Elite coaching special - Ingrid Kristiansen & Charlie Spedding

Two greats in one place
Every once in a while great athletes come together.
Sometimes it is in an Olympic final. Sometimes it is in a Grand Prix race. Occasionally they are in one place for a different reason – to talk. And when that happens it is great to be able to listen in.
Between them Ingrid Kristiansen and Charlie Spedding have a host of honours, particularly at marathon, but also at a range of other distances. Kristiansen in particular enjoy championship and record breaking successes at distances from 3K upwards.
So when they sat down to talk about their training and their successes we were there to listen in.

Kicking it all off
Of course it wasn’t just us in the room, Bruce Tulloh, himself a former world class athlete and coach to the likes of Richard Nerurkar, was also there.
He kicked things off by asking Ingrid whether using cross country skiing and a treadmill in training had helped her avoid injuries. Ingrid replied: "Yes it did. I had only one big injury - in the Olympics of 1988. Before and after that I almost never had injuries. Cross training was good for me and my body.”
She went on to talk about something that would become a theme – the importance of appropriate rest to allow the training to have it’s benefit. "You need to take breaks to let your body build up. I would take two breaks a year. Three weeks after a spring marathon and four weeks after a winter marathon. I would put on 5kg in weight in this time.”
The need for rest is something Ingrid believes is neglected by many athletes.
“People in Norway have a problem with taking one day off. They don't do it because they think they will lose fitness. In my rest I was walking, biking and playing with the children. It wasn't that I did nothing but I there was no training. I had fun. "When I was finishing a marathon my next one was four to five months away. The rest was for physical and psychological reasons.”
Ingrid explained how she picked up the running again after her break: "After my rest I started with long runs in the first week. In the second week I did some long intervals. After four weeks I was in normal training. "The rest was hardest to take after my world record in London. I was on such a high I felt I could go on forever. But if I had carried on I would break down - maybe one month later. I also would have less to train for the track season. You think you are going well and then it goes straight down hill. "Before London in 1985 I was doing cross country skiing but not competing. I would ski from 8am until 11am and then take a rest. A rest at that time would mean cleaning the house and making food. In the afternoon I would take a one hour run or a 45min run, often on the treadmill. I stayed in Norway in the winter as I liked to be with my friends and family and eating my own food. My competitors would be in Florida so I knew I had to do a good session - I had to do a good session on the treadmill."

Charlie on the importance of rest
Charlie Spedding won the London Marathon in 1984 and then medalled in the heat and pollution of the LA Olympics. A key factor in his success was being bold enough to rest after his success in London.
Charlie said: "In 1984 London was a trial for the Olympics which were 13 or 14 weeks later. The criticism heard from coaches at that time was that you couldn't run in London and then run well in the Olympics.
“I believe the reason people thought that was that people who had tried this sort of thing hadn't rested enough after the first race.
“After London I was just jogging, I didn't worry about how long the recovering took. Whether there was pressure from the coaches or not I was not going to start serious running until my body had recovered and I was mentally and physically ready to start again.
“Before the Olympics I had 11 weeks training, I went slowly back to my old level.” Some in the room wondered whether taking breaks would lead to problems when they started to ramp the training up once more. Ingrid said: "After a break I had no problems with my muscles. You have to take it step by step and build it up.”


Easing down for a marathon
The mix of hard work and recuperation is a difficult one to perfect. Recovering after a marathon is important but the process of easing down before the race is vitally important to race day success.
Ingrid said: “Before a marathon I would try to do a half marathon three weeks before the race, then hit a highest mileage of 200K, then dropping down. For the last three weeks I would drop it down. The week before I competed I would run 70K or 80K - including the marathon. The difficult thing was to keep resting.
"My eating in the last week before the race would mean maybe eating a little less beef or fish and more spaghetti and rice, but it was almost the same as usual." Charlie explained his last few weeks: "I would ease off a lot in the last week and the week before that I would ease down a bit. I used to run 90 to 100 miles a week. Two weeks before I'd run 80 miles and in then 30 miles in the week before.
"For the first half of the week I'd eat normally. I might feel a bit bloaty because I was running much less. I would put weight on."

