EAST MEETS WEST: FROM RUSSIA TO BEDFORD! NEW LEVELS COACH MATT LONG TRAVELS ACROSS EUROPE TO TRACE THE ROOTS OF A KEY SESSION UNDERTAKEN BY THE GREAT PAULA RADCLIFFE:

Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop

Excited athletes travelled from far and wide, all over the UK, for the inaugural Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop on Sunday 5th January as the former world marathon record holder and world marathon champion returned not only to the University where she graduated from but also to the very Loughborough track whose stadium was more recently named in her honour as a bow to her mind boggling achievements on the road, track and of course cross country. Clad in black shorts and orange tee shirt, despite the wearing of a cap, onlookers could not fail to recognise the unmistakable bob of the blond pony tail as the three time World Cross Country Champion sped round the snowy track in bitterly cold conditions.

The derivation of ‘the Bondarenko session’

The specific track session which both our workshop attendees and Paula herself undertook was framed in the classroom-based introduction led by New Levels Coaching Founder Lewis Moses as ‘the Bondarenko session’. Whilst the mode of session was undertaken by Paula herself under the guidance of coach Alex Stanton, she was keen to credit its derivation from the Russian star of the 1980s, Olga Petrovna Bondarenko, who most famously became Olympic 10,000m champion in Seoul back in 1988. Amongst Bondarenko’s other successes were the breaking of World Record in 1981 and subsequent lowering of it 3 years later in 1984 to 31m13s plus the bagging of a coveted  European 3000m title in Stuttgart, Germany, two years prior to her Olympic triumph in South Korea.  Her 10,000m track PB of 30m57s owes a considerable debt to a particular mode of session which she regularly undertook- hence notion of ‘the Bondarenko’. 

The practice of ‘the Bondarenko session’

Typically Bondarenko herself effected the following: 

Run 400m @ 5k pace
Recovery 400m@ marathon pace
Run 300m @ 1500m pace
Recovery 300m @ marathon pace
Run 200m @ 800m pace 

Recovery 200m @ marathon pace
Run 100m sprint
Recovery 100m @ marathon pace

The above constitutes one block or set of work, the cumulative volume of running being 2km which if effected on a track is 5 laps. In her prime Bondarenko was capable of completing a combined total of no less than 6 sets of the above. Whilst each set of work is continuous without passive recovery, ‘the Bondarenko’ is framed as an interval session because the Russian effected 3 sets back to back, had 3 mins passive walk recovery, 2 sets back to back, then 3 mins passive walk recovery, finishing off with a final singular set of work.

Athlete-centred adaptation

To attempt the undertaking of 6 sets of work without first habituating the underlying principles of ‘the Bondarenko session’ would be folly and is likely to lead you to having to terminate the session very early! Indeed many club and even county level athletes have reported over the years their reluctance to engage with this mode of session because of initial bad experience where they had to proverbially abort. 

The New Levels Coaching Team who planned for the Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop were cognisant of the above and along with Paula, made two key adjustments to attempt to avoid this. Although the session was track based as alluded to above, athletes were run to time not set distance and because the group was large and diverse, athletes ran to feel pace rather than prescribed stopwatch splits. 

So whilst the session deviated from the practice of Bondarenko herself four decades ago, it remained faithful to the underlying physiological principles underpinning her work. One set of the January 5th session was as follows: 

2 min @ 10k effort- 2 mins @ marathon effort

90s @ 5k effort – 90s @ marathon effort

60s @ 5k effort- 60s @ marathon effort

30s @ faster pace- 30s @ marathon effort

Each set added up 10 minutes work and in remaining faithful to the golden principle of athlete-centredness, workshop attendees were given the option of undertaking three or four sets with there being a 3 minute passive walk recovery between each set. 

Why the session works

The session is an interval rather than a repetition session precisely because the focus is as much on the active nature of the recovery as it is on the pace of the faster efforts. It was both Woldemar Gerschler and Herbert Reindel who almost 100 years ago, taught the exercise world that the heart grows larger and more efficient during the interval whilst recovering from faster running. Reindel was a cardiologist whose 1960 book Heart, Circulatory Diseases and Sports was a ‘game-changer’ in the emerging field of sports science and his principles were put into coaching pedagogical practice by the German Olympic Coach Gerschler coached the likes of Rudolf Harbig who set a world record for 800m way back in 1939 and Britain’s very own Gordon Pirie who took Olympic silver over 5000m in 1956. Whilst repetition training is indicative of speed endurance work, ‘the Bondarenko session’ is framed as ‘aerobic endurance’ work because of its continuous rather than discontinuous nature. 

