Source: podcasts-francais(dot)fr
Yann Schrub
First Year medical school: during his first year of medical school he only trained three times per week for 45 minutes each time on trails in the forest at a fast pace.
Now, flash forward to 2021 he now train six times a week and works 50 hours per week in the hospital including 14 hour shifts at night.
His favorite and most effective training is what we call in French - VMA. He does not like doing 20×400 m on the track. In French we call it « le seuil » which would be his top speed that he can maintain for a long distance. For example when is training for 5000 or 10,000 m in a typical session in the summer it would be 1000 m, 2000 m, 3000 m, 2000 m, 1000 m. Then approaching the competition, He will do 3×3000 m. He does not normally do this during the season but only when he’s close to a major race.
The main objective with the VMA is to augment the distance and to diminish the rest periods between each interval and that is how he has improved for the past few years. He has cut his rest down from one minute (1:00”) between each interval to 45 seconds right now in 2021 and hopes to bring it down even more - that is the key to improvement cutting the rest, and increasing the distance while still maintaining the same speed or going faster. His Basic speed that he works at is 1:03 and 1:04 for a distance of 8000 m. This is the objective and that is what he’s capable of doing at this time. His VMA capacity right now is 2.40 per kilometer.
His weakness in training is strength and in his group “Club athlétisme de Sarreguemines” (Northeast France) he is by far the weakest when it comes to lifting weights and general strength and that is something that he hopes to remedy at some point in the future. He rarely does cross training except during the three weeks in the summer which he takes completely off from running and at that time he will do some cycling. He used to be a skier but has now stopped that activity because in February and March he is focusing on the French cross country championships.
Nutrition he’s lucky to come from a rural area and he eats a lot of organic produce including honey and fresh products from the garden. However being an internist in the hospital he’s forced to eat in the canteen frequently and so has to do the best with what he has. He makes comments about the amount of pesticides present in vegetables and fruits and laments the fact that there’s nothing much we can do about this when eating in canteens and other places where we cannot prepare our own food.
Technology he never uses any of those devices which constantly measure all the parameters to do with heart rate etc. he just goes by feeling so he’s a very natural runner in that respect, and he’s doing 14 hour night shifts in the hospital the next day would be very easy and he might just go for a jog or completely take the day off.
Paris 2024 he’s planning to possibly take one or two years off completely from Medical practice to devote to full-time athletics because you only have one life and this would be the time to do it.
During the lockdown, he used the treadmill in his home and one time he ran 30 km on the treadmill at a very fast pace so he knows that one day he may be good at the Marathon.
Paris 2024 he’s planning to possibly take one or two years off completely for medicine to vote full-time to athletics because you only have one life and this would be the time to do it.
You can find all of the above and more on the podcast at the link which I provided in the beginning of this. It is in French and for those who don’t know French it might be a little bit difficult to understand.