Why Alex Yee’s marathon success is a triumph for triathlon training techniques

After Olympic triathlon champion goes No.2 on UK all-time marathon rankings, what can the running world learn from his success

Alex Yee’s 2:06:38 marathon in Valencia on Sunday was a triumph for triathlon and the immense aerobic benefits of swim-bike-run training. Not for the first time, an athlete who spends as much, if not more, time cycling and swimming as they do running has excelled in a footrace.

Back in 2013, Alistair Brownlee ranked No.3 in the UK over 10,000m behind Mo Farah and Chris Thompson. Since then we have seen triathletes like Beth Potter and Hugo Milner enjoy success in running races. Now, Yee has gone No.2 in the UK all-time marathon rankings – and is second only to Farah’s 2:05:11 national record.

How can these ‘part-time runners’ beat the ‘full-time runners’?

Back in 2018 I asked Malcolm Brown, coach to the Brownlee brothers, who said bluntly: “They do about twice the number of hours per week of aerobic training at senior levels.”

In the same conversation, he added prophetically: “Yee is a special talent at running, as we know.”

This is certainly true. After making a decent marathon debut of 2:11:08 in London in April, Yee swiped four-and-a-half minutes off his best in Valencia.

A former English Schools cross-country champion, Yee memorably out-sprinted Chris Thompson and Andy Vernon to win the British 10,000m title at Highgate in 2018. The overall race was won that night, incidentally, by Richard Ringer – a German distance runner who notably boosts his training with several hours of cycling each week, often incorporating it into his warm-ups and warm-downs.

To give an idea of how hard triathletes work, I saw first-hand a “day in the life” of the Brownlee brothers about 10 months before the London Olympics. We were visiting the Barcelona triathlon and Alastair and Jonny were there on behalf of one of their sponsors.

On the day of travel they squeezed in an early-morning swim before catching an 8.30am flight from Leeds-Bradford Airport. Then, on arriving at their hotel in Barcelona, they went straight out for a bike ride, followed by a 40-50-minute run. Apparently it was their end-of-season rest period too.

Perhaps some of the world’s top runners are getting the hint. Cole Hocker, the Olympic 1500m and world 5000m champion, supplements his running with a few miles each week on a bike. He told AW last year that he did around two to four hours on a bike each week, adding: “Cross-training is a big part of our training.”

Jakob Ingebrigtsen is among those who remain sceptical, though. When we put Hocker’s cross-training habit to the Norwegian, he said: “If anybody thinks they are good at running because they do a lot of swimming then they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Ingebrigtsen added that cross-training when you are fit to run is “very strange”, adding that he only does cross training (usually aqua jogging) when he cannot run which, ironically, has been quite a lot lately.

So if you are a budding endurance runner or the coach of an ambitious distance runner, are you willing to spend a number of hours on a bike each week in the pursuit of a PB? As Yee and others have shown us, it might give you an aerobic boost that you’re unlikely to gain from running alone.