Cram's Training Camp

BACON BUTTIES ARE NO LONGER THE WARM-UP FUEL FOR WORLD CHAMPION MIDDLE DISTANCE RUNNERS. MATT LONG ATTENDS A STEVE CRAM TRAINING CAMP AND FINDS OUT FROM A MYRIAD OF EXPERTS EXACTLY WHAT HAS CHANGED

- Matt Long

 IT’S LATE July 1985 in Oslo and a 24-year-old British athlete in the distinctive yellow vest of Jarrow & Hebburn AC leaves Spaniard José Luis González and Los Angeles Olympic 1500m champion Seb Coe trailing in his wake.

The athlete stops the clock at a staggering 3.46.32 to win the “Dream Mile”. It will stand as a world record for more than eight years. Thirty-three years later it still is the British and European record.

The athlete is of course Steve Cram. Now one of the voices of athletics on TV, I’m listening – with over 100 others – to his words in the largest manmade woodland in Europe, Northumberland’s Kielder Forest.

After inspirational talks about international representation in triathlon from BBC Breakfast’s Louise Minchin and The 401 Challenge from Helen Rollason Award winner Ben Smith, here’s what I learned from the Jarrow Arrow.

Strength and conditioning work

In Cram’s biography, The Making of an Athlete, and prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics he’s quoted with saying this about strength and conditioning (S&C): “Other types of training can help give you all-round body strength but running is specific and that’s one of the things in training which a lot of people tend to neglect. When you get out on the track nobody’s going to ask you to pick up a weight halfway round, nor to do 10 press-ups at the end of each lap”.

Three decades later, by his own acknowledgement, attitudes have changed. Cram introduces 2011 European indoor 3000m champion, Helen Clitheroe, to enlighten and share how in her early career she used to attend Bodypump classes twice a week and that after her 2002 Commonwealth Games 1500m bronze medal she began to access specific S&C support via the English Institute of Sport in Manchester.