Seb Coe is one of the legends of British running. Now known as the head of World Athletics and the organiser of the 2012 London Olympics, anyone who watched athletics in the early 1980s remembers his rivalry with Steve Ovett. The 1980 Moscow Olympics are one of my earliest sporting memories where Coe entered as world record holder for the 800m while Ovett hadn’t been beaten in the 1500m for three years. While the races resulted in two golds for Britain; it was a surprise when they each won the race the other was favoured in.
Coached by his father, Peter Coe; Seb won golds in 1500m at both the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympics. In 1979 he broke three world records, the 800m, 1500m and mile, in 41 days. In 1980 he broke the 1000m record then bettered it to 2:12.18 in 1981. That same year he also reduced his 800m WR to 1:41.73 – a record which lasted until August 1997.
It’s a highly successful career and his father’s training philosophy of improving lactate threshold through low volume, high intensity training became a training model which endured into the 2000s. It’s only later been understood that Coe’s low volume of fifty miles per week wasn’t really low volume as it neglected to count mileage done during warm-ups and cooldowns and explains why later attempts to follow a genuinely low volume approach led to a dearth of western success in middle distance for the following decades.
It’s clear Peter’s coaching was able to get the best out of Sebastian and he goes into great detailing about all aspects of training in his book – “Better Training for Distance Runners”. This isn’t a book I recommend to the average runner but, as a coach, it is a mine of information which I’ve regularly returned to.
This winter I’ve rejoined the gym with the express purpose of getting stronger and trying to maximise my muscle recruitment – mainly for running but with the view it is one of the most important things you can do to stave off the effects of ageing.
I’ve been focusing my weight training on the advice in running books like Peter Coe’s as well as reading decent articles and watching videos on YouTube from trusted sources. I’m not interested in Bro science or what the influencers have to say. When I need advice on lifting I chat to, Rich, a powerlifter at the gym who squatted 390kg / 850+ lbs at his peak.
In Chapter 6 of his book, Peter Coe explains the benefits of weight training and in describing squats on page 280 he gives this example …
“Seb Coe (130-lb body weight) doing six sets of half-squats, the number of reps will be 15, 15, 15, 10, 10, and 5, with the weight increasing by 10 lb per set set from 140-190 lb. Admittedly this is a challenging session – more than 11,000 lbs moved in 70 lifts – but over the years Seb became an accomplished weight lifter, and while this training session was not a “killer”, nevertheless it would have been accompanied by only an easy run that day and also the following day.”
To summarise and convert from Imperial to metric it is
| Reps | LB | KG |
| 15 | 140 | 63.5 |
| 15 | 150 | 68 |
| 15 | 160 | 72.8 |
| 10 | 170 | 77.3 |
| 10 | 180 | 81.8 |
| 5 | 190 | 86.3 |
| 990 | 2178 |
Although I’ve only been back in the gym for less than three months, I’ve already been squatting significantly heavier weights than these albeit not necessarily deeply. Having chatted to Rich he tells me that a half squat is when the thighs are parallel to the ground and while I find this difficult to judge accurately when looking straight on into a mirror, I’ve been able to half-squat reps at 100kg perhaps more. My heavier squats which reached 160kg after twelve weeks are certainly only 1/4 squats at best.
While Rich tells me that he would recommend only ever doing deep squats and working up from those, he is a powerlifter not a runner whereas Pete Magill states in his Speed Runner book “You don’t have to squat so low that your thighs are parallel to the ground. While a lower squat will help acceleration, a quarter squat gives you more bang for your max velocity buck.”
With Christmas week seeing the gym closed for a couple of days and it marking the three month mark since I started training, I wanted to see whether I could match what Seb was doing. As my gym’s weights are in kilograms I decided to keep things simple and work at 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90 kg with the same rep counts as he was doing.
I felt confident I could achieve this as I’ve done 10x90kg half squat; there was however a little doubt at the back of my mind as to how I’d find the 15rep efforts in the beginning because I never do sets past ten reps at lighter weights. While the overall set of lifts seemed like they would be easy to do, I wasn’t taking anything for granted.
Squats are always the first thing I do at the gym and this session – on the Monday before Christmas – wasn’t going to be any different. I warmed up for squats in the usual way by doing three deep reps with an empty 20kg bar which both begins to warm me up but also ensures I’ve set the equipment, in particularly the safety bars, in the right places. While I didn’t expect to need them for this, it doesn’t cost anything to put them in place. Once I’d done 3x20kg I then proceeded to do 3x40kg, 3x50kg and 3x60kg which all felt very simple and like I was barely training. I then took a few minutes before starting Seb’s Squat Challenge!
The first set of 15x65kg (143lb) felt easy. My legs were warmed up and it was a set well within my capabilities so I just did the 15 reps straight off and then added 2.5kg to each end of the bar for the 15x70kg (154lb). I took a minute or two rest and was then able to go through this second set with only a momentary pause around the 8th rep.
Having loaded the bar to 75kg (165lb) for the next fifteen reps I had confidence that if I could get through this things would get easier on the remaining sets. Unracking the bar I began to notice it was feeling a little heavier and once again paused around the 8th or 9th rep than as I reached the 12th I knew I had the strength for the last three reps but also that I would need to take a second or two extra rest at the top before starting the next rep. Things were beginning to get a little tougher.
At 80kg (176lbs) I felt confident in the knowledge that I now only needed to do ten reps which I have regularly done before. It proved relatively easy as did the next set at 85kg (187lbs). By now the bar was definitely feeling heavier when I unracked it but having unracked as high as 160kg I expected this.
With the final set only requiring five reps at 90kg (198lb), I even felt confident enough to repeat my first rep as I could see I didn’t go deep enough. Even though I’d already done 60+ reps it might have been the easiest set of the lot.
I’d done it – mission accomplished! Of course there is no official Seb’s Squat Challenge it’s just something I wanted to see if I could do. All told it took me about twenty mins with breaks of 2-3mins between sets. There was the occasional rep where I dug deeper but in all honesty it never felt that difficult. Most of the sets were done with barely a pause. The one remaining doubt is whether I was going deep enough. A half squat should see the thighs parallel and, if I were being hyper-critical, I’d like to have gone an inch or two deeper but it was close enough.
And yet there’s a catch. Seb Coe weighed 2/3rds of what I do – 59kg vs 90kg. Where the final set was about 1-1/2 time his body weight, it’s equal to mine. To truly take on this challenge, I’d need to up the weights and set them to the same percentage of body weight as Seb did. I know I’m not ready for that, and while I can probably get close to deep enough for five half-squats at 135kg, it’s all the preceding lifts which would be make it tough. Even so, maybe when I’m finishing up at the gym in March I will give it a go!
Weight training can be an important supplement to run training and if you decide to start doing squats – even just air squats with body weight or with a weighted vest, remember that Pete Magill states “Pause when your thighs are near-parallel or parallel to the ground – a quarter squat for maximum velocity training and half squat for acceleration”.
If, like me you end up at the gym, I think it’s worth working through all ranges of motion at different times. One day I train at getting used to squatting the heaviest weight I can and this might only allow me to confidently do a quarter squat. The next time I train I might focus on achieving half squats which are inevitably at a lighter weight but allow my legs to recover from the very heavy day. At the end of each session I usually do a set of the deepest squats I can, ass-to-grass as Rich terms it, where my thighs are touching the backs of calves – again these will be even lighter but useful in adding support and confidence for heavier lifts.
Big Red Running 
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