Training for success
It’s clearly not all about resting. There is a lot of hard work to be done. The long run is one of the key components of marathon training.
Charlie said: "For my long run I would once do 27 or 28 miles. But the other runs would be 20miles. I'd run up to 2hrs 50min." Ingrid gave her take on it: "My longest run was 2hrs 30mins. I didn't care about how far I was going.
"All the time, every week, I did a two hour run. Even if I was preparing for a 3K, if I came to a steep hill I would walk up so there was not too much lactic acid in my legs." While many successful marathon runners do work at race pace Ingrid revealed that this was not something she did: "I did almost nothing at race pace before the race. But I did a lot at 3min 30sec per kilometre pace as opposed to 3min 20sec. I would do a session of 3 x 10min at 3min 20 pace plus 5min at 3min 15sec pace two or three times. "For the marathon it is important to have a mix of different things. The mix that was good for me might not be good for another person. To be a good marathon runner you need to learn your own body and to take good information from your coach. "My coach would give me things to do and said, 'If you do this you will be better'. Sometimes I couldn't do it and would call him to say I couldn't do it. Then I would try it a week later and be able to do it. One day you can feel awful and the next week you can feel good. It can be due to your resting or other things in life. Sometimes you are tired mentally and you need to be fresh for it." Charlie revealed one of his sessions that he believes served him well in preparing to race over 26.2M. He built intervals into a long run: "I used to do 5min steady running, then a four min effort, then 5min steady running, then a 3min effort, then 5min steady running, then a 2min effort, then 5min steady running, then a one min effort. Then I would start this 4min, 3min, 2min, 1min efforts with 5min steady again. I felt it was the only session I could do that taught me to race a marathon. You got that feeling of getting to 20 miles and then someone making an effort. That time will come no matter how hard you are going. Sometimes in that session you would get to the bottom of a steep hill and find you have got a four minute effort into it. I felt I had to be in shape to do this session - it gave me big confidence."

Diet
The importance of diet is often at the front of a runner’s mind.
Both Charlie and Ingrid took a fairly pragmatic approach to it. Charlie said: "I always regarded food as one of life’s pleasures rather than something to do for running. Food was something I enjoyed not part of my training schedule. If I was very tired or not well I would take vitamins. If I was tired for four days in a row the first thing I did was back off the training." Ingrid said: "You can't have to eat, sleep and train to a programme or else your whole life would be a programme. You have to be happy. You have to be able to eat ice cream if you want to. If you are not allowed to do what you want to do you will not be happy with your running. Many runners are running slower and slower because they are not happy.”

Using your head
Talking about being happy in your running led Ingrid on to talking about the importance of the right psychology.
She said: "Some athletes think you need to train from the neck down and do nothing with their heads. "The way you think is a stronger weapon than most people are aware of. I would not have been as good as I was if I hadn't trained my head. Every day I trained my way of thinking. "Grete Waitz helped in that I knew if she could be the best marathon runner in the world then I could be. I saw that she was a good runner, she was a great runner but if I trained harder I could be better.
“My thinking was that if I was going to race with Grete in the field then I couldn't win. I had to get to thinking I can win and I can be the world's best or the best in Europe." Charlie did not spend long hours with a sports psychologist but he too sees the importance of having got his thinking right in a different environment. He too benefited from looking at his rivals and role models. He said: "Brendan Foster being there helped me because when I went training Brendan was there, John Caine was there and they were all a few years older than me.
“I would go on training runs with them then at weekends they would go and race internationally.
“I thought, 'That's what you do', that's what I aspired to. I was immediately aspiring to international level. The other big influence was that there was a good group of runners. We would train together twice a week at least." Ingrid revealed she also believed runners benefit from training together – despite the fact she spent long hours training alone on a treadmill in her basement: "It is difficult to get runners to understand that running is a team sport because runners have a schedule and they don't fit together. Someone shows up at training at 6pm someone else is already warming up and someone else shows up at 6.30pm."

The need for speed
Both Ingrid and Charlie used track work as part of this preparation, not that things always went as well as they might have hoped. Charlie said: "I went on the track in my build up. I felt to run a good marathon I had to be in good 10K shape. As the marathon approached the track work got shorter and faster. The last few weeks I would do 1500m type sessions. It brought me to a physical peak and that's what I wanted. I would do sessions like 200m reps with short recoveries. They appeared to be nothing to do with a marathon but they did give me an edge." Charlie admitted that races over the shorter distances weren’t always spectacular: "Some of my build up races were bad, and embarrassingly bad. If I went on my prior race performances I would never have raced a marathon. I was not so keyed up for them as for the marathon, my mind was on the marathon. I felt that on the day of the marathon I would be ready to run a good 10K." Ingrid said: "There is a formula of two times your half marathon plus eight minutes and that is true for most runners at high levels. A marathoner is not a person who trains miles and miles and miles at a slow pace. They need to feel they have a bit of speed so that they can be in a group in the front when they start speeding up. It is not a question of if you can get to the end of the marathon and feel that you can go on for another half marathon. It's that mix of what you can clock up in training and not forgetting that speed."

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