Why Keely Hodgkinson’s seashore periods may be just right for you

Olympic 800m champion is the newest in an extended record of runners who’ve included sand dune exercises of their coaching with nice success

Modern coaching methods for right this moment’s endurance runners double embody tempo efforts, cross-training and naturally Norwegian-style double threshold periods. Due to Keely Hodgkinson, although, sand dune operating is making a comeback.

The Olympic 800m champion places herself via gruelling exercises on the seashore at Formby, particularly in the course of the winter base constructing interval. Located a brief drive from her dwelling in Manchester, the 22-year-old travels there to coach with coach Trevor Painter’s group. “It’s a very brutal session,” says Painter. “It’s formulates your thoughts in addition to your physiology.”

Working exhausting on the seashore and particularly up sand dunes is nothing new for center and lengthy distance runners, after all. The efforts construct power and stamina and promote good operating type because the physique struggles to get a grip on the tender, uneven floor.

Coincidentally 124 years earlier than Hodgkinson stormed to gold in Paris, one other British 800m runner referred to as Alfred Tysoe received the boys’s Olympic title – additionally in Paris – after having carried out a lot of his preparations on the sand dunes of South Shore in Blackpool, a couple of miles north of Formby.

Not solely did Tysoe win that Olympic 800m title in 1900 however quickly afterwards received a head-to-head match race over three-quarters of a mile in opposition to the Olympic 1500m gold medallist Charles Bennett. The victory over Bennett earned him the title of “undisputed middle-distance champion of the world” and Tysoe’s health had been constructed on the sand dunes of the favored vacationer city in Lancashire, though he died aged simply 27 after a bout of pleurisy.

An obituary in Athletic Information in October 1901 stated it was “possible that in distances from half of 1 mile as much as one mile he had no superior within the novice ranks” and added he was “a pure runner with a swish, raking stride and splendid ending powers”.

What’s extra, Tysoe ran related instances to Hodgkinson and the boys’s world file on the time for half of 1 mile was 1:53.4 – a fraction slower than the girls’s world 800m file of 1:53.28 that Hodgkinson has in her sights.

Whereas Tysoe is one thing of a forgotten champion, the coaching that led to Herb Elliott’s 1960 Olympic 1500m victory – in a world file of three:35.6 in addition – are higher recognized. Elliott famously went to Portsea on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, to coach below coach Percy Cerutty each weekend. Throughout that interval he endured numerous repetitions up and down dunes along with dwelling off uncooked meals and bathing within the ocean.

British middle-distance runners have additionally used sand dunes at Merthyr Mawr in South Wales for a few years and Steve Ovett, amongst others, was an everyday customer to the realm to embark on robust hilly exercises, typically in naked toes.

Coaching on the seashore was after all additionally popularised within the a number of Oscar-winning movie Chariots of Fireplace. Extra lately, the ultra-distance race the Marathon d’Sables has develop into referred to as one of many hardest footraces on earth, partly as a result of the sand underfoot makes it so difficult.

There have even seashore races within the UK such because the Blyth Sands occasion within the North East of England, the Crimson Bull ‘quicksand’ race in Margate and seashore races down Blackpool seashore too.

So what are you ready for? Throw away these tremendous footwear this weekend and hit the seashore as a substitute.

English Nationwide in September a shining success

A number of years in the past Weston Park close to Telford performed host to a G8 Summit with Invoice Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and Tony Blair among the many guests. Final weekend the identical venue staged the closely delayed English Nationwide Cross Nation Champs.

There have been fears the fields wouldn’t be sturdy but it surely appears the nation’s prime distance runners supported it pretty effectively. Holding the occasion in September sunshine may appear odd but it surely’s not at all times been freezing chilly or moist on the normal February date.

READ MORE: English Nationwide protection

I bear in mind the 2012 Nationwide at Parliament Hill – a couple of months earlier than the London Olympics – being unusually delicate with an ice cream van on the sting of the course doing a roaring commerce and spectators sporting t-shirts.

It’s a numbers recreation

I missed the English Nationwide Cross this 12 months to attend a soccer match as a substitute. Sacrilege, I do know, for an athletics journalist.

In my defence I haven’t been to a soccer recreation for years and I at all times like to match ‘different sports activities’ to athletics. Isn’t it good, in any case, to develop a broader view of the sporting spectrum quite than merely attending athletics occasions and nothing else?

I used to be considered one of virtually 17,000 spectators watching Plymouth Argyle beat Sunderland 3-2 in a Sky Guess Championship match and for slightly below £30 I noticed loads of targets throughout 90 minutes of leisure.

Was the general expertise higher than an athletics grand prix assembly with a similar-sized crowd? No, however then once more I’m slightly biased towards the No.1 Olympic sport.

I used to be nevertheless reminded why the broader media commit extra protection to soccer than athletics. Even at this ‘second tier’ early season recreation there have been much more folks than you’d get at, say, the UK Athletics Championships – and this included round 1700 Sunderland followers making an admirable 400-mile pilgrimage from one nook of England to the opposite.

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