The Oregon based coach and coach educator, Peter Thompson (see https://www.newintervaltraining.com) has done great work in recent years in explaining the benefits of athletes undertaking ‘roll-on’ or ‘float’ recoveries. Thompson introduced the term ‘Lactate Dynamics Training’ in the mid-1990s to explore modes of training underpinned by the dynamic utilisation and clearance of lactate so that lactate could be used as a productive energy source by the body. Thompson’s work owes an intellectual debt to the notion of the ‘lactate shuttle’ which was developed by Dr G.A Brooks in the mid 1980s when Bondarenko herself was in her pomp, to articulate the dynamic action of the metabolite being mobile within muscles and the circulatory system, thus producing energy.  

The session is also congruent with the kind of multi-pace ethos developed by British Coach Frank Horwill in the 1970’s, whose work with the likes of Loughborough University graduate and two-time world cross country silver medallist, Tim Hutchings, was based around operating over differential paces across a microcycle of training. 

How to diversify and progress ‘the Bondarenko session’. 

The father and coach of double Olympic 1500m champion Sebastian Coe, who graced the very track named after Paula Radcliffe way back in the 1970s and 80s, once famously quipped that, “Athletes who train the same, stay the same”. So ‘the Bondarenko session’ needs to be both diversified according to athlete centred need or correspondingly progressed. 

The two golden rules of the session are that (a) recoveries should always match the same distance or time of the efforts and (b) that recoveries should always be active and not a passive walk. 

By definition, our attendees at the Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop tended to have an orientation to the 26.2 mile event. That is exactly why the active recoveries were set at marathon feel pace. This effectively meant that the efforts were always at faster than marathon feel pace – in our case namely 10k, 5k and ‘faster than 5k’ paces. By operating at paces faster than marathon feel pace, we are thus able to develop ‘speed reserve’ which is akin to driving at 70mph on a motorway, pulling off on a slip road where the speed limit suddenly drops to 30mph and feeling as if we are proverbially crawling along in our vehicle, only to look down in shock at the speed gauge and see that we are still in fact moving at 50mph. By operating at paces faster than marathon feel, our athletes were meant to perceptively feel that marathon paced recoveries were ‘slow’ when it fact they were anything but. 

So there is no reason why you couldn’t operate over threshold (one hour race pace/ 7 out of 10 rate of perceived exertion) if you wanted to make the session even more aerobic than ours or conversely if you are say a 5k specialist you could add paces in there such as 3k or mile feel paces which will correspondingly give you the ‘speed reserve’ effect alluded to above. 

The athletes at the Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop operated over 4 sets of 10 minutes volume per set- giving a cumulative total of 40 minutes on their feet. One way of progressive overload could for example be to add yet another 5th set of work making it a cumulative total of 50 minutes work. Another intervention could be to drop a set and regress to just three sets of work but to expand the time of each set to say 15 mins which would result in a cumulative time total of 45 mins, 5 mins in excess of the session Paula and our athletes effected. We can add time or distances or correspondingly regress times and distances depending on our state of fitness. 

What we could also consider doing is to reduce the time of the recoveries between each set of work. Athletes at the Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop had 3 mins walk recovery- progressive overload could be achieved for example by reducing the recoveries between sets to 2 mins or alternatively sticking with 3 mins recovery but making athletes jog rather than walk. 

The above being said the golden rule of progressive overload is we only change one variable at a time. Either we add a set, change the paces, reduce the recovery and so on but critically we only change one thing at a time, otherwise we risk what physiologists tend to refer to as ‘over-reaching’ which will lead to us going stale and risking injury. 

The above leaves us with the following questions for self-reflection

  1. Where is there a place for me to effect a ‘Bondarenko style session’ in my periodised plan of training?
  2. What multiple paces within my version of the ‘Bondarenko session’ would give me the most physiological benefit for the specific event(s) I am training for?
  3. How can I remain faithful to the principle of progressive overload in terms of the way in which I diversify my version of the ‘Bondarenko session’ over a much longer period of time or macrocycle of training?

Matt Long was a New Levels Coach @ The Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop and in the build up to the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games he served as an England Team Coach both at the Marathon Trial Race and Training Camp. 

Register Your Interest for the Next Paula Radcliffe Marathon Workshop https://www.newlevelscoaching.co.uk/paula-marathon-workshop/

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