Thirsty (for knowledge) Thursday: Kipchoge's Training Schedule

Outside Magazine posted a story last year that I am somehow just finding. Their writer Cathal Dennehy spent 3 days with Eliud Kipchoge (the fastest marathoner in history) to learn about his training. It was surprisingly simple. Here are some pieces worth sharing:

For Kipchoge, recovery runs start at a shuffle, typically an 8:30-to-8:45-minute-mile pace, and slowly build up to finish around 6:30 to 7 minutes per mile. That’s starting at four minutes per mile slower than his marathon pace, and still two minutes per mile off his marathon pace at the end. The goal here is to build overall volume - Kipchoge runs 124 to 136 miles each week - and ensure he’s ready to run fast for his next workout.

I've often heard the saying "run slow to run fast." And Kipchoge seems to live that. He says "I try not to run 100 percent. I perform 80 percent on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and then at 50 percent Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday."

In terms of strength training, Kipchoge does 2 sessions for 60 mins each every week. He's not doing any heavy lifting (obviously) as most of what he's doing is with a resistance band. He does some balance exercises and some gentle stretching to finish. He doesn’t lift weights, and the goal behind these exercises is mainly injury prevention.

Kipchoge gets his proper rest:

For Kipchoge, every day starts at 5:45 A.M., and he’s in bed by 9 P.M. each night. During the day he’ll nap for an hour, while his spare time is spent reading or chatting with his teammates at the camp. Despite the many demands on his time, he’s very, very good at doing nothing.

He drinks a lot of water (3 liters/day) and consumes plenty of protein. His meals contain a lot of homemade bread, local fresh fruits and veggies, tea, meat, and one of his favorite foods: ugali, which is a dense corn flour porridge. Kipchoge doesn't take any supplements, and he gets a massage twice/week.

Kipchoge (orange shorts on the right) during a 19 mile training run
at an average pace of 5:15/mile (and at a considerable altitude).

Kipchoge logs everything in a notebook. He started this in 2003, and has filled 18 notebooks since:

"I document the time, the kilometers, the massage, the exercises, the shoes I’m using, the feeling about those shoes," he says. "Everything." He is known to review these details and learn from them for future training cycles.

And they make a remarkable record of marathoning excellence. "I trust one day I will go through them and see what has been happening in the whole system," Kipchoge says. "When I call off the sport, I will combine them and write about them one day."

As for his training, Kipchoge runs fast three days/week, and then just coasts through the rest of his runs, sometimes at a comically slow pace. His marathon-training blocks have been as long as seven months and as short as three months, but typically they last around 16 weeks. Here's a typical week in an early stage of marathon training:

Monday

6 A.M.: 12 miles easy

4 P.M.: 6 miles easy

Tuesday

9 A.M.: A track workout totaling 9 to 10 miles of speed, run at marathon pace or slightly faster, on a rough dirt track.

Examples: 8 x 1,600 meters, run in 4 minutes 40 seconds, with two minutes of recovery; 8 x 400 meters, run in 63 to 64 seconds, with 30 to 50 seconds of recovery.

4 P.M.: 6 miles easy

Wednesday

6 A.M.: 12 miles easy

10 A.M.: 60 minutes of strength and mobility exercises

4 P.M.: 6 miles easy

Thursday

6 A.M.: A 19- or 25-mile run (alternate weeks)

Friday

6 A.M.: 12 miles easy

10 A.M.: 60 minutes of strength and mobility exercises

4 P.M.: 6 miles easy

Saturday

6 A.M.: Fartlek (13 x 3 minutes fast/1-minute jog)

4 P.M.: 6 miles easy

Sunday

Any time: 2 hours easy

For more "Thirsty Thursday" posts that highlight workouts, body science, and all kinds of interesting information, CLICK HERE. As always, back with some "Friday Funnies" tomorrow.

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Semi-Wordless Wednesday: Kipchoge's Bottle Guy is my Hero

You've all heard about Eliud Kipchoge lowering his marathon world record to 2:01:09 over the weekend:

And maybe you've seen this guy. He was the person responsible for Kipchoge's water bottle, and he had PASSION for his job. Check out this video:

Direct link: youtu.be/5MSoP4Z4z7o

With a little research, I've learned his name is Claus, and he was Kipchoge's "bottle handler" for his world record marathon in 2018 as well! (Click that link to see him at work back then.) He's been appropriately dubbed "Bottle Claus!"

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Thirsty (for knowledge) Thursday: Nike’s Fastest Shoe

This NY Times article came out a few days ago, and it talks about Eliud Kipchoge (with the aid of his pacers in pink shoes) breaking the 2:00 marathon barrier:

Here are parts of it that I find interesting:

These kinds of shoes from Nike — which feature carbon plates and springy midsole foam — have become an explosive issue among runners, as professional and amateur racers alike debate whether the shoes save so much energy that they amount to an unfair advantage.

A new analysis by The New York Times, an update of the one conducted last summer, suggests that the advantage these shoes bestow is real — and larger than previously estimated.

At the moment, they appear to be among only a handful of popular shoes that matter at all for race performance, and the gap between them and the next-fastest popular shoe has only widened.

We found that a runner wearing the most popular versions of these shoes available to the public — the Zoom Vaporfly 4% or ZoomX Vaporfly Next% — ran 4 to 5 percent faster than a runner wearing an average shoe, and 2 to 3 percent faster than runners in the next-fastest popular shoe. (There was no meaningful difference between the Vaporfly and Next% shoes when we measured their effects separately. We have combined them in our estimates.)

This difference is not explained by faster runners choosing to wear the shoes, by runners choosing to wear them in easier races or by runners switching to the shoes after running more training miles. In a race between two marathoners of the same ability, a runner wearing these shoes would have a significant advantage over a competitor not wearing them.

