MILES BETTER

Join us as we celebrate one of the greatest moments in athletics history!

In honour of the 71st anniversary of Roger Bannister’s legendary sub-4-minute mile, NLC Coach Matt Long will take you on a lap of the track like no other — at our special mile-themed Friday Night Track Session this April.

Then on Monday 5th May, we’re heading to the iconic Bannister Mile event, where New Levels Coaching is hosting an exclusive wave takeover. It’s set to be an unforgettable day of fast racing and community spirit — and we’d love to see you there!

🎟 Haven’t signed up yet? Join our wave here:
https://in.njuko.com/bannister-2025?mc_cid=a4b0c1c8f5&mc_eid=UNIQID&currentPage=select-competition🔗 And don’t forget to select the ‘New Levels Coaching’ group when registering!

NLC Track Night – Friday 25th April 

Sign Up Here: https://www.newlevelscoaching.co.uk/new-levels-track-nights/

So with this in mind our Friday night ‘Miles Better’ session on Friday 25^th April gives a nod to a favourite session of the late, great Sir Roger Bannister. 

As a young and extremely busy medical student, Bannister’s affiliation to the so-called ‘Paddington Lunchtime Club’ enabled him to fit training around his considerable commitments in his final year of study at St Mary’s Hospital in London. So he made use of what little spare time he had to undertake interval training.

It was the Physiologist Dr Herbert Reindel, who laid the academic foundations for 1930s German coach Dr Woldemar Gerschler to make developments in repetition and interval training. Through bottom-up empirical testing with athletes, it is likely that Gerschler intuitively knew that breaking fast running down into smaller units with controlled periods of recovery got his athletes fitter but it was Reindel who caught up with his practice and provided the sports scientific theory which explained it.  

The above undoubtedly influenced Sir Roger Bannister’s own charismatic coach, Franz Stampfl, in terms of the setting his own repetition training. Bannister’s lynchpin session on the ash track near the Paddington hospital where he worked was 10 or 12 x 440 yards (400 metres in today’s currency) which was effected with a rolling 440 yard jog recovery in approximately 2 minutes. 

Significantly progressive overload was achieved not by increasing the number of repetitions to 15 nor by reducing the recovery to say 90 or 60 seconds, but rather more simply by incrementally increasing the speed of the reps. Sounds simple? It is! But here is the ‘sting in the tail’. Whilst you are going to undertake 12 x 60 seconds with a 2 minute slow jog back to the start recovery, unlike Sir Roger who had a whole season to get progressively faster, you are expected to get incrementally faster during our Friday evening session itself!

You are running once again to feel rather than split and are encouraged to use a rate of perceived exertion scale. 

You are going to run the 60s efforts in three sets of 4 repetitions as follows. 

1^st effort @ 7 out of 10 RPE.

2^nd effort @ 8 out of 10 RPE.

3^rd effort @ 9 out of 10 RPE.

4^th effort @ 9 out of 10 RPE. 

To help you achieve the above, you will be given a cone to run with on the first effort of each set. That cone will have a sticker with your name on it. When the whistle goes after the first effort in each set you place your cone on the infield right by where you have finished. Your task then in working through the RPE scale and in getting faster on each subsequent effort is to push the cone forward on your 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th efforts as evidence you are getting incrementally faster. At the end of the 4^th effort on each set you will have a generous 3 minute passive walk recovery back to the start which enables you to pick up your cone and walk back to the start with it ready to commence the subsequent set of running. 

Common mistakes in attempting this mode of session:

1. Not having a strong enough aerobic base of fitness to undertake interval training. Whilst Sir Roger trained in his lunch hour, his aerobic base tended to be built over long weekends of hiking in the countryside and he had significant strength endurance acquired through mountain climbing. If your aerobic base is diminished for whatever reason, speak to the coaching team on the night who can adapt the session for you. You may for instance choose to run all efforts @ threshold or 7 out of 10 RPE so you build volume without over stressing your lactate system. 
2. Going off too hard! You are full of adrenaline and it’s understandable that you may wish to proverbially ‘fly’ on your first effort because you are fresh. This being said as this session involves a progressive element you are doing yourself a disservice if you go off at 8 or 9 out of 10 on an RPE scale. You will purely and simply have no other gear to move into!
3. Turning an interval session into a repetition session. So what’s the difference? The former involves active modes of recovery such as floating or jogging. The latter involves walking or standing still. Like Sir Roger in his lunchtime sessions at the Paddington track, you are expected to slowly jog your recoveries once you have placed your cone down on the first effort or moved it forwards on the 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th efforts. This active mode of recovery makes the training an interval rather than repetition session and helps build aerobic capacity by simply adding to the volume you have covered whilst running. So jog don’t walk those recoveries!
   
   

Matt Long is an NLC Coach who is a former winner of the British Milers’ Club Annual Horwill Award for outstanding coach education.