Posted: January 3, 2005

Multisport: EnduranceRadio.com Interview with Kent Oglesby

From: EnduranceRadio.com

Tim Bourquin: “Welcome back to www.EnduranceRadio.com. This is Tim Bourquin. Thanks very much for joining us today.

We’re going to be speaking with Kent Oglesby. He is a coach with /www.aerobic.net and anaerobic management, and we’re going to be talking to him about his background in the sport. He’s been in running for a good long time, so we’re going to hopefully get some information about his background and some training tips for you runners out there. We’re trying to building our library quickly here of pure running interviews. I know we’ve been heavy on triathlon, but we’re also doing more adventure racing and cycling interviews as well. A couple of things; make sure you sign up for the monthly audio newsletter. We give away some great gear every other week to celebrate the launch of the site but of course you have to be a newsletter subscriber to be eligible to win, so make sure you get signed up for that.

Tim Bourquin: “Kent thanks very much for your time, I appreciate you talking to us at www.EnduranceRadio.com this morning.”

Kent Oglesby: “Glad to be here.”

Tim Bourquin: “Talk about your background a little bit. You’ve been in the sport for how long now?”

Kent Oglesby: “Well I probably pretty much grew up with the running sport. I was certainly a runner in high school and so forth, and then took some time off. I did not run in college and sort of picked up with the running boom in the early to mid 70’s and I’ve been at it pretty much ever since doing some coaching at the high school level, both head coach at track and field and also, interestingly enough, head coach in swimming.”

Tim Bourquin: “I’ve spoken to your colleague Libby Hickman this morning and we did an interview with her and I asked her the same question; how do you think the state of running in the US is at this point? We had that boom in the 70’s where it really grew. Is it still on rise?”

Kent Oglesby: “Well, let me just give you an example. There used to be a fairly small race out in Kansas called The Atwood Ten Miler and 250 to 300 people would show up at that and normally there would be at least 55 to 60 people, including women that were running under one hour for ten miles. You couldn’t find that today at all in even in a big race as well. Same thing with the marathon; it used to be that the qualifying time for the open men was 2:49 and now its, what, 3:05, 3:10, something like that. I think there is just not the quality and maybe also the quality and depth of running that there used to be. There might be more numbers but not the quality and depth.”

Tim Bourquin: “Why is that do you think? Are there less people that are concentrating on full time training for long distance running?”

Kent Oglesby: “You know we talk about this all the time. You get a beer in front of you and you start to discuss this and so forth, and it’s hard to really put your finger on, but you think in the high school, for example, when I started teaching and also running there were no women’s sports. The only sport maybe, other than GAA, was track and field and now there’s what, I don’t know, at the high school level probably as many as 20 different sports for both men and women at the high school level; certainly that’s true at the college level as well. So there is a dilution of the talent I think across the board that might have otherwise have been in running. I think too there’s just not the quality of training that there used to be.”

Tim Bourquin: “You’re typical client, are they training for a 5K or a 10K or a marathon?”

Kent Oglesby: “Oh boy, that’s interesting. I would say probably half of them have the marathon bug and perhaps even more than half. The marathon still tends to be the sort of, you know, glamour event and everybody tries to want to run it. Interestingly enough, when somebody comes to me I try to talk them out of it.”

Tim Bourquin: “Why is that?”

Kent Oglesby: “Well I just think that the marathon is a hard hard distance and it takes a huge amount of training. If you’re a recreational runner you could do a lot more interest things than spend all of your time training for a marathon and go and run when probably one in four goes well.”

Tim Bourquin: “So when a client first comes to you, are they a brand new runner or do you typically get people with a little more experience?”

Kent Oglesby: “You know it runs the gambit. I have people who are brand new runners. A woman came to me several years ago, couldn’t run five minutes, and at the end of the summer she was running 90 minutes, I mean she never thought that was possible. I have people who are on the other end of the spectrum who are trying to make, say, the Olympic trials and the marathon and everything in between, but I’d say the preponderance of those individuals are recreational, and interestingly enough the ones we really enjoy working.”

Tim Bourquin: “Now the people that do come that are brand new, what’s the first thing you do? Do you do an overall assessment of where they’re at?”

Kent Oglesby: “They have to fill out about an eight page questionnaire and that’s pretty detailed. It gives a lot of background information and also what they’re presently doing, if they’re running at all, walking, just general information that would help me pinpoint where they are, and then we do interview, kind of like this, over the phone, except it takes about 30 or 40 minutes and I get more information. It’s just a process of gathering information as we go along and trying to reassess and assess where the person is, and then, in that case, give them appropriate schedules that will help them to progress.”

