Training of famous runners - Members Only

Training of famous runners

‘The Best Ever’ - The Training of Hicham El Guerrouj © 2019 Runner’s Tribe, all rights reserved. The Best Ever? - with 2 Olympic golds, 4 world championship golds and multiple world records; it is hard to argue against El Guerrouj’s claim to the title of ‘The Best Ever’. Runner’s Tribe took a look...
From Bernard Lagat, to Steve Cram, Steve Ovett, Seb Coe, Sarah Jamieson, Sarah Brown, and countless others; 300m intervals were key staples of their training  programs.  Less mundane perhaps than the traditional quarter mile,  400m interval, more race specific, and potentially easier mentally.  It’s a trend seen in numerous top middle distance and distance runners. Runner’s Tribe dove into the specifics of some of these 300m interval sessions routinely carried out by world leading athletes.
    “There are lots of elements to running a successful marathon and I’ll bet insights into them are woven throughout all of the interviews in this book!”  – Lisa Ondieki from Australian Marathon Stars © 2021 Runner’s Tribe, all rights reserved. Lisa Ondieki certainly rates as Australia’s top female marathoner, her...
During the early nineties, Queenslander Simon Doyle was a serious player at a global level over 1500m. Doyle that year won three Grand Prix races and finished 4th at the Commonwealth Games in Auckland. In 1991, Doyle finished 12th at the World Athletics Championships final in Tokyo. It was...
September 29th 2019, and Kenenisa Bekele made history, clocking the second fastest marathon in history – 2:01:41, missing the world record by just two seconds.Bekele has many years of aerobic conditioning in his legs.  However, his race specific training for Berlin 2019 only spanned over an 8 week period during.  A remarkably short period of time.Bekele’s training diary leading in to the 209 Berlin Marathon is below. Most of this training was performed at sea level in the Netherlands.
‘Flying Finn’  –  The Training of Lasse Viren © 2019 Runner’s Tribe, all rights reserved.  A lot of the below information about the training of Lasse Viren was taken from the book ‘Running with the legends’, by Michael Sandrock, unless otherwise stated. We highly recommend this classic book to anyone who...
‘El Caballo’ The Training of Alberto Juantorena © 2021 Runner’s Tribe, all rights reserved “The secret to being a good runner is that you must sacrifice your life for it. You must train hard; eat well, with not too many parties and not too much sex. You must have a lot of...
Pre was an animal when it came to training. Quality over quantity, no long runs over 12 miles, morning runs most days, intense track sessions. Runner’s Tribe picked out 5 of Pre’s favourite sessions.  For a more detailed account of Pre’s training program check out Pre’s training HERE
Lisa Ondieki ran her first marathon in December, 1983 at the Rocket City Marathon in Huntsville, Alabama, and it would be fair to say that her career took off like a rocket. Within 12 months, Ondieki, then Lisa Martin, was an Olympic seventh placegetter, the Australian record holder with first, a 2:29:03 at the Los Angeles Olympic Games, and then, a 2:27:40 in Chicago and embarked on a career which saw her become Australia’s only Olympic marathon medallist, a dual Commonwealth Games champion and, for a long time, holder of the ‘world record’ for a women’s race on an out-and-back or loop course.
Seb Coe to this day is one of the greatest middle-distance runners to ever live. Coe won four Olympic medals, including 1500m gold at the Olympics in 1980 and 1984. He set eight outdoor and three indoor world record in middle-distance track events – including, in 1979, setting three world records in the space of 41 days.  The world record he set in the 800m in 1981 remained unbroken until 1997. In this article we reflect on the main lessons we can gain from the training and career of this brilliant athlete