Okay fanatical puritans, it’s time to read about the world’s leading runners, many of them the eminent top of the class from Ethiopia and Kenya.
My favourite piece of advice from Gudisa is ‘When you run the race, just remember that you will not die. So you have to run really very hard!’ Mersha is getting more and more obsessed with me recovering between training.
He wants me to stop working for the last two weeks of my trip and to spend all of my time between training sessions asleep. He keeps repeating the mantra ‘no recovery, no improvement.’ He’s right, of course, but there are limits to how much rest you can deal with.
High altitude training: What could be more enjoyable than sapping the living daylights out of you day after day?
You really can’t run anywhere from his house without encountering lung sapping, imperceptibly steep hills, so most of the running we did was fairly slow. We managed to cover a fair few miles though, fuelled by the near constant eating that comes with Easter celebrations here.
Running for them, it’s a good job, average club salaries are $37 per month, in stark comparison coming 9th in a European race could net $1000 in prize money, representing roughly two years of his salary.