Throughout my career, I have consistently prescribed a multi-tiered, holistic training system. This approach encompasses training across all paces, from short sprints to marathon pace, with regular sessions at 1500-meter and 5k paces. Additionally, it emphasizes overall athleticism, incorporating heavy weightlifting and Olympic lifts.

While my training regimes continue to employ these principles, I have increasingly focused on what I term the primary training pillars: speed/power and aerobic capacity. I firmly believe that these pillars must be developed progressively throughout the whole year. By enhancing speed, power, and aerobic capacity, athletes can reduce the need for the highly demanding race-pace specific workouts. With greater speed, power, and aerobic fitness, athletes can initially approach race-specific training at a higher level and nail it the first time out! Over the past several years, working with some top 800, 1500 and 5k runners, I’ve found that with the primary focus being on these two fundamental pillars, speed/ power and aerobic capacity, that they can race very well with minimal race specific workouts. More on the speed/ power pillar next time!