Amongst all the busy activities that goes on when a new business opens its doors, we have not had time to introduce the members of our fledgling “ChampionsEverywhere Squad”, a dedicated group of athletes that our coaches work with to help them move from simply enthusiastic competitors to national or international standard.
We were hoping to present a story on Richard Healy first, but his family and work commitments sadly means he has needed to take a “semi-retirement” from running. This made his victory at the “To Hell and Back” race earlier in the year particularly well-timed and we hope to see him back with the squad some time in the future. It was a pleasure for me to work with Richie and I recommend everyone check out his fabulous stone-work. Running’s loss is art’s gain in this case!
Instead, I want to introduce a runner who just about made himself a “man of the moment” recently with a strong third-placed finish in the Wicklow Way Trail race, a 25km run from Ballinastoe Wood to Johnnie Foxes’ Pub in Glencullen. The runner is Amidou Dembele, a 27-year old native of the African nation of Mali.
In 2009, in his first mountain running event, Amidou finished 69th out of 157 runners in the Powerscourt Uphill race. I didn’t notice him, as I was six minutes ahead in 29th that day but that would soon change and this development from very much a “mid-packer” to podium-chaser and contender is the essence of what ChampionsEverywhere is all about and it is fitting to share Amidou’s story as an inspiration to any other “69ers” out there:
First encounter
I had first noticed Amidou in 2010 when I returned from one of my lengthy spells on the side-lines and as it often happens he caught my attention because I raced in and around him at the time. He looked an impressive athlete displaying all the traits of natural strength, but he did look more like a sprinter to me at the time and I was initially happy to find that I could drop him easily enough on the ascents.
A few month’s later, as I was recovering from another Snowdon race, I decided to have a run-out on the trail-course I had helped introduce on the IMRA calendar a few year’s earlier: the Devil’s Glen race close to Ashford, County Wicklow. This route has a particularly fast fire-road descent on the first loop which takes in the Seamus Heany walk in the old glen.
Coming into this descent I was not a happy camper, having blown up badly on the ascent but once the legs got rolling down that steep bit of fire-road I felt like I was “really moving” and did not expect anyone to gain ground on me. Going at full tilt, I suddenly saw Amidou on my side, and then he was gone, soaring down the hill. Here I was moving my legs as fast as seemed possible at the time, yet he went past me like I had been standing still.
After the race, I was curious: I beat him on the ascents so I had a feeling his training background might be limited. Yet, I could see he had great natural power and incredible leg-speed. So I asked him: what sort of training are you doing, oh, and by the way, how do you feel about joining Crusaders? (perhaps I was not quite so direct, but in the end he did).
The beginning
Amidou explained to me that he had never run further than 45 minutes or so in training (this made me feel worse about the result, but more interested in what he’d say next) and went on to mention he’d done a few races and had received a basic background in sprint training which is more popular in Mali than long-distance running. We will often remind Amidou of this when he hammers past us doing strides in our fartleks. “Well, you were a sprinter,” we’ll moan, and he’ll respond: “Ah yes, but I wasn’t a very good one, you see.” Thus his interest in long-distance running was born.
One of a family of ten, Amidou grew up in South-West Mali, on a farm owned and run by his parents. Aoife and I were quite fascinated to know more about Mali. Everyone knows Timbuktu but otherwise little is common knowledge about this vast country in West Africa. The North-Western borders consist mostly of desolate Saharan sands and only a small part of the population lives there. Unfortunately, it has become the fulcrum of the recent crisis which lead to the military staging a coup against the young democracy. Fighters from Libya have been creating trouble in the north and the army now seems intend on remaining in control until they can quell this force.
“In Mali, everyone is like a big family,” Amidou explains, and while thousands died to bring democracy to the country in 1991, so far the latest troubles have been entirely bloodless. From his homeland Amidou pursued the vocation of a scientist, studying in Algeria and France before arriving in Ireland where he now works as a PhD researcher for UCD.
