The women’s marathon this morning was full of drama and despair, strength and success. After just three miles American Deena Kastor, who won bronze in Athens, pulled up with a dreaded foot injury that so often strikes distance runners. Britain’s Liz Yelling slipped over at around the halfway stage, cracking a rib, before eventually finishing a respectable 26th, considering the circumstances.

Paula Radcliffe, the former world champion and current world record holder, put in a remarkably valiant performance. She has only been able to road run for three weeks due to her stress fracture in the femur, and hadn’t managed more than 15km, less than a half-marathon. After her Greek tragedy four years ago she was determined to race again at these Olympics. She claimed beforehand that she simply wanted to complete the race. She maintained a good pace with the leading pack. Then with just 2km to go she had to pull up and stretch her suffering thigh. 

She may not have had the strength to push on with the leading pack but she showed great strength in carrying on and pushing herself round that 400m track to finish an incredibly respectable 23rd. Afterwards she was obviously disappointed and like any competitive athlete worth their salt, had obviously had dreams of pulling off the impossible. 

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In an event like the marathon though, miracles are hard to come by. It’s no 100m sprint where if you’re name is Usain Bolt you can run backwards and still win. The marathon requires so much acute training. The combination of cardio-vascular fitness and muscular-skeletal fitness is crucial. As the leading pack pulled away, the strength required was obvious. 

It was Romania’s Constantina Tomescu who showed the most strength, racing away from the halfway mark to enter the stadium alone and grab the gold. At 38 years old she should provide hope to Paula and everyone approaching ripe old 40. Let’s consider the importance of strength to distance runners.

While many endurance events draw heavily on the aerobic energy system, they also require short high-energy bursts provided by the anaerobic energy pathways (e.g. the sprint for the line, as we saw for the silver medal) – pathways that are often neglected in training because of the desire to concentrate on endurance performance. However research by Finnish scientists at the Research Institute for Olympic Sports suggests that this strategy may be counterproductive for endurance runners, and that anaerobic performance can be readily enhanced without increasing training volume or compromising endurance.

In the study, the effects of concurrent explosive strength and endurance training on aerobic and anaerobic performance and neuromuscular characteristics were studied in 25 distance runners, who were split into an experimental group (13 runners) and a control group (12 runners). All of the runners trained for eight weeks with the same total training volume, but in the experimental group 19% of the endurance training time was replaced by explosive-type training, including sprints and strength drills. After the eight-week training programme, all the runners were evaluated for various aspects of performance with the following results: 

Compared to the controls, the maximal speed during a maximal anaerobic running test and 30-metre speed improved in the experimental group by 3.0% and 1.1% respectively;
The concentric and isometric forces generated during leg extension increased in the experimental group but not in the controls;

The experimental group improved their muscular force-time characteristics and had rapid neural activation of the muscles (ie they were able to generate more power through more rapid muscular contractions);

The increase in thickness of quadriceps muscles after eight weeks was nearly double in the experimental group compared to the controls;

Importantly, the maximal speed during an aerobic running test, the maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max) and the running economy (how efficiently the runners used oxygen to for any given running speed) remained unchanged in both groups.

The implications of these findings are clear; if you are an endurance athlete whose event also demands brief bursts of high-intensity work, substituting some of your endurance training (up to 20%) with anaerobic work needn’t necessarily involve a drop in aerobic performance, and may even give you a competitive edge.

There you go, marathon training just got harder!

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