Elite Marathoning with Renato Canova: The Training of Moses Mosop and Abel Kirui Renato Canova is a widely-renown coach of some of the most elite middle and long-distance athletes in the world. His runners routinely medal at World Championship and Olympic races and place highly at major marathons. I've done a good bit of writing on this blog about his training methods, and those posts are some of the most popular of all of my articles. Unlike many other elite coaches, Renato Canova has no reservations about sharing his training philosophy and the workouts of his athletes. 2011 was a banner year for Canova, as several of his runners won medals at the 2011 world championships, including Abel Kirui, a young runner who won his second marathon World Championship. Additionally, Moses Mosop, a long-time Canova runner with sub-27 10k credentials, made his debut marathon in an earthshaking 2:03:06 for second place at the Boston Marathon, then later smashed the 25k and 30k world records at the Prefontaine Classic meet in Eugene, Oregon. To cap off his amazing season, Mosop won the Chicago Marathon with a course record as well. Soon after this incredible spring and summer, Renato Canova posted the training of Moses Mosop before the Boston Marathon and Abel Kirui before the World Championships marathon on LetsRun.com. I've had the training schedules sitting around for some time, but I've just now gotten around to copying them to a calendar and translating them into relevant paces. If you would like to read my other work on Canova, a good place to start is my article titled "Something New in Training:" http://runningwritings.blogspot.com/2011/07/something-new-in-training-methods-of.html And last fall I completed a similar analysis of the training of Canova's track athletes (1500- 10,000m) in the last month before the World Championships: http://runningwritings.blogspot.com/2011/09/peaking-with-renato-canova_28.html The Training Schedules I have transcribed the training schedules of Moses Mosop (four months' worth of training) and Abel Kirui (two months) onto calendar pages on .pdf files for easy viewing and printing. Two versions exist for each athlete's training: a schedule with the absolute paces and times for workouts, and a schedule with the paces translated into relative percents of PR pace, which is how Renato Canova discusses relevant training paces. In most cases, the schedules have been "Americanized" by translating kilometers into miles and times per km to times per mile. Some workouts, mostly interval repeats of familiar distances to Americans (i.e. 3ks, 5ks) have not been translated into a per-mile pace. Abel Kirui's training schedule—absolute paces Abel Kirui's training schedule—relative paces Moses Mosop's training schedule—absolute paces Moses Mosop's training schedule—relative paces To download the files in their original PDF form (for better text quality), select "File > Download" on the Google Docs menu. Remember that all training was done in Kenya, which is at relatively high altitude, and most road runs were over fairly significant hills. However, according to Canova, Kenyans are much better at running close to their sea-level performances while at altitude than Western athletes are (probably because the Kenyans have lived at altitude their whole lives), so I don't think the schedules need any drastic adjustments to compensate for that. Glossary of Terms You'll need to know the following terms to understand the schedules: Fartlek—Swedish for "speed play." A low-key workout that involves surging and recovering during a run. Usually the efforts prescribed for the surges are general terms like "fast" or "moderate" instead of specific paces. Diagonals—A low-key workout popularized by Kenyans. It involves running the diagonal between corners on a soccer field quickly, and jogging along the goal line to the other corner. This is repeated either for a number of diagonals or for a specified length of time. A Note on Renato Canova's math Renato Canova computes many of the paces he prescribes based on percentages of an athlete's personal record. It's important to discuss how this is calculated, because it is not straightforward. For example, if we say "run at 90% of 5:00 mile pace," many people would divide 5:00 by 0.90 and get 5:33.3 minutes per mile. Renato, however, does his math differently. To him, deviations from PR pace are measured quite literally in per cent—parts of one hundredth of the original pace. So, when Renato says "90% of 5:00 pace," he means "10% slower than 5:00 pace." To compute this, you do the following: 5:00/100*10 + 5:00 = 5:30 pace Here are two simple formulas that will aid you in calculating "Renato Canova percents": To calculate the resultant pace N by going P percent of race race (RP) N = RP*(2-P/100) As you can verify yourself, this formula works equally well if P is greater or less than 100 percent. For 110% of 5-minute mile pace, N = 5*(2-110/100) = 4.5 minutes per mile, or 4:30 mile pace. For 90% of 5k pace, N = 5*(2-90/100) = 5.5 minutes per mile or 5:30 mile pace. To calculate what percentage P (faster or slower) than race pace (RP) some new pace N is, use: P = 100*(2-N/RP) Disclaimer Please note that the analysis of these schedules is only my own interpretation, and that I don't claim to speak for Renato Canova or anyone else. As I have written before, any scholarly analysis will necessarily involve placing things into a context where they can be understood. Finally, I take responsibility for all typos—I'm sure I've made at least a few, so don't read too far into any one particular day's workout! Also, for computing Mosop's relative paces, I used a rough prediction of 2:05:51 based on his 10k PR. Abel Kirui's percentages are based on his PR of 2:05:04 Observations and Analysis After a first glance at the schedules, a few things jump out right away. The first is consistency. Barring a disruption in training, Kirui and Mosop train twice a day almost every day. While the workouts will be the focus of most of our analysis, do not forget that these 40- 80min runs at an easy to moderate effort, day in and day out, make up the core of their training. These are not so much aerobic training sessions (as they would be in a diet of high- mileage training for a less experienced Western runner), as Kirui and Mosop both have many years of high volume training under their belts, and are thus already in exceptional shape. Rather, think of these as more of supplemental or maintenance work—just like a calculus student has already mastered algebra, yet still uses it on a daily basis to accomplish more complicated tasks, such is the role of easy to moderate mileage in Canova's marathon training. To Mosop or Kirui, 80min moderate in the morning and 50min easy in the evening is likely no more stressful to them than your regular easy eight-mile loop is for you. Second, there is very little long easy or long moderate running. Both schedules include one run around the duration of a marathon (2:10 for Kirui and 2:28 for Mosop), but aside from that outing, only a handful of easy/moderate runs are longer than 80 or 90 minutes. To Canova, these long easy runs are not very useful to an experienced athlete, as he writes in a thread on LetsRun.com: One question : if you want to run a Marathon at 3:19 pace (about 2:20 final time), do you think that running 30k at 4:00 pace can have some connection? If you want running 10000m in 30:00, do you think that the main workouts are 400m on track, and long run must be only easy regeneration? Instead, the focus of training is in long fast runs, long intervals workouts, and short fartlek- style workouts. Main Workouts Starting early on in training, and continuing up until three weeks out from the goal marathon, Mosop and Kirui run long fast runs on a regular basis. These are typically between 20 and 40km (12mi-25mi) and are done at least once every two weeks. The pace for the continuous long-fast runs is between 87 and 95% of PR marathon pace. On weeks that do not contain a continuous long fast run, Mosop or Kirui often instead do a broken up or progressive long fast run, for example, 10km at 87% + 12km at 97%. These broken up or progressive sessions allow the runners to do some blocks of continuous running at 95% of race pace or faster after first covering several miles. Another staple training feature are long interval workouts. The repeats last from 1km to 5k, and sometimes vary in distance and pace. The longer invervals of 3-5km are typically at 95- 101% of marathon pace, while the shorter repeats of 1km-1mi are usually at 103% or faster. Very often, the recovery is not a slow jog, but rather is 1km at a prescribed pace. Early in training, this kilometer of recovery is at an easy pace (50-70% of race pace), but as the marathon draws near, this kilometer of recovery gets faster, culminating in the "alternating" workout two weeks out, where the athlete runs 22-24km alternating kilometers at 103% and 89% of race pace.