Paula’s kids

In my article about marathon speed, I wrote about how the best marathoners of the Sixties could all run 400 metres in under a minute. They started out at clubs where they developed their speed and only later worked on endurance. This idea has been something rolling around in my mind for a while now and I wanted to provide another example

Back in the November 2019 issue, Runner’s World ran an interview with Paula Radcliffe on getting more kids into running. One question and answer stood out to me:

RW: With parents like you and your husband Gary [Lough, coach to Sir Mo Farah] your children must be pretty active?

PR: Absolutely. Both of them [Isla, 12 and Raphael, 8] will sometimes do kilometre events in Monaco where we live. Isla recently ran 3:25 and Raph can do 3:43. We also recently dropped Raph into a one-mile race with a bunch of men and he actually finished third in a time of 6:26! He absolutely loved it. I’m not sure that the men did though …

Imagine that! An 8-year-old boy running 3:43 for a kilometre and a 12-year-old girl running 3:25. Now go out and see how quick you are. When I ran my 800m time trial at start of December 2020 I clocked 2:58 which is the same pace as Raphael but I have no doubt I’d have lagged behind him had I run another 200m. That quickness over the kilometre enables him to run a fast mile – it’s not like he’d stop at 1,001 metres and have to walk the rest. I’m guessing he’d have been hitting 22-23 minutes for a parkrun if they dropped him into one.

Now I could make excuses about small children having a good weight-to-power ratio, lower centres of gravity and no idea about pacing. But whatever the reason, these kids are QUICK and I’m doubtful it’s down to the genetics of their parents. It will be the excuse those men beaten over the mile give “He’s Paula Radcliffe’s son so he’s born to be good”. But I suspect the truth is more down to how Paula and Gary are coaching their children to run quickly first before they step up the distance.

I suspect if you could find a snapshot of Raphael against all those other mile racers, he would have been up the front from beginning to end. He would be one of the fastest over quarter mile, half mile and so on. The speed he carried through the distance with him gradually slowing as he went into the uncharted territory of the mile.

I genuinely believe 90% of people can run significantly faster if they train for it. I got sucked into working exclusively on endurance for the past four years and while my times remained decent I was struggling to hit the heights I’d once reached so easily. I used to have oodles of speed available because I pushed hard on every run and gasped my way up every hill; but I always felt something was missing when I raced. As I began to understand endurance it turned me into a more efficient runner who recorded faster race times. The only trouble was I lost touch with my speed. You have to keep going back to speed to maintain it. If you’re constantly racing and training at 6-10 min/mile, you lose the ability to finish at sub-4 paces. People think all the slow training kills their speed, it doesn’t. It only goes when they stop working on it.

Now ask yourself, if you raced Raphael or Isla, who would win? If the answer isn’t to your liking then it’s time to do something about it!