Interview: Craig Mottram

by Scott Douglas

Australian Craig Mottram will attempt to defend his title at the Healthy Kidney 10K in New York City on May 20. Mottram won last year’s inaugural event in 28:28, the second-fastest 10K ever run in Central Park. This year, Mottram will try to break the Central Park course record of 28:10, set by Paul Koech in 1997. Mottram also won a much shorter road race in New York last year, September’s Continental Airlines Fifth Avenue Mile.

Mottram has already had a busy 2006. During the winter, he won the Reebok Boston Indoor Games 2-mile, set an Oceanic record for 2000 meters of 4:50.76, and placed second at 5000 meters in front of 70,000 hometown fans at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia.

Mottram, 25, was third at last year’s world championship 5000 meters in Helsinki, and placed eighth in the event at the 2004 Olympics. His personal bests include 3:48.98 for the mile, 7:37.30 for 3000 meters and 12:55.76 for 5000 meters, all of which are Australian records.

MensRacing.com: Out of all the road races in the world you could be running, why are you returning to the Healthy Kidney 10K?
Craig Mottram: I had a good experience there last year. I liked being in New York—it was a lot of fun. And the race worked out well last year—two weeks later I won in Seville [in a world-class track 5000 meters], and this year I’m starting to get going again after the Commonwealth Games. So if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

MR: You’ve said that you want to break the Central Park course record this year. Last year, you ran 28:28, and Hendrick Ramaala and Meb Keflezighi were in the race. Who do you think can help push you this year to breaking 28:10, the course record?
CM: Last year, I wasn’t after the course record. Last year, Meb and Hendrick weren’t in the greatest of shape—Hendrick was coming back from the London Marathon—and we just kind of rolled through 5K, and I didn’t start pushing until the second 5K. I’ll probably have to do it myself, but I can do it.

MR: What do you have planned for after the Healthy Kidney race?
CM: I’m running the 2-mile at the Pre meet a week later, and then it’s straight off to Europe to race the mile at Oslo. That’s all I know at this point. After those races, we’ll sit down and consider whether to keep racing or to have a bit more training before more racing in Europe.

This is a different year than the last two years. For Australians, we’ve already had our major championships. The rest of the year is more about meeting personal goals.

MR: So your training right now isn’t planned so that you peak at a certain time this summer?
CM: Not at this point. By the end of the European summer, I intend to have run fast at every distance this year—1500, 5K, 2K, 3K. But like I said, we’ll get through Oslo and then sit down and decide whether I need more training or to keep racing. I’m going to concentrate more on racing the 1500 and 3K, because that will complement my 5K the next couple of years.

MR: Have you set time goals for those shorter events?
CM: I want the Australian records in all of them. In the 1500, that’s 3:31.6. [Mottram has run 3:34.80.] I have the mile and 3K records, so in the 1500, I want as close to 3:30 as I can, and in the 3K as far under 7:30 as I can. I might have a go at another 5K in Europe, but it’s not a priority for the rest of this year.

MR: How did you change your training this year compared to the last few years, so that you would be in sub-13:00 5K shape for the Commonwealth Games in March?
CM: The Commonwealth Games were the major focus of the year for me and most Australian athletes. To be ready for it, I did more stuff on the track than I normally do at that time of year. But to be honest, if I need to be, I’m never more than six weeks away from being in sub-13:00 shape. So we just moved that time frame forward. That doesn’t mean I can’t do it again in the same year.

MR: I was going to ask about that. It seems like you’re ready to run good races at a variety of distances no matter what time of year it is.
CM: Yeah, I’m fit pretty much all year round. At the end of the European season, I rest a bit, but I still run every day, because I like going out for a run and I just like feeling fit. There’s no point in the year when I’m not fit or I’m putting on weight or anything like that.

Your observation that I’m in good shape for several distances throughout the year is because my aerobic fitness is good all year; the base is always there. The basic principle is a lot of running, longer reps and pace runs. There are maybe only six weeks in the year when I’m not at 150 to 170 kilometers for the week. I don’t go much below 140 kilometers a week even when racing in the European summer. Our year runs 12 months—we have commitments in the Australian summer, when it’s winter here. So I’m not someone who lets the volume drop much throughout the year.

MR: Right now you’re in Boulder. What training are you emphasizing there?
CM: Mostly base work, getting stronger. It’s difficult to do quality stuff on the track up here [at 5,000 feet of altitude], so we’re doing a lot of pace runs and longer hill reps.

MR: By “pace runs” do you mean threshold work?
CM: Yeah.

MR: What’s an example?
CM: The other day we did three times 15 minutes, with a one-minute jog between.

MR: On what? Road? Track? Trail?
CM: It was on a pretty flat dirt path, soft surface. Each one, the first five minutes were at a heart rate of 165, then the next five minutes at 170, then the last five minutes at 175. That, of course, is very individual, what heart rates you run at. But the amount of work is pretty standard for pace runs, somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes of work.

MR: What’s your max heart rate?
CM: That’s a good question. I haven’t had it tested in awhile. I know I can keep it in the mid to high 190s for a long time. After awhile, the pace runs are as much feeling that you’re working at the right effort as opposed to looking at a number on a piece of paper.