The shoes, which retail for $250, confer an advantage on all kinds of runners: men and women, fast runners and slower ones, hobbyists and frequent racers.

Many other brands, including Brooks, Saucony, New Balance, Hoka One One and Asics, have introduced similar shoes to the market or plan to. These shoes may provide the same advantage or an even larger one, but most do not yet appear in sufficient numbers in our data to measure their effectiveness.

These findings are based on more than twice the data that produced our previous estimates. Our data now includes results from more than a million marathons and half marathons combined since 2014.

The article notes that large numbers of “faster” runners have switched to these shoes. In the final months of 2019, about 41 percent of sub-3:00 marathons were run in these shoes:

What makes these shoes different is a carbon fiber plate in the midsole, which stores and releases energy with each stride. The shoe also has a midsole foam that is supposed to contribute to “increased running economy.”

Whether the shoes violate rules from track’s governing body, World Athletics, depends on how one interprets this sentence from its rulebook: “Shoes must not be constructed so as to give athletes any unfair assistance or advantage.” It does not specify what such an advantage might be.

“We need evidence to say that something is wrong with a shoe,” a spokesman for the governing body, then called the I.A.A.F., told The Times last year. “We’ve never had anyone to bring some evidence to convince us.”

In an announcement earlier this year, the group said, “It is clear that some forms of technology would provide an athlete with assistance that runs contrary to the values of the sport.” It has since appointed a technical committee to study the shoe question, and to make a report with recommendations. (The report was originally intended to be released to the public by the end of the year; it will now reportedly be released in 2020.)

When we asked Nike last year about whether its shoes might violate I.A.A.F. rules, a spokesman said the shoe “meets all I.A.A.F. product requirements and does not require any special inspection or approval.”

On Thursday [Dec 12], the company said in a statement, “We respect the I.A.A.F. and the spirit of their rules, and we do not create any running shoes that return more energy than the runner expends.”

The Times started their research last summer using information available on Strava. In the data they were able to access, they had results from about 577,000 marathons and 496,000 half marathons in “dozens of countries” from April 2014 to this month.

How did they measure the shoes’ effect?

We measured the shoes’ performance using four different methods — each with its own strengths and flaws:

1. Using statistical models

2. Studying groups of runners who ran the same pair of races

3. Following runners as they switch shoes

4. Measuring the likelihood of a personal record in a pair of shoes

None of these approaches are perfect, but they all point to the same conclusion: Something is happening in races with the Vaporfly and Nike Next% shoes that is not happening with most any other kind of popular shoe.

Method #1: Using statistical models:

No statistical model is perfect, and it’s possible that runners who choose to wear Vaporfly or Next% shoes are somehow different from runners who do not. Regardless of the decisions that went into this model — even when trying to control for runners’ propensity to wear the shoes in the first place — the outputs were similar.

Method #2: Comparing groups of runners who completed the same two races:

Strava is very popular among runners. At last year’s Berlin Marathon, for example, more than 10,000 runners uploaded race information to Strava, and this year, more than 14,000 did. Crucially for our purposes, about a thousand of those runners ran both races, and a subset of them reported racing in different shoes.

We could then examine the change in performance of two similar runners — people with similar race performances and, ideally, training regimens — and compare the improvement of a runner who switched shoes with a runner who did not. In Berlin, runners who switched to Vaporfly or Next% shoes improved their times more than runners who did not, on average.

For two athletes and a single pair of races, this might not tell us much. But in our data, there are thousands of instances when pairs of runners ran in the same two races.

When we perform this calculation for every pair of races in our data and measure the effect of switching to any kind of popular shoe, we see that runners who switch to these Nike shoes improved significantly more than runners who switched to any other kind of shoe. No other shoe comes close to having the same effect.

Method #3: Following runners as they switch to a new kind of racing shoe:

I don't fully understand this graph, because it seems to imply that if you switch to
ANY shoe other than the bottom 3, you WILL be faster. Just keep
switching shoes and gain speed each time? Yeah, I don't buy that.

More than 110,000 athletes uploaded data for more than one marathon, and about 47,000 uploaded data for three or more marathons. The Strava data allows us to follow these repeat racers over time and as they change shoes.

When we aggregate the change in race times for runners the first time they switch to a new pair of shoes, runners who switched to Vaporflys or Next% shoes improved their times more than runners who switched to any other kind of popular shoe.

Method #4: Measuring the likelihood of a personal best:

Race times are, in many ways, a crude way to measure performance. One marathon may be hilly or full of sharp turns; others may be flat and straight. Weather, too, is important, with higher temperatures typically resulting in slower times. And yet race times are how runners qualify for prestigious races, like the Boston Marathon, and most runners know their personal best times by heart, regardless of whether the race they ran was flat or hilly, on a hot day or a cold one.

We can follow the runners in our data with this measure in mind, testing whether a runner’s fastest time is more likely when he or she switches to any kind of shoe.

Someone can run a personal best for all kinds of reasons unrelated to shoes. A runner may train more, execute a better strategy on race day or run an easier course. Regardless, we found that runners who switched to these shoes were more likely to run their fastest race than runners who switched to any other kind of popular shoe.

I’ll be curious to see what the “technical committee” through the I.A.A.F. has to report back next year. Will it be damning for these kinds of shoes? Will they strip awards and finish times for those who have utilized this technology? Or will it be deemed allowable as it ushers in a new “norm” of performance footwear?

For more "Thirsty Thursday" posts that highlight workouts, body science, and all kinds of interesting information, CLICK HERE. As always, back with some "Friday Funnies" tomorrow.

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