Amidou clearing the cones in Kerry 2011
Training and 2011 season
One comment had struck me during my first conversation with Amidou, he mentioned: “I’d like to be able to run 6-minute miles aerobically eventually.” This left me thinking “here is someone who has thought it through.” The topic arose when I had explained the basic premise of the Lydiard system. The more cerebral and thoughtful the athlete, the easier they can adopt to a schedule like Lydiard’s which encourages runners to fully understand the principles so they can make the right decisions every day. As I am wont to say: “the only mistake you can make with a schedule is following it every day.”
With his enormous leg speed but largely unexploited aerobic reserves from the lack of volume training, my gut told me he could be a great runner so I asked him if he wanted to strike up a collaboration and allow me to coach him. He had clearly liked what he had heard about the system and got stuck straight into seven days per week of training in January 2011. Things progressed well from the outset: Amidou always seemed to make the right decisions, running well when feeling great and easing off when something was coming on.
His paces in training were coming down fast and he had little problem adapting to a training regime that required two runs longer than ninety minutes during the week as well as the two-hour plus run on the Sunday. Coming into the training, he had only one road race for me to base his pace estimates on – a 39:57 10km, well below his capabilities. We saw the first sign of this in April when signed up for the Connemara half-marathon, his first race on the distance. I set out a pace plan for him to break 90 minutes and he went on to a convincing 1:28 on the slow course. There could be no doubt: his body was absorbing the aerobic load well. By early June, we even had time to give him the experience of a track race as he entered the combined C and D race at Irishtown. He ran a solid 10:02 for his first try at the distance but in his typical meticulous manner focused rather on the fact that he felt his pacing had been well-coordinated when he emailed me the summary.
We had a few small setbacks as shin-splints gave him a bit of trouble, a common occurrence when both volume and paces go up quickly during a period of weeks. This meant a number of easy weeks largely off running but as always Amidou focused on his cross-training. When he suffered some minor damage to his knee in the beginning of this year, from slipping during a sprint on the grass, the pattern was similar. He saw a good specialist, Gráinne Butler, and retained his fitness through biking and gym work, not allowing himself to lose much of his hard-won condition.
By May, despite clocking two top-10 finishes in the Leinster League, he was still not considered fast enough for our Crusaders A team for the Wicklow Way Relay and instead ran a strong leg for UCD. With his ferocious descending skills and still building fitness, uphill remained a slight weakness, which he showed when he finished only 21st at the Powerscourt Uphill but he quickly improved on this finishing 5th after an amazing descent off Lugnacoille. He finally got his first podium spot by recording the fastest descent of anyone at the Leinster Championship race on Mt Leinster in County Wexford and then went on to show that his fitness was getting markedly stronger over the long distance as well when he took 5th position in the 21.1km Dublin Mountain Plod. Two weeks later he was back on the podium at the Glen of the Downs trail race.
Half-marathon improvement
Amidou during a Kerry Way training run
I personally only began to truly appreciate the huge gains of aerobic fitness he had made when we joined up for the National Half-Marathon in Waterford in September. Markus Roessel and I were the most experienced half-marathon runners there with Markus looking for about 80 minutes and me just trying to see what sort of shape I was in after the Lakeland 50 mile ultra. On the day, I felt perfect and close to my best in 1:22:48 but Amidou stormed past me looking relaxed on the first mile and finished with an impressive 80 minutes. He had knocked 8 minutes of his half-marathon best time between April and September!
On that mark, we all went into the cross-country season with high hopes but if anything the regular group sessions in Marlay may have been a little bit on the “competitive side”. Early season, the sharp training paid dividends: first he could collect a team prize with Jason and I at the traditional Star of the Sea cross-country race in Meath and then Jason and he went on to have cracking runs in the Dublin Novice race both finishing with spectacular kicks. Amidou awed our Crusaders supporters when taking out four men in the final push to the finish, a rare chance to display his obvious sprint power on the flat.
