On a snowy Norwegian morning in January, Jakob Ingebrigtsen was on his treadmill, shooting the breeze about his running philosophy before our more formal interview. I should write something on this, I told him. In recent weeks, the 26‑year‑old has added to his legacy with a European 5,000m gold, the World Ultimate 5,000m title and a world road silver medal despite achilles surgery in February and a flu that lingered through May and June.
So now seems as good a time as any. Some of Ingebrigtsen’s opinions were a little hardcore. Others reiterated basic truths.
But whether you are a runner or not, there are certainly some life lessons from one of the most beguiling athletes around. 1) To be the best it helps to be a control freak Ingebrigtsen runs a lot, around 175-180km in a typical week. Apart from his family, that is his sole focus. They just wouldn’t handle it.
But that’s how I want to be. If there’s anything that’s out of my control, then I’ve not done my job properly.” “If you have a day off, you lose 20-25km of running,” he says. Counterintuitively, perhaps, he believes the risk of injury goes up too and tries to run even when he is moderately poorly.
Because you are taking your body out of a consistent load. When you get back again, you will have sore legs because your body is not adapted to that load and when you compensate, or just change symmetry a little bit, that’s when something snaps.” Ingebrigtsen runs twice a day, in the morning and afternoon, with hills on a Saturday and a longish run of 20km on a Sunday. He supplements this with drills, mobility and core work on Monday and Wednesday and weights every Friday and Sunday.
He does this week after week after week unless he is injured. Consistency, and gradually increasing load, is a lesson he says amateur runners should apply. Ingebrigtsen is famous for his double threshold runs on Tuesday and Thursdays – two runs each day that aim for the sweet spot between hard, but not brutal, fatigue, but sustainable.
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