He suggests a 20-minute nap between midday and 3pm to relieve fatigue. But when you don’t hit that target, naps can help counter – but not completely fix – short-term sleep loss and provide an energy boost for a late-day run, Dr Ramar adds. Most runners don’t need a nap if they get the recommended seven to nine hours on a consistent basis, Dr Ramar says. Crucially, your pituitary gland releases growth hormone, which helps your body to grow and repair, says Dr Ramar. While you’re down, your body is doing more than resting. ‘If I have enough sleep, my body and my mind are free of stress and ready to go with the programmes,’ says Kipchoge. Then, instead of scrolling through Instagram or Facebook, he winds down by reading at least two chapters of a book. The habit reduces his exposure to blue light, known to delay the release of melatonin, leading to a decrease in sleepiness, says Kannan Ramar, former president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Most of us don’t have either the time or 120-mile weekly workload to justify clocking 11 hours of sleep, but we can follow Kipchoge’s sleep hygiene cues.Īt least 30 minutes before bed, he turns off all electronics. Kipchoge sleeps up to nine hours at night, even after taking up to a two-hour midday nap. Save your conversations and stories for the finish! Sleep like your run depends on it (A rule of thumb to follow is ‘10 syllables’ – if you can’t get those out before you need to breathe, then you’re no longer doing a Zone 1 run.)Īnd then there’s Zone 3, where talking is impossible – and who cares, because the point of Zone 3 is maximum effort.

If you can talk, but only in broken sentences, then you’re in that middle-threshold zone, Zone 2. If you’re able to hold a conversation in full sentences, without having to interrupt yourself every few words to take a breath, then you’re in Zone 1 – easy training. So instead of being bogged down in the swamp of percentages of VO2 max, heart rates and lactate thresholds, here’s a far simpler way to manage your Kipchoge-like training: Physiologists have very precise definitions for these boundaries, and various tests can be done and measurements taken to identify what yours are.īut such tests are beyond most people – and honestly, they’re unnecessary, given the range of possible training paces. Managing training intensity is all about understanding how to identify when you’re moving from a purely aerobic and management training zone into a zone close to your physiological thresholds, and then beyond this into severe exercise. Identify your intensity, whether you’re the next Kipchoge or the first you. There’s a long run on Thursdays that builds to a fast finishing pace but everything else is very, very easy. He does those only twice a week: a track session on a Tuesday, and an unstructured fartlek session on a Saturday. That’s why Kipchoge spends a lot of his time at a relatively pedestrian 4:30 to 5:00 per kay – it frees him up to really give his hard sessions a proper go.

And risk injury and burnout, and dilute our high-intensity efforts – those days when we actually want to push harder – because we’re that little bit fatigued from what was meant to be an easy recovery day, but instead became something tougher. If we’re always edging into Zone 2, we get too few days of appropriate aerobic stress. Well, the problem is that this compromises recovery. Over time these efforts accumulate, and your training takes on a 60/30/10 pattern rather than the 85/10/5 of Kipchoge and many other elites. Or you’re finishing an easy 8km run, but you feel good so, 3km from home, you lift the pace just a little, cranking it up progressively, until you finish at around your 10km pace. If we’re always edging into Zone 2, we get too few days of appropriate aerobic stress See ‘In The Zones’, below, for more on recommended training zones and how to know when you’re hitting each of them. You’ll often read about ‘ threshold pace’ and ‘ tempo runs’ – they fall into this middle zone. But you’re still in control, and you could speed up if you wanted to. You’ll feel like you’re working, and that if you picked the pace up slightly, you’d cross a threshold into Zone 3, where the proverbial bear will jump on your back. This is what we’d call ‘heavy’, but it’s also manageable.

Think of how you feel during a 5km time trial, or hard intervals. At the other end of the spectrum is Zone 3 training, which is what physiologists describe as ‘severe’ once you enter this zone, fatigue is inevitable – it’s a matter of time before the effort becomes too much, and you’re forced to slow down or stop. There is easy training, which is done in Zone 1. Broadly and most simply, we can divide training into three zones.

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