SUB 2:

Sebastian Sawe 'The Special One'

IN THE SECOND OF THREE PIECES, RUN THROUGH COACHES MATT LONG AND SAM GOODCHILD EXPLORE WHAT TRAINING THE SUB 2 HOUR PERFORMANCE OF SABASTIAN SAWE WAS UNDERPINNED BY:

Those of a certain age may well chuckle when looking back two decades or so ago when then new Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho, turned heads when he famously both equally endeared and irritated the football world in equal measure in announcing himself as ‘The Special One’ upon his grandstand entrance to life at Stamford Bridge. I guess it’s a slightly different story when a significant other says this about
you, rather than it being a self-proclamation. Speaking of his charge, Sabastian Sawe, coach Claudio Berardelli recently said, “When I started to see him running the way he ran before London, I was like, hey, Sebastian was not just a good one…he’s a special one”.

One day there will no doubt be a book or three written about Sawe’s pre-London training but until that happens lets be a little more selective and focus on five key facets of his physical performance- namely Aerobic Endurance; Bridging; Interval Work; Strength Endurance and last but by no means least, Fuelling.

 Aerobic Endurance

To achieve success at the marathon one simply has to be an ‘aerobic animal’ with bags of oxygenated energy waiting to be used. Sawe averaged 125 miles per week with a peak of around 150 miles. There will be marathon runners out there of lesser accomplishment who have far exceeded these averages but the point about the differential between the mean average and peak is that his training will have included progressive overload weeks and periodically, de-load weeks.

Significantly Sawe’s traditional long run progressed from around 15 miles to around 25 miles. Again what is significant about this is the incremental increase in volume not the fact that he eventually covered almost the full marathon distance. Importantly Sawe would switch his work between gravel and asphalt thus gaining a biokinetic effect from operating on different surfaces and by making sure some of his runs
towards the London marathon itself would have been effected on a road-based surface, in the ethos of embracing race specificity. Amazingly Sawe reportedly ran a couple of extremely long runs of 24-25 miles almost entirely at marathon race target pace (around 2hr05m) for race specificity.

It is vital to understand Sawe operated off an extended micro-cycle of 10 days meaning he would not attempt to effect a long run every single calendar week and this explains why the culmination of his long runs were especially voluminous. To get the aerobic volume into his work on the majority of the days where a long run was not effected, Sawe would often ‘double day’, running up 12 miles in a morning and
around 6 miles in the afternoon.

Bridging

Every athlete training for a marathon needs to do a significant proportion of their work at low intensity and Sawe was no different in the lead up to London. Sawe favoured active rather than passive recovery days with steady state 7-9 mile runs being effected which would have assisted in the processes of ‘flushing out’ metabolic
waste.

This being said it would be a mistake to think that his periodised plan of training was completely polarised between ‘easy’ running and ‘hard’ interval training. There were sessions which bridged in between and which were harder than an easy run but not as intense as a formal interval session. One such type of session was the fartlek which he typically effected between 5 and 10 miles and which would have contained a mixture of surging, walking, jogging and easy running on a rotational basis.

The fartlek session which if effected in the true spirit of ‘speed play’ is guaranteed to tick the boxes of working all three energy systems- namely aerobic, lactate and alactic. The aim of a 'bridge session' like the fartlek is to finish feeling better than when
one started the session rather to be on one’ proverbial knees. 

Intervals

The difference between repetition training and interval training tends to be that the former typically involves shorter repetitions with relatively generous passive walk mode recoveries. The latter by contrast tends to imply longer repetitions with shorter but more active modes of recovery, be that jogging or ‘floating’ (slightly faster than a
jog). As a marathon runner rather than middle distance track star, Sawe would typically opt for aerobically based intervals. This being said prior to London there was significant variance in his work.

Shorter intervals would tend to involve between 5-10 miles of work broken down into repetitions of between 1km and 2km typically. The onus in these sessions, some of which were track based was to build to build neuromuscular ‘speed reserve’ by operating at faster than marathon race pace whilst maintaining aerobic volume via
an active float recovery.

In the name of the aforementioned concept of ‘specificity’, road-based intervals would be effected ordinarily over 11-15 miles. The emphasis in these sessions where blocked work would be effected over distances of over 2km was to simulate marathon race pace (2m50s per km)- sometimes referred to as ‘pace lock’. These sessions account for how Sawe was able to achieve a differential of no more than 10s between his fastest km and slowest km average splits at London (2m45s-
2m55s).

Strength Endurance

 Residence in the Rift Valley of Kenya would inevitably mean that even steady state aerobic runs would tend to have a strength endurance component due to the natural inclines. This being said more structured hill work would have been undertaken in the form of short and then medium length hills reps to challenge either the Alactic and Lactate energy systems. Alactic hill work tends to be complemented by walk
back recoveries whereas lactate hill work typically involved a more active jog down recovery.

Fuelling

 You may well have heard members of our coaching community like Gemma Hiller- Moses talking regularly in podcasts, using the phrase ‘Training the Gut’ when talking all things ingestion. As well as the preference for hydrogel formulated rather than traditional gels, Sawe drank regularly every 5km en route and at around the half way
point he temporarily switched to a caffeinated gel which enabled him to average a whopping 115 grams of carbs per hour.

Prior to the race itself his breakfast of bread and honey set him up for the day with the former acting as a quick digestive carbohydrate, functional in the replenishment of liver glycogen stores, with the latter providing a quick energy boost whilst avoiding a
so-called ‘sugar crash’. ‘

But I can never train like Sabastian Sawe!’, we hear you plead. Sure, we agree that if you tried to replicate even a 10 day micro-cycle of his schedule you’d probably end up on a trolley waiting outside a ward at your local hospital!

In our third and final piece, we will convince you that you can adopt the principles if not the exact practice which guided ‘The Special One’ of athletics, to last month’s iconic run on the streets of our capital.