Training Log-- Seb Coe

At the Rome Olympics, two relatively-unknown athletes, trained by a coach named Arthur Lydiard, won Gold Medals. Lydiard has his runners, regardless of their distance, consume around 100 miles a week during their base training. Soon, the distance running world collectively decided that the surefire formula for winning gold medals was a steady diet of 100 miles a week. Most people got injured, but Frank Shorter, who ran 150 miles a week, won a gold medal. Bill Rodgers, who also ran 150 miles a week, won Boston and New York several times. By the late seventies, the world was certain that more miles meant more speed, and all the top runners ran ten miles in the morning and ten miles in the evening and partied like rock stars on Friday and ran 3:52 or so for the mile every Saturday until Sebastian Coe, who hardly ran more than 40 miles a week, blew them all away at the 1979 Oslo Dream Mile.

Unlike his competitors, Sebastian Coe did not barnstorm his way across Europe, racing twice a week and collecting under-the-table payments from meet promoters. He picked his races intentionally: he'd race shorter distances to work on speed, longer distances to work on strength. He hardly ever raced on a whim, and usually had a pretty good idea of his season before it began. He always kept his eye on a particular race, the Olympic Final.

Unlike his competitors, Sebastian Coe did not run his legs to mincemeat on a daily basis then compensate with a bucket of Big Macs and beer for the ever-hot furnace. He approached his workouts like a sculptor: he would carefully craft the calendar and cadence of his workouts so that he arrived at the starting line of his ultimate race ready to win. He supplemented with heavy weights and plyometrics to focus specifically on explosiveness and efficiency.

Unlike his competitors, Sebastian Coe did not treat his racing season like a world tour-- he went to bed, and lived a boring life in service of races. He did not treat his training like solitary, painful, penance-- he consulted daily with his coach (his father) and his doctor on how best to craft his workouts. He didn't treat his career like some poetic, never-ending quest-- he set goals, accomplished (most of) them, retired, then leveraged his athletic success for a career in politics.

There are plenty of places to find the workouts Coe crafted, or how he structured his season, but the most important revelation that he brought to the running world was that he crafted and structured them in the first place. The meticulousness and intention was fundamentally different than what anyone else at the time was doing. Sure, everybody worked hard, but the did so with almost a self-conscious abandon. He had a professional approach that hadn't been seen since Alf Shrubb and the days of actual professionalism. Seb Coe had the humility to run only as much as needed, and always in service of his goal, which was to win races. Over the course of his career, he won the Olympic 1500m gold twice (the only male-- and only non-Soviet-block athlete-- to ever do so), the Olympic 800m silver twice, and set nine outdoor (and three indoor) world records.

The final line of the comic is reminiscent of a quote from Peter Coe, Seb Coe's coach and father: "One must believe that if winning isn't everything then it very nearly is."