Training of Noureddine Morceli

All the below information about the training of Noureddine Morceli was taken from the book  ''Running with the legends', by Michael Sandrock.

Profile

Date of birth: February 28^th 1970, Algeria.
-  Previous world record holder for the 1mile, 1500m, 2000m and 3000m.
-  World champion gold medal for the 1500m in 1991, 1993 and 1995.
- World indoor championships gold, 1mile, 1992.

The consistent hard worker

Morceli combined a huge store of natural talent with a work ethic matched by very few.  This combination allowed Morceli to stay at the top of his sport from approximately 1990 to 1996. He was the dominate miler of the 1990's and it took the great Hicham El Guerrouj to end his reign at the top.

The workouts

All the information below is taken from 'Running with the legends', by Michael Sandrock.

Morceli's core training involved intense interval sessions around the track at paces faster than race pace.  However, Morceli also combined these intense track sessions with a lot of slower, endurance type recovery runs.

It is clear that speed played a huge role in his training, as he would often finished his long runs off with a few strides making sure that he “changed gears”.

The structure of Morceli's year was pretty standard, and is outlined below

At the start of the off season Morceli would always have a break from running to “recharge his batteries”.

• During the off season he lifted weights regularly.
• Once training resumed he ran pure mileage, but not overly excessive mileage.
• Once he felt that he was ready to get back into interval training he would start off cautiously by giving himself long recoveries between repetitions.  Once his fitness grew he then lowered the recovery times between repetitions.
• He did a lot of road runs of approximately 1 hour. He liked to “hammer” these 1 hour runs. At the completion of these runs he would then put on his spikes and complete run-throughs with good technique and speed.
• He ran twice a day only when he felt he could handle the workload safely.
• Morceli very rarely would ever run in excess of 1 hour.

A typical week of training for Morceli is outlined below. Information was taken from 'Running with the legends', by Michael Sandrock. (You said that in the heading)

Monday:

• 1 hour hard of road running. Upon completion he would do strides in spikes for speed and technique.

Tuesday:

• 1 hour very easy. It is reported this would be as easy as 10-minute miles.  The aim for him was to recovery on easy days so that he could train very hard on his hard days.

Wednesday:

• Track intervals. Examples of typical sessions include 12 by 400m with 100m jog recovery.  It is reported that he would do all of them in approximately 55 seconds.

Thursday:

• Recovery day. Same as Tuesday, very easy.

Friday:

• A fartlek session involving sprinting and striding.

Saturday:

• An easy day, with very slow jogging.

Sunday:

• 1 hour run with 30 minutes at 6:30 per mile pace