Different long distance running training programs
TUESDAY 9 a.m.: 90 minutes at 3:40 per kilometre (25K) MONDAY 4 p.m.: 50 minutes of running at a tempo of 5 minutes per kilometre (lOK) ONDAY 9 a.m.: 120 minutes of running at a pace of 4 minutes per kilometre (30K) As she prepared for New York, Tegla often ran about 190km per week, broken down into the following schedule: She also finished third at the world half-marathon championships in ’93 and set the Kenyan IOK record in the same year (31:21), complemented by a brilliant 15:08 5K.īut by far the best performance of her life was at the 1994 New York Marathon, where she blazed across the finish line more than two minutes in front of her nearest competitor, ahead of all but 45 of the race’s 29,000 entrants. With careful coaching from Silas Chesere and Patrick Kimayo, Tegla improved steadily in her late teens, competing at 10,000 metres at the ’92 Barcelona Olympics at the tender age of 19 and then finishing fourth at the lO,OOOm world championships in Stuttgart in 1993 – still only 20. She had created a foundation on which she could build some spectacularly difficult training (see schedule below) as she entered the world of international competition. When she turned 15, Tegla had already run about 23,000 miles in her short lifetime, just going back and forth to school. At the age of 10, she was already-clipping off the 1OK distance to her school in a rather nifty 6 minutes, and by the age of 15 she was entering – and winning – races for Kenya against some of the best female runners in the world. The dirt road that extended from her hut to the school was extremely hilly, and oxygen was not exactly in abundant supply at the 7500-ft altitude, but Tegla soon discovered that she could run for long distances without becoming tired.