Kenyan Olympic Runners: Technique Observations
Prior to the London 2012 Olympic Games, Kinetic Revolution Coach Neil Scholes spent time with the Kenyan Olympic Team at their holding camp in Bristol.
During the time spent with these exceptional athletes, Neil collected a great deal of running footage, working with the team coaches to offer technique observations for future reference.
For this blog post, Neil has slowed the frame-rate of some of the footage, and added his commentary to share some interesting observations about the running forms of these athletes.
Please Note:
Due to the nature of filming in-session with a group like this, the footage (camera angles in particular) is not of the usual quality we achieve in a full-on running analysis.
Thus, we approached this commentary more as a set of technique observations, rather than full analysis, as we can't clearly see some of the finer movements, especially at foot level.
The Athletes
The clip above shows the following athletes running a 200m rep at close to 25sec pace.
- Mark Mutai Commonwealth Games 400m Gold Medalist (Black T-Shirt)
- Vincent Kosgei 400m Hurdles (White T-Shirt)
- Maureen Chelagat 400m Hurdles (Red T-Shirt)
- Joyce Sakari 400m (White T-Shirt)
Follow-up Correspondence
"As a follow-up to the ideas we shared in Bristol, I have given attention to the young athletes in schools inorder to establish good running mechanics in good time. It's harder to correct anomalies when they are more mature.
The results have been very inspiring in a very short space of time; one of the junior boys ran a sub 14min 5000m barefoot and the girl did 9:32 in the 3000m which are P.Bs. The junior sprinter has run 49secs 400m barefoot. I have been able to get him spikes and believe when he gets used to them, he will be able to post 21secs in the 200m.
Stay intouch and lets explore the opportunities together."
Bruce Kilulai - Kenyan Olympic Coach
From Facebook & Twitter
We posted a raw (no commentary) version of the footage on to Facebook and Twitter, and asked our friends to share their impressions from a technique and biomechanical perspective.
Here's one of the initial responses we received...
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below...