By the late cross-country season, Amidou was left a bit tired and was disappointed to miss out on a medal when he was taken out late in the Dublin Intermediate race where he never quite looked himself and finished 5th Crusader. Still a very credible performance but it was clear he had hit a peak too early that autumn. I took the blame for this and made it a priority to see him freshen up and catch a break from the rough cross-country scene and instead do “a nice road race”. The reward came in December when he lowered his 5k PB of 17:45 (which he had set in his first attempt earlier in the year) to 17:09.
The secret?
There is no secret to his success beyond proof of the old adage that “miles make champions” but, of course, those miles need to be run in the right way and Amidou has knack for approaching his training intelligently and with great diligence. Beyond that he is no doubt a fast learner and during our Natural Movement workshop a few weeks past we learned why this may be so.
Tony Riddle was impressed from the outset by Amidou’s running form, noting that the only reason he had any issues with injury was certain bad habits he showed once he wore his standard runner – a pair of over-engineered standard runners. Once we took them off him and put him on the treadmill, he was a picture of perfection – relaxed, good posture and moving as nature intended the human machine to.
Amidou Dembele during the Natural Movement clinic
Once we filmed him on the descent it became even clearer why he could recover so quickly from workouts and possessed his blistering
Amidou's "downhill pose" - pure control and perfect posture
descent. For starters, he held no fear: “I was a stupid child really,” Amidou laughingly said during the course, “always crawling up trees, jumping around, once I get badly hurt in a fall and my parents were upset then, but they never told me “stop””. This is unlike the mentality of many parents. Today we make a habit out of “don’t do that, you’ll get hurt” or “don’t do that, you’ll get dirty” ingraining patterns of fear and tension in children that linger on in the subconscious of the child. This “fear of movement” restricts our uninhibited movement over “dangerous” terrain. In the absence of this fear, Amidou holds a great advantage on many of us but it’s not the only one – his superior posture and movement patterns are another.
Moving down the hill, we could detect on the footage that Amidou is able to hold his posture in its strongest and most efficient position with his foot landing every so slightly behind his centre of gravity. “If you could hold it even a few more inches back, you’d be even faster”, Tony pointed out, so there is a slight room for improvement, but compared to the footage of the rest of us, it was clear that Amidou’s running style allows him to minimise ground contact time and impact from the ground with each step, all the while maintaining an extremely fast stride without losing control and exerting his muscles as little as possible, relaying instead on the optimal placement of his foot under his body for maximum elastic recoil or “free energy”. A downhill machine indeed.
2012 and beyond
So what in 2012 for Amidou? The year got off to a troubled start with the sprint injury but he’s now back running regularly and training for his first attempt at the Snowdon International mountain race. I believe this will be a great opportunity for him to express his obvious love of the downhill over the 5 mile descent which has seen some truly insane downhill times over the decades. It’s an exciting climax to what promises to be a very interesting mountain running season for the “Man from Mali”.
As a coach Amidou has been the ideal athlete to work with and there’s a lot of lessons runners can take from his approach: he’s very curious about the Lydiard system and takes great care to assimilate the training principles. When he’s in doubt about something regarding a workout, he asks or he makes a judgement call and then discusses it with me afterwards. I have noticed in the last year the frequency of questions has become increasingly lower and his understanding of the Lydiard system has become very intuitive.
As mentioned in the introduction, Amidou’s story is really what I want ChampionsEverywhere to be all about: taking “mid-packers” and using the Lydiard system to bring out their full potential. Don’t get us wrong, we would not turn prodigies away at the door or go as far as saying that Amidou is not a talented athlete. There would much to suggest he is. But talent or not talent is not really the point of the tale. Rather that if you take an enthusiastic runner with a good mindset and an able body and build them up on a platform of steady aerobic mileage, then you will very often find yourself very positively surprised with the result. “We didn’t suffer, we enjoyed ourselves,” Lydiard would gruffly say, and he’d have approved of Amidou who finishes most of his sessions with a big smile.