on the very fast pace set races that the africans dominate.

   That said there is little doubt that we are underachieving in the marathon as compared with the track.  I think that a parallel can be drawn between current american running and the level that the Kenyans were at in the 1990's.  At that time many, many kenyans were running under 27:30 and 13:20.  A good number were under 61, 27 and 13.   Yet almost none were running inside 2:08 for the marathon.  In fact only a fraction of the number of Kenyans were under 2:10 as are today.

   What happened.  Well to listen to many in the sports media tell it the Kenyans stopped fearing the distance and started attacking the marathon.  This is to my mind the stupidest assertion I have ever heard.  The kenyans always attacked.  They had been roaring out at fast paces at marathons from the moment they turned to the roads in the mid 1980s.  The question is why did they stop blowing up?

  My arguement is that Renato Canova, and a couple other coaches, started to do professional development with coaches in kenya.  Traveling the country working with athletes and sharing infomation like this, http://mymarathonpace.com/uploads/Renato_Canova_Marathon_Training_Methods.pdf, with coaches.  This lead to a seed change in how the Kenyans prepared for the marathon.  I think the general fitness that came with this kind of work also lead to greater performance in the half marathon but there the difference was far less.  A 61 man was now becomeing a 60 man.  In the marathon however it was stunning.

  In 1998 the 10th fastest Kenyan marathoner ran 2:08:52, this was a great year for the kenyans in the marathon at that time.  By 2008 the 10th best was 2:07:21.  A solid improvement but the bigger difference at that point was up front as the world lead had gone from high 2:06's to 2:03's.  This meant that big improvements were needed to win and so more and more athletes and coaches adjusted their training accordingly.  In 2015 the 10th fastest Kenyan ran 2:06:19.  A startling time that is under 3:00 per kilometer pace and that no man had ever run faster than prior to 1998.

  My personal experience is what makes me believe so fully in this system.  In the fall of 2005 I had never run under 24:30 for 8k.  I had a 1:07:28 half marathon best.  I began training in the most rudimentary way with Canova workouts and systems and by the end of spring in 2006 I had run 23:26, 1:03:44 and 2:15:28.   Later on after the Olympic trials I was able to get Canova to send me a training schedule.  You should be able to view the schedule here, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m0aEpBDKhfjEmKKzGvWPBkxVZKx1qfYyxPqRLFiT0mw/edit?usp=sharing

  I was already struggling with my coordination issues and as such I never ended up racing off of this training.  I did however find myself in the best shape of my life by far at the end of a month of this training.  I cannot say for sure how fast I would have run I can say I felt confident I would be able to run under 1:03 for the half and in the 2:10 range for a marathon in reasonable conditions, not tailwind, at Boston. 

  So what are the Africans, and a guy like Moen doing that I believe that we Americans are not.  I think the four major things are, one, truly specific marathon workouts in numbers.  So not doing one 16 mile long run at marathon pace and otherwise training like you are getting ready for a half marathon or 10k.   In this type of marathon training the athlete runs a lot of marathon paced work every week, sometimes in multiple workouts per week throughout the training cycle with 15 to 30 miles of marathon paced work run each week during the specific phase.
  Second long hard runs of around marathon distance run at 90 to 95% of marathon pace.  These workouts start much shorter, around 20k, in the base phase but build up to around 40 to 45k during the specific phase.
  Third alternation style workouts where the athlete averages marathon pace for 10 to 15 miles but does so by alternating between running slightly faster than and recovering slightly slower than marathon pace.
  Fourth moderate medium length, 10 to 18 mile, light tempo runs at an effort slower than marathon pace but faster than a reasonable training pace.

  Many top american groups are implementing some of these strategies.  The fourth one is very much like Schumachers' rhythm runs for example.  Meb did a marathon paced tempo run pretty much every week during his marathon build ups.  I think in the marathon the big one most americans tend to fall short on is the specific work.

  Finally I think that one area that the Africans excel at and that much of the rest of the distance running world fails at, myself very much included, is the balance between training very hard generally but not fearing to take complete rest or to half ass workouts. 

  I read an article where a 2:05 Kenyan marathoner was asked why he felt the Japanese could not compete in the marathon with the Kenyans.  He said he thought that if the Japanese trained like the Africans  they would be the best in the world.  When asked what he thought the Japanese were doing wrong he said they were training too hard.

  Similarly when I followed the linked Canova plan, which was the first time I didn't have to figure out my own paces for the workouts, I was shocked how EASY most of the workouts were.  In a two week block there were 6 or 7 "workouts" but 5 of them would be barely harder to do than a basic training run.  Then one or two of them would be savagely hard.

  This is not to say that I think we should make a return to the under training that plagued the 1990's.  I think the tricky key is that the athlete needs to train extraordinarily hard in the macro sense but that they need to be able and willing to reduce the effort in the micro sense.  Doing more workouts, and very high volume, but realizing that those workouts might be quite easy and that is ok.

