Hi all! My name is Colby Eddowes, I’m 19 years old and I compete for the South Canberra Tuggeranong Athletics Club in the ACT. Up until last September (2020) I was a fully pledged decathlete having won the silver at the Australian u17 championship in 2018 and gold in the u18 champs in 2019. Come September I had to get major hip surgery causing restrictions to what I could do event wise leading up to nationals and the possible selection for the world u20 team. After surgery I decided that hurdling would be my best bet to try and qualify for the team, so to make a long story short I ended up running 2 qualifiers at the last minute at nationals and got a silver in a time of 13.71 seconds to be selected for the Australian World u20 Championship team which were to be held in Kenya. Unfortunately, Australia didn’t send a team to the championship but did still stage a training camp for us up in the gold coast.
As a decathlete you must be able to balance and train for 10 events, meaning there isn’t much time per event as someone who focuses on one event. Currently, the ACT is in lockdown, so we are all currently trying our best to stay fit and active but before lockdown, my weekly schedule looks a little like this:
- Track: Monday, Wednesday & Friday
- Gym: Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday
- Recovery/Rest: Sunday
Runner’s tribe has kindly reached out to me and asked if I would be able to shed some light on 4 of my favourite sessions with you so that is what I’ll be doing! Firstly, thank you so much to Runner’s Tribe for this opportunity, I hope that by reading this that someone out there who has gained a little insight into what my typical training sessions look like. If at all you want to ask questions or get in contact with me, you can find me on Instagram @colby.eddowes feel free to send me a message.
Session 1: Hurdling
My first and favourite type of session by far would be any session that involves hurdling. Hurdling has always been the event that came naturally to me, and I also enjoyed it the most.
One of my favourite hurdling sessions would have to be hurdles/blocks or hurdles/tempo days. For the sake of this review, I’m going to be using my current hurdle program. At the start of every session, my coach Mike Barber likes to get us mobile and flexible so that the injury rate is greatly reduced. After stretching, rolling and getting mobile we would move onto drills, after surgery my drills took a shift to hip mobility as my hips would always tighten at the start and finish of a session. The next step in my warmup would be hurdle mobility which I use to further loosen my hips and get my body ready to be able to hurdle. As we are in off-season my hurdles program isn’t too intense, I currently just started building back into full hurdles. I currently do a few hurdles further hurdle drills like 1 step and 5 step hurdles. After I finish hurdling, I always have running coupled in with the session whether that is short blocks or tempo runs. For my current program, tempo runs are coupled with my hurdle’s session, and they get progressively harder each week. Finally, core! At the end of each session, we like to do ankle mobility and core just to fine-tune our bodies.
Session 2: Long Jump
Long jump would have to be my second favourite event, something about running on a runway and throwing yourself into a sandpit always seemed fun to me. Because of my injury, I haven’t been able to do a long jump session since the start of last August (2020), meaning I was meant to start ago as lockdown was announced. My long jump sessions usually consist of jump drills and more tempo running so let’s break it down. To start we do the same warm-up consisting of 2 laps, mobility, rolling, stretching and drills. I then go onto to a more general hurdle mobility to help loosen up my body. There are a few jump drills that we like to do for ankle stability and get ready to take off, next would be jumps! I usually do around 5 standing jumps and then would go back to whatever run-up I had planned to do that session depending on the time of the year. The running that is coupled with this long jump session is a longer tempo session usually consisting of more 150’s, 200’s or sometimes 300’s. Last but not least again is core and ankle mobility. Core strength is important for any athlete to do as it can play a vital role in an athlete’s event.
Session 3: … min on, … min off
Although this session is quite painful, I still semi enjoy it. For those who don’t know the decathlon with the 1500m on the second day meaning we have to train for endurance as well. Min on, min off is my least hated endurance session as there are constant break in-between and I can do it anywhere and don’t require a track. Depending on when and what the session is would depend on how many minutes on and off I get, when I’m in the lead up to a decathlon I would have a more intensive on and off as I would be trying to simulate that lactic feeling in a race and how to push through it for when the time comes as every second counts.
Session 4: High Jump
My last session that I have for you today is my old high jumps sessions from last year. Like all my other track sessions my high jump sessions start with the same warm-up, mobility, drills, hurdle mobility and any other extra things I think I need to get done. For high jump days I like to start with jump drills to warm up and activate my ankle. I then go through my high jump drills which typically include 5 standing high jumps, 5 curve run thoughts, 5 full run ups, 5 skipping the curve, 5 repeat take-offs on curve. I then would go to my curve marker and proceed to do 5 jumps front hat marker before finally doing some take offs from my full run-up mark. At the end of a high jump session due to the little energy, I used I like to do some more running after just like the long jump sessions. Most high jumps days would be 100m from the 200m start just so that I am running of a curve. Again, this session would be topped off with a core session and more ankle mobility.
Thank you so much for your time,
Colby
