In the tradition of Aussie legends “Mona” and “Deeks”, here’s how Lee Troop plans to star in the Beijing Olympics marathon.

Lee Troop proved all his doubters wrong in September last year when he placed sixth in the Berlin Marathon behind Haile Gebrselassie’s world record run. His time of 2:10:31 was the fastest by an Aussie in a long while, but it had been a long and brutal road to get back to the top of his game. Plagued by injury between 2000 and 2006, Troop was unable to perform at his best in the Sydney or Athens Olympics. But instead of giving up, he is now injury free and running times that hark back to the glory days of Aussie marathoning with Robert de Castella and Steve Moneghetti. Having qualified for the Beijing Olympics, Troop is now determined to finally realise his potential on the world stage and take his rightful place among the greats of Australian marathon running. Here, he gives Inside Sport a look at how he plans to do just that.

ON THE RUN

“I train twice a day, every day, running roughly 200km a week. For the main sessions of the week, a lot of it is race adjusting. When you race, you try and run as fast as you can for as long as you can, so you’ve got to build up both strength and speed. I do solid, long running which gives me a good strength and aerobic base, and then quality sessions that help give me my speed. My sessions will vary depending on the length of the race I’m preparing for. So, for marathon, the sessions are more targeted towards marathon race pace, with less recovery. If I was doing a track race, I would be doing 1km reps off a longer recovery in around two minutes, 40 seconds; when I’m marathon training, the recoveries are a lot less, but I’d be running the 1km reps in around three minutes. My second runs every day are easy, light running, eight to 10km, just to accumulate mileage.”

AND THE REST

“I complement my running with one or two sessions a week of Pilates. I also get a massage once a week, and I see a deep tissue osteopath. As I’ve gotten older, and I’ve had many more injuries, my body isn’t as biomechanically sound as it once was. Doing Pilates helps strengthen the areas I’m deficient in, helping my core stay really strong and tight.

“When you’re in a marathon and you get to about 35km and you’re really starting to tire, you only want to be battling against fatigue, you don’t want to be fighting against your poor biomechanics; which is what has happened to me over the last couple of years. I would get tired not only because I had been going for such a long time, but also because my body would get sloppy. I would be working to get my body just to run in a straight line.”

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