Tim Bourquin: “I want to ask you about your overall philosophy about training and running, but we need to take a quick break. We’re going to be right back to speak with Kent Oglesby.”

Tim Bourquin: “Kent, over the past couple of months, since we launched this site I’ve talked to a number of different people about their overall philosophy and really its kind of all over the board. You hear people talk about; when you run you run at the same pace and you run as long as you can. I hear people say never run more than two minutes as fast as you can, and then all interval training. What’s your kind of overall philosophy about how you train for a marathon?”

Kent Oglesby: “Well I suppose in some general way you would say that both John and myself are third generation Liddiard type coaches. I think Arthur Liddiard was one of the great giants. He was just here in Boulder not long ago. I’ve spent an afternoon or two with him talking about running and so forth, and then the next generation after that was the people that Liddiard coached, people like John Davies who fortunately is now deceased, who was actually John’s coach in New Zealand one time; and people like Dick Quack and many many others, and so we kind of follow that general idea, but I most people never really listened very closely to Liddiard. It wasn’t doesn’t long slow distance, there was a lot of hard running and a lot of periodization of what they were doing, and certainly we try to adhere to some of that. To say that I have any one specific philosophy would be difficult because we try to look at each individual as a case of one and sort of proceed from there because the differences among people are as differences as you can find on the bell shaped curve.”

Tim Bourquin: “How much for you concentrate on, say, technique versus just pure endurance training?”

Kent Oglesby: “Technique, you mean as in terms of biomechanics?”

Tim Bourquin: “Exactly, in terms of their running stride and that sort of thing.”

Kent Oglesby: “Oh here’s another can of worms. Biomechanics are as individual as your thumb print, and if I were to cut you down the middle and compare the left half to the right side you’re just not a mirror image, and so a lot of things are happening in terms of biomechanics that are a reflection of the specific makeup of each individual body, and whereas you can try to smooth something’s out and try to develop some things that will help imprint a little bit better biomechanics I think, in general, that if you try to do too much you’re in trouble. Bill Rogers would be a great example; I mean look back at those old pictures and, you know, a left hand and a right hand were doing something way way different and he looked like a windmill at times and yet he was extremely successful. I think he got measured later on in life and found out that one leg was quite a bit shorter than the other. So trying to smooth out everything and trying to change everything is not necessarily in the best interests of the athlete.”

Tim Bourquin: “So maybe looking at it but not getting too over complicated and too over involved in trying to change gauge and that sort of thing I guess is what you’re saying.”

Kent Oglesby: “Yeah, I’d that. In other words I think repetitions over a period of time as long as they’re not like, you know, carpel syndrome type of repetitions tend to smooth things out. Same thing is true in swimming. I mean swimmers do a huge number of meters everyday and repetition is important in terms of developing your body’s best ability to be, what should I say, to be as smooth as possible.”

Tim Bourquin: “Okay. Have you ever had any folks who are about the same weight, about the same build but drastically different endurance levels and do you ever find out what makes this person different and why are they able to run so much longer than the other?”

Kent Oglesby: “You know, again, you do find great individual differences. Let me give you an example that would also sort out back door answer your question. Ano Dane, who was one of the great marathoners from New Zealand, had a max heart rate of 168 and that’s incredible for a woman who ran 2:26, 2:25, 32 minutes for 10K. I had a woman who was 45 and was in pretty good shape who was running for me and we were finding heart rates that were very very high, and we did a treadmill test and found that her max heart rate was almost 200, at 45 and was quite healthy. I mean, you know, here’s two people and of course I can’t compare them exactly, but what I’m trying to get at is that you could have two people that look very very much the same and have a vastly different make up in terms of everything from slow twitch, fast twitch muscles to heart rate numbers.”

Tim Bourquin: “Which I guess speaks to why coaching is so individualized and so personalized.”

Kent Oglesby: “Exactly and that’s why it’s an art, not just something that you can plug numbers into and spit out an answer. You’ve got to look at each individual and try to look at the numbers, no question about that, but at the same time to use experience and intuition as well.”

Tim Bourquin: “Well Kent believe it or not we’re actually already out of time, but we’ll link to your bio and your page on www.anaerobic.net so listeners can go and see your bio and find out more information about your coaching, but thanks very much for talking with us today, I appreciate your time.”

Kent Oglesby: “It was my pleasure.”

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