“I often find out the track session on a Tuesday a few minutes beforehand. I don’t want to be thinking about it the whole night,”
- He doesn’t rely on track sessions, and even during summer he says it’s rare to track on the track more than once a week. Majority of his hard work is done on paths and parklands. Track sessions he adds are ‘merely the finishing touch.’ He adds that: “You need to do the runs and the hard sessions in the park – the aerobic stuff”.
- Generally in winter mileage is upwards of 100-110 miles per week, and in the mid track season “we might go up to 100 miles a week”. He is picky about high mileage weeks to accommodate races but generally maintains a lot of volume all year
- Craig’s coach Bideau says that there’s a know purpose for all of Craig’s sessions, and 3-4 main ingredients which are worked upon throughout the year, just in different ratios.
- Example of a threshold/pacing session during base in Boulder Colorado:
“The other day we did three times 15 minutes, with a one-minute jog between. It was on a pretty flat dirt path, soft surface. Each one, the first five minutes were at a heart rate of 165, then the next five minutes at 170, then the last five minutes at 175. That, of course, is very individual, what heart rates you run at. But the amount of work is pretty standard for pace runs, somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes of work.” - “We do a lot of things in training that mimics race situations. However, you can never beat the race environment and you can never train to the standard that you can race at. That’s one of the problems some athletes encounter – they train too hard and leave their best form on the training track rather than stepping up another gear in races. Better to train smart and just get many of the sessions done so the fitness levels accumulate slowly over time.
“You’ve got to be desperate, because everyone else in the race is”