21.04.2009

Tallents on a high en route to Berlin

Before Jared and Claire Tallent had even crossed the line in the third leg of the IAAF Race Walking Challenge in Wuxi, China, at the weekend, the pair was already on a high.
  
The Tallents, together with fellow Australian walkers Chris Erickson and Adam Rutter, had just spent three weeks training at altitude in Flagstaff, Arizona, as part of their build-up to this year’s world championships in Berlin.

And the high-altitude training was quick to pay dividends for the hard-working couple, Jared placing fifth and Claire 11th amidst strong fields for the men’s and women’s 20km events at the weekend.

Twenty-seven-year-old Claire Tallent said the US-based training camp, run under the guidance of coach Brent Vallance, was yet another phase of their Berlin campaign.

“In Flagstaff we were training at 2100m and doing some pretty intense sessions and really just getting a good feel for altitude training before we go on to the world champs this year,” she said.

“Hopefully we’ll repeat the sort of training we’ve done and get a good idea of how we handle altitude training and what we can get out of it. It’s really important for us to see how altitude training has worked for us individually and what we can handle and how we can best prepare for world champs.”

While altitude training is not a new concept for Vallance’s squad, it was the first time the athletes had lived and trained in high-altitude conditions.

For dual Olympic medallist Jared Tallent, 24, the three-week camp is set to hold the athletes in good stead in the heat of competition in Berlin.

“We’ve always done a live-high, train-low program living in the altitude house at the AIS and we’ve been banking up a lot of hours in there but not actually living at altitude and training at altitude, so it was good,” Jared said.

“It was good to be away, on camp you tend to focus a bit more and get a bit more training done so we did a lot of kilometres while I was up there, we got up to about 200km on some of the weeks and I think I’ve benefited a lot from that."

In its three weeks in Flagstaff the squad covered up to 200km a week and all with the Berlin finish line in its sights, where a new generation of walkers will push the Aussie men all the way.

“It was different every day but on our longer days we did about 30km of walking in the morning and 10km of running in the afternoon and then we had track sessions and medium distance days as well,” Jared said.

“I actually did a fair bit of running while I was up there, I got up to about 70 or 80km a week of running which is the most I’ve ever done and the rest was walking.

“The (standard of competition) is getting better all the time, it’s getting tougher and you really have to make sure you’re in top shape at every race to do well. 

“It’s the new generation, I’m only 24 and the guys that are the toughest to race now are all younger than me.”

Having arrived home in Australia after a whirlwind start to the year, Vallance’s AIS-based squad will now turn its attention to race six of the IAAF series in Spain at the end of June in what will be its final hit-out before the Berlin event. 
 
“We’ll have a few quieter weeks and then really start to put together a bit more base work again and get into the faster stuff again leading into world champs,” Claire said.

“This is kind of the first training block and the first block of racing for the season and then we’ll go back and refocus on our base training and build up again."

The next race of the IAAF Race Walking Challenge will be held in Sesto San Giovanni, Italy, on May 1.