  I watched a documentary following an athlete who eventually finished 4th at the NYC marathon and the thing I found most different about him compared with myself was that when faced with hardship he opted to half ass his training for a while as a sort of compromise.  He skipped the harder workouts, mixed in days off and then when his body came around he got serious again.  My coordination issue has defied all my attempts to solve it so I doubt that a similar attitude would have saved me from it but I do wonder if I had been a bit more like this if I could have run more consistently well both during my short time of being on the national level and fully healthy, 2006/2007 and in the shorter distances over the years that followed.

  Finally I think that the very top americans are making some changes.  Schumacher's ladies have run better in the marathon this year, though sometimes what is effective training for women in the marathon does not carry over to men because we are less efficient with glycogen, and Salazar has obviously had more success with the marathon of late, seen both in Rupp's very effective running but also in Suguru Osako's 2:07:19.   However I think that there is still an opportunity for one of the second tier groups to stun the US distance world and dominate the top of the USA marathon rankings and perhaps take the majority of the spots on the U.S. Olympic team.

  I think that if you are running more than 5% slower than your half marathon best on similar terrain in the marathon you are under achieving and if you have shown a predilection towards the longer events than that conversion should be closer to 3%.  So for a mid 1:01 half marathon athlete, of which there are now a fair number in the USA that means running in the 2:06 mid to 2:08 mid range.  Obviously in good conditions this would likely fall short of what it would take to beat a guy like Rupp but certainly you could take a spot on the team.  Furthermore a group that was slowing like this would expect mid 1:02 half marathoners to run in the 2:09 to just under 2:11 range.  Think of the impact on american marathoning if one of these groups with 3 to 5 sub 1:03 guys got each of them to run in the 2:09 to 2:10 range in the next year.  I also believe that Moen shows that if they make these changes it is likely that athletes will not only race the marathon closer to the equivalent of their existing pb's in the other events but it is quite likely that they will see a jump in general fitness as well.   In which case perhaps some of our consistent 62 minute half men could find themselves running 59:42 and 2:05:48 in a year or two like Moen has.

Four Pillars of Training for Fast Running

   Over the last twenty years of training I have found in my own training and in looking at the training of others with much better success than I've had that there seem to be four types of workouts you should focus on to build a balanced fitness and run up to the maximum of your potential.  These are not the only running you should do but they are sessions that are used regularly in pretty much every program I have looked at that produced unusually good results.

  These sessions are not an exhaustive list of all the types of workouts you should do but they are the four main pillars that hold up all of the other training.  If you are doing these you will do well.  If you aren't you will likely not get the most out of yourself.

  Pillar 1- Fundamental tempos- These have many names, I've used Renato Canova's name for them.  Jerry Schumacher calls them rythm runs, Joe Vigil calls them, fast endurance runs or 30km tests, George Malley or Bob Hodge would probably call it running a bit faster than normal sometimes.  Call them what you want, just make sure you do them. These are longer runs at pace that is faster than training pace but not as fast as tempo pace.  For a beginning, low mileage runner this might only be five or six miles long.  For a competitive marathoner they might get as long as thirty miles.   The key to this session is relaxation at a pace that is not exactly fast but is faster than you do or really could do day in day out for your training runs.   A good starting place for these is a minute per mile slower than your 5k race pace.  These should be done throughout the training year but you would do them much more often during the early phases and much less as you get into the thick of your racing season.  Similarly these are important for all runners but even more so for the developing runner.

  Pillar 2- Specific work/max lass workouts- I combine these because if your event is 1500 to 10k then the specific version of the max lass workouts is your key specific workouts but in the marathon the key is much more just specific paced running and max lass becomes much more secondary.   For me specific workouts mean running within about 1% of race pace.  So if your training to run a ten minute two mile specific pace would be 4:57 to 5:03 per mile.  I would hesitate a guess that more effort is wasted on running, supposedly, specific workouts that are too fast than in any other area of training.  If your goal is a 10 minute two mile and the quarter repeats you are doing feel too easy at 75 you should NOT run them faster.  You should either run them with shorter rest or you should run longer repeats at the same pace.  If it is early in the training cycle then you should focus on embracing the efforts feeling easy and try to make them feel as easy as you possibly can.

  Max lass workouts are workouts that try to create an ability to hold the amount of lacate, ie acid, in your blood at an essentially steady level while running your specific race pace.  For a long time it was thought that you could only really do this at 10 mile to half marathon race pace but it has been found that athletes can produce a defacto max lass at much faster paces, ie 3k to 10k race pace, where they hold lactate levels basically steady for 5 to 25 minutes.  Workouts for max lass in the base phase focus on doing explosive work, like short hill sprints, bounding, sprinting etc., while your body has a ton of latic acid in it.  This can be accomplished through hill circuits or doing hard track repeats with circuits or hill sprints mixed into the rests between the intervals.  As you move to the specific phase these workouts morph to involve repetitions at race pace mixed with explosive sprint reps.