MR: Your biggest races are mostly of two sorts—the time-trial type of meets where you’re trying to run as fast as possible, and the major championships, where place is most important. In the championship races, you have to be able to surge and counter moves and things like that. Do you practice those tactics in training, like purposefully getting boxed in during a track workout?
CM:That is very difficult to simulate in training. The key is to be super fit and ready to deal with whatever happens in the race. A lot of people say you have to super quick to medal in championship races. But in Helsinki, we ran the last lap in 53. That’s not super quick. The fitness and strength have to be there so that you can get through the first 11-and-a-half laps. I don’t care how quick you are if by the last lap you’ve lost your ability to sprint. So the basic thing is to be fit and strong. The races give you that little extra quickness.

MR: What about altering the pace of repeats in a workout to simulate surging and recovering?
CM: Not in the middle of repeats, no. But say we’re doing kilometer repeats on dirt. We’ll do eight or 10, and maybe do the fifth and seventh ones 15 seconds faster than the rest.

MR: Who’s in your normal group?
CM: Benita Johnson, Andrew Letherby—that’s where I am now, at his place in Boulder. And we have a good group back in Melbourne. You wouldn’t know their names, but they’re guys who are always fit. When we’re in London, our coach tries to bring a couple of them over to keep us company and bring some normality to things.

MR: So how much running do you do on your own?
CM: None. I have a guy who rides his bike with me, Gary Henry, a retired runner. He lives with me when I’m in London and Australia, and he rides his bike alongside me and tells me stories and makes me laugh. I don’t mind running by myself, but we’re trying to do things no one has ever done before. It can be a grind. It’s good to have someone there to give me a kick in the ass or tell me I’m doing the right thing.

MR: How much of the year are you at altitude?
CM: I probably spend about four months out of the year at altitude. In Australia, there’s a place called Falls Creek—that’s my favorite place in the world to train, and I try to spend as much time there as I can. In April and May, I’m usually at altitude for four weeks, like I am now.

MR: I’ve been to Iten, Kenya, and have run with Augustine Choge [who defeated Mottram at the Commonwealth Games in March]. I couldn’t believe how slow we were going on recovery runs. Do you do that?
CM: We always run slowly. That’s why you have your [hard] sessions. Recovery runs are just that—recovery runs. I train a lot of the time with girls, and they drop me some of the time. They’re just able to get rolling sooner than I am.

MR: Not a lot of people here in the States do that.
CM: Not a lot of them are doing 110 miles a week for most of the year, either. Do that, and you’ll get sore and tired and fatigued. It becomes more of a survival thing. You usually feel better at the end than at the start.

MR: Tell me a little about your background in triathlons.
CM: I was doing them starting in 1993, for five-and-a-half years. I ran when I was a lot younger, in what in Australia is called Little Athletics. I stopped doing that after my family moved a couple hours away from where we’d been. So when I started doing triathlons, I was sort of a runner first. I wasn’t the best in the world, but I was pretty good at it. Then, in Australia, year 12 in school is when you take exams for university, and I started running into time constraints with training for triathlons—getting up at 4:00 or 5:00 to swim, riding before and after school, and running was too much. But I could find time for running. In that year, Nic [Bideau, his coach and manager] came back from London and saw me run and said, “You want to make a go of it?” That was at the end of ’98.

MR: Do you ever miss swimming and cycling?
CM: I still do some occasionally. After the 2004 Olympics, I went back to Australia and was taking a break for five weeks, so I trained for a triathlon in Australia, the Noosa Triathlon, an Olympic-distance triathlon and the second biggest triathlon in the world. I won the open category. I petitioned to compete in the elite category, but they wouldn’t let me, I reckon because they thought I would win that, too.

MR: Was how active you were pretty normal for an Australian of your generation?
CM: I was probably more active than most, especially with the triathlon training. We were always encouraged to be active and participate in sports. I did runs with my dad when I was young, and I tried every different sport.

MR: You come out of a long Australian distance-running tradition, and as with most other countries of European descent, there’s not the depth in Australia that there used to be. Why do you think that is?
CM: Well, that’s the million-dollar question everybody wants to know, isn’t it? I’d say part of it is that there are so many opportunities to earn money besides running. Running is probably the most difficult sport in the world to be at the top of, because everybody does it.

In Australia—and maybe it’s that way here, too—a lot of the funding goes to the younger athletes, and they tend to forget that the junior athletes are going to become senior athletes. So there’s funding for the youngest athletes, but then when they’re 15 or 16 years old, there’s no support, and they go off to other sports. But I don’t really know. We have better facilities, better knowledge, better access to what we need to succeed. We should be doing a lot better than they were 20 years ago or whenever.

MR: Was there a specific incident where you thought, “Hey, I can run with these guys, the very best in the world”?
CM: You mean the Africans, right?

MR: Sure.
CM: Yeah, when I was born. I’m lucky that I wasn’t running in the ’80s and early ’90s when the Africans started dominating. I never learned I was supposed to be intimidated. I always assumed when you line up, you line up to try to win the race. A lot of people weren’t—maybe they were trying to be the first of non-African descent across the line. It was definitely not bred into me that I couldn’t compete against them. I didn’t even know I was supposed to be afraid of them when I ran the junior world cross country championship in ’99. It’s never been “us” versus “them” for me. In ’99, it was just a race, and it still is.

Editor's Update: Mottram won the Healthy Kidney 10K in an impressive time of 28:13. He was a mere 3 seconds shy of the course record set by Kenyan Paul Koech in 1997. To read the Healthy Kidney race story, click here.

Interview conducted May 5, 2006, and posted May 11, 2006