Still Running (weakly). Issue 127

PAST – inspiration – On Friday 27th June 2003, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya and Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia raced each other for the first time, with 21-year-old Bekele holding off 18-year-old Kipchoge by three-tenths of a second to win the men’s 5,000m in 12:52.26.  However, in the Paris World Championships that year, Kipchoge defeated Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj and Bekele to win 5000 gold.

It is difficult to sum up exactly how great these athletes are – and over such a span of time. 

The marathon is a notoriously unpredictable event, yet Kipchoge has won 16 of the 23 he has contested at time of writing – in fact, 16 of the first 19.  He has two Olympic golds in the event (2016-2020, actually 2021), putting him alongside Abebe Bikila (1960-64) and Waldemar Cierpinski (1976-80.)  Bikila was a great athlete but did little else besides those halcyon days in Rome and Tokyo.  And Stasi files show that the East German was on drugs.

Almost completely dominant on the track, Bekele has three Olympic and five World golds, plus a scarcely believable 11 World Cross Country Championship titles.  He also set world records at 5 and 10,000.

Kipchoge set a world marathon record of 2:01:39 in Berlin in 2018.  The next year in the German capital, Bekele came within two seconds of the mark!  Kipchoge set another world record of 2:01:09 there in 2022.

Kipchoge is without doubt the greatest marathon runner the world has ever seen.  Bekele will forever battle it out with Zatopek for the corresponding title over 5 and 10,000!

PRESENT – perspiration – So their meeting in the New York City Marathon last weekend almost had the feeling of the last Ali-Frazier fight, or an Ashes series, or Coe and Ovett racing one last time.

And, whilst it would have been great to see Kipchoge and Bekele fighting it out for the win through Central Park on Sunday, it was never going to happen, with the Kenyan clocking 2:14:36 for 17th and the Ethiopian dropping out at about 17 miles.  The former is 41 this week and the latter was 43 in June.

Well, if their careers really are over, we can only thank them for the memories – and glory one more time in, for example, Kipchoge’s 1:59:41 in Vienna in 2019 (an unofficial event, but one which to my mind did carry the stamp of a truly honourable celebration of human potential) and, say, Bekele’s irresistible last lap of 53.02 to win the Olympic 10,000 in 2004, as Gebrselassie passed the mantle to his compatriot.

FUTURE – suggestion – I have been asked for more detail on my fabled 2 minutes hard / 2 minutes float session……….

As I have said, 2 minutes is my optimum speedwork interval – 1 minute being too short, and 3 minutes seeing the quality suffer – especially when the bits in between are floats rather than jogs.

I used to do this in the middle of a 10-mile run, warming up with about 3 miles of easy running, doing 6 stride-outs, and then commencing the 6 rounds of 2 hard / 2 float, with about a 2-mile warm-down to finish.

But what is ‘hard’ and what is this ‘float’?  The hard stuff is about mile pace, I would say, and then, depending on your endurance, the float is half marathon, marathon or even ultramarathon pace.

I could run a 4:50 mile and a 2:36 marathon back then, so my hard speed was 5-minute miles, and my float was 7s – about my pace for a 40 miler.  So I would average 6-minute miles for the entire 22 minutes of the speedwork (the last float is not necessary.)

For a 3:20 marathoner, it may well be 6s and 8s.  For a 4:20er, perhaps 7s and 9:30s.  Experiment and you will be able to tell the right pace for you – as long as the float is NOT a jog!

I believed that this was the most important session of my week, very quickly giving me an extra gear over 10km/half marathon, enabling me to cruise along about 20 seconds a mile faster than I had been.