Coach shares his secrets

HOW do you run a marathon distance faster than anyone has ever run one before?

First you find someone willing to fund the project.

Next you find out if the best distance runner the world is up for the task of running 422 consecutive 100m sprints at an average speed of around 17 seconds each.

And finally, once you get him interested, you call in the best of the best in sports science.

That’s when Tim Kerrison enters the room. Kerrison is one of the most respected high-performance coaches and sports scientists in the world.

He cut his coaching teeth mentoring rowers in Australia and Great Britain before working with British Swimming, Swimming Australia, and the Queensland Academy of Sport. But Kerrison’s involvement in road cycling is what cemented his reputation as a leader in his field.

Between 2012 and 2019 when he was with Team Sky Cycling – later INEOS Grenadiers Cycling – he helped secure an extraordinary seven Tour de France victories. He also had a say in multiple Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia wins during the same period.

Kerrison visited Bond University last week to offer insights from his long and fascinating career in elite highperformance sport. But of all his achievements, it was one of his more recent projects, the successful Ineos 1:59 Challenge, that had the audience at its most attentive. The Ineos 1:59 Challenge was a successful 2019 attempt by Kenyan athlete Eliud Kipchoge to break the two-hour mark for running the marathon distance.

The event was created specifically for Kipchoge and held in Vienna, Austria, on October 12, 2019.

Kipchoge ran through crisp Vienna morning air to clock an unbelievable 1:59:40.

It’s a mind-boggling athletic achievement. It was also an extraordinary logistical feat, and one that Kerrison enjoyed especially because it allowed him to apply elements of all he had learned over an extensive career.

“I made a decision early on in my coaching not to be an expert in one thing,” he said. “I needed to know enough about each of the areas involved to be useful on race day.”