  These workouts, both specific marathon workouts and max lass workouts, are only a small change from traditional or "normal" workouts. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are fine just doing your regular sessions and working hard.  These sessions are probably the biggest difference in the performances we see today verses the 1980's.   For a long period of time it seemed that the best in the world were sort of pinned into the 13 teens, 27 lows and 2:07 to 2:08 range.  Now I'm not trying to say that EPO wasn't involved in the sudden proliferation of sub 13 men in the 1990's.  I'm not that naive.  That said there were many highly dedicated very hard working and talented men in the 1970's and 80's and only a few slipped under 13:10, notably Henry Rono and David Moorecroft.  Even if you discount some of the best in the world today there are many athletes who I feel very secure in saying are clean who are running well under 13:10.  Ben True, Hassan Mead, Chris Solinsky, Matt Tegankamp, Sam Chelanga come to mind very quickly.  I simply don't believe they are more talented then say Matt Centrowitz Sr., 13:12 or Lasse Viren, 13:16.  When you look at this improved standard and then consider that the vast majority of the training is unchanged in the last fourty years it becomes clear that something subtle but important has happened.  Both generations did high mileage.  Both generations did tempo runs, intervals, long runs.  Both generations ran on mondo tracks and even had pace setters, though admittedly Viren never ran well in a race that was paced.  This leaves the question, what is different?  The answer, to my mind, is in the two types of workouts I have highlighted above.  So if you are asking do I think that if the runners of the past were doing more of these sessions they would have been faster my simple answer is yes.  I do not believe it is likely or even possible that someone like Craig Virgin could have worked harder than he did and he ran 8:40.9 for two miles in high school so it is also unlikely that any number of athletes are significantly more talented than he was.   Yet we have a number of guys running much faster.  Some of this could be chalked up to faster races.  I have no doubt that at times in his career Craig could have run in the 13:10 range if the race had been going at that pace but I find it hard to believe simple pacing would drop him 20 seconds.  So what are the likes of Ben True, 13:02, Matt Tegenkamp, 12:58 and Chris Solinsky, 12:55 doing differently?  I believe the answer is fundamental tempos and max lass workouts.  Though I' imagine that none of them call them by those names.

Pillar 3- Threshold workouts.  Traditionally this would be your half marathon paced tempo run.  I would include those but I personally focus much more on alternation style intervals.  I believe these are far more effective in improving threshold as well as overall fitness.  Your threshold or steady state pace is the single most important fitness maker in deciding your success in races from 3k to marathon.  If you have a high threshold you will race well.  If you have also do some decent specific workouts with that high threshold you will race very well.   Raising your threshold is how you make a pace that is hard to run for longer than a few hundred meters into something you can run easily for a few miles.
  Alternation workouts for threshold included things like Aussie Quarters, http://nateruns.blogspot.com/2014/12/workout-wednesday-australian-quarters.html, Moneghetti Fartleks, http://nateruns.blogspot.com/2015/01/monaghetti-fartlek.html, or Renato Canova style alternations, http://nateruns.blogspot.com/2015/02/workout-wednesday-alternations-for-5k.html.  Basically any workout where you mix in intervals of faster than half marathon paced running with quick, faster than regular training paced, recoveries.
 Threshold workouts are closely related to the fundamental tempos in terms of the changes that they create in your body.  Improvements in one of these workouts will lead to improvements in the other.  If you find yourself plateaued in either of these work types very often the answer is to focus on the other.  For more than a year early in my career I could not find a way to run a threshold run under 5:10 per mile or so.  If I did one mile at 5:00 pace it felt painfully easy but somewhere between 3 and 5 miles it became incredibly hard. Then I found fundamental tempo's and within a few months I could do 5 mile tempo runs at 4:50 per mile.  In the more then a decade that has past since I have seen this connection in my training again and again.

Pillar 4- Speed work.  This is NOT anaerobic work.  This is work focused on teaching the body to run fast while remaining relaxed.  This can be as simple as strides.  It can be done in great volume or in very low volume with great regularity.  I try to never let a week go by where I don't do at least some session for speed.  Joe Vigil, who is a much better coach then me, tries to never let a day go by where it doesn't get touched on.
   Nearly everyone runs fast in their training but too often we fall into the trap of thinking fast and hard are the same thing.  Much like the workouts in pillar one speed sessions should not be hard. They are more than an easy day but not nearly a hard day.  You can address the need for this type of work in a ton of different ways.  You can do sets of strides, 4 to 15, as often as daily or you can do short hill sprints, under 15 seconds.  I often do longer sessions like 30x100m or mix 10 to 20 second high speed bursts into a regular run with full recovery between efforts.  The two keys to this type of work are a focus on good, relaxed, powerful running form and taking full recovery between efforts.  It is easy to slip into not taking enough rest between these sessions, it is all but impossible to take too much recovery.

  There you have it.  As I stated above I don't expect this to be the only training you do but I do expect that this is what your training schedule should be designed around. If you are regularly working on all of these systems you will do well.  If you then start to put them into a well designed progression of increased volume and periodized adjustments you will be truly training and not just running and you will see some impressive results.