Mo Farah, owner of the best finishing kick in the world, is having trouble correctly running six 200m repeats in 28 seconds.

The bouncy stride, high kickback and exaggerated arm swing that helped him crush a 52-second last lap in the 2012 Olympic 5,000m final are now, apparently, a problem. Since the two-time Olympic champion, who won gold in the 5,000m and 10,000m at the 2012 Games and the 2013 world championships, is training for April's London Marathon, his coach, Alberto Salazar, wants to rein in his elongated stride and overhaul his picture-perfect form. It's like asking a right-handed quarterback to start throwing Super Bowl-winning touchdowns with his left hand. Can you imagine Peyton Manning being so agreeable?

"The coach is the boss at the end of the day," Farah says, after his workout. "I do whatever he tells me and don't ask questions."

Salazar intently watches Farah and his Nike Oregon Project training partners--Matthew Centrowitz Jr., Luke Puskedra and Suguru Osako, a new addition from Japan--dash down the long straightaway that cuts across the perfectly manicured soccer field in the middle of Nike's 200-acre, wooded campus in Beaverton, Ore. It's a frosty Wednesday morning in December. Salazar wears a billed cap with the earflaps flipped up and holds his stopwatch with gloves shaped like lobster claws. While his charges work out, he tackles his own daily 4-mile run, jogging back and forth between the two ends of the field and keeping a close eye on the action.

"Bring your hands down, Mo," Salazar hollers after the group hits its first 28-second interval.

"Mo, lower your hands more," he says after the next rep.

"You've got to engrain it in your memory," he emphasizes, fully aware of how difficult it is to run sub-4-minute pace using a marathoner's relaxed gait.

"Keeping everything contained will save Mo a lot of pounding, and it's more efficient for oxygen consumption," Salazar says.

Farah is bundled in tights, a black windbreaker and a Jordan Jumpman stocking hat, but he still appears cold. Judging by his eyes that acknowledge the sound of his coach's voice, the instructions break through the layers and into Farah's psyche. As the group jumps into its next 200, Salazar punctuates his point. "To perfect it, he has to do it again and again and again," he says, "on every run and not just when we are testing him."

The Oregon Project men run a workout in December on the Nike campus. Left to right: Suguru Osako, Farah, Luke Puskedra and Matthew Centrowitz Jr. Chris Pietsch

RUNNING A FINE LINE

For Farah's marathon debut, Salazar is taking a perfectly fine-tuned, best-in-the-world machine and re-engineering it in hopes of making something even more superior, starting with form. As Salazar sits in a meeting room in the Nike fitness center prior to the workout, he outlines Farah's training approach and fidgets over the million things that seem to be on his mind, the most pressing of which is the weather. The 30-degree temperatures are abnormal in Portland. Perhaps a Midwestern runner would pull on a stocking cap and shrug it off, but Salazar looks like he wants to arm wrestle Mother Nature for a more ideal training day.

The goal for Farah's debut, however, is to win. To do that in London has required between 2:04 and 2:06 the past five years. In a unique move, Farah, a British citizen who has lived in Portland since 2011, ran the first half of the 2013 London Marathon with the leaders before purposely dropping out. It was a training exercise to preview the course, and part of his reported $700,000-plus, two-year deal to participate in the 2013 and 2014 races. "Mo is undeniably the best 5K and 10K guy in the world, and he could go into the marathon and run very fast and be only the fourth- or fifth-best guy in the world. That's no good," Salazar says. "For Mo, we're shooting that he has to be the best in the world. That is a pretty hard test."

The coach sweats the details, so something as significant as Farah's marathon mileage base has received hours of analysis. Instead of asking the 31-year-old to put in more road mileage because it's accepted practice for those training for the marathon, Salazar adds volume through non-weight-bearing runs. Though Farah's mileage remains at 120–125 per week on land, he supplements it with another 25 miles on the underwater and antigravity (AlterG) treadmills. Farah had never before used the AlterG, which allows an athlete to run at a percentage of his body weight (Farah runs at 90 percent), but says, "It is cool because I have a TV on it."

"Do I give Mo 150 miles a week outside and have him face a tremendous risk? If he gets injured, he is done," Salazar says. "We are shooting for extra miles in a safe way that will get the exact same benefits."

The plan is to train Farah more aggressively than anyone in the world while giving him the lowest chance of injury of anyone on the planet. It's an impossible strategy to master, but Salazar doesn't hear "impossible."

Initially used as a fitness alternative for the injury-riddled, these antigravity treadmills have increasingly become a weekly staple for some Oregon Project athletes, even when they're healthy. But does the AlterG really provide the same physical benefits as a run on land? A 2012 study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise indicated that as long as runners set the machine to at least 85 to 95 percent of body weight, they could obtain biomechanical and aerobic gains similar to actual running. It's a far cry from the days of Bill Rodgers, who pounded out 140 miles a week on the hard streets of Boston between shift breaks at his running store, but it is like playing with house money. As Farah climbs up to the mega-miles, he elevates his fitness level without the added risk of hurting himself.

Chris Pietsch

RUN EASY, BUT FASTER

Another adjustment has been the pace of Farah's easy runs.

This past fall, after reviewing Farah's logs, Salazar noticed he had been doing 7-minute miles on easy days. Salazar deemed the pace too pedestrian--that Farah wasn't getting any physiological benefits from about 40 percent of his weekly volume. He told Farah to accelerate his pace by 60–90 seconds per mile. "Now, he will only run slower than 6-minute pace if he is really tired," says Salazar, before correcting himself. "Actually, he and Galen [Rupp] average 5:30 minutes-per-mile easy-day pace--not the first mile, but when they get into it."

Plugging Farah's best times into Jack Daniels' running calculator shows that his easy pace theoretically should be 5:30 to 6 minutes per mile, though keeping tabs on mile splits still runs counter to the standard go-by-feel approach. Salazar's philosophy is to set a pace standard for easy days and require his athletes to adapt to it, whether or not that leaves them feeling fresh for hard workouts. "If you're always worried about feeling perfect for every workout, you may never really get the conditioning you need," Salazar says. "The hard workouts will initially be better, but over time your conditioning will decrease."

The hard days are the litmus test: If athletes continue to improve on them, Salazar isn't terribly concerned if they feel dog-tired clicking off honest recovery days. Farah has responded to the uptick in tempo by completing some of the best workouts of his life, including 12 miles at 4:48 pace. By December, he hadn't run farther than 20 miles in a single practice, but was adding long tempo runs at 2:05 marathon pace to his training diet.

In Farah, Salazar has a talented ace with tremendous range, from 3:28.81 for 1500m to 1:00:10 for the half marathon. "All of my runners are tough, but if somebody asks me, I will tell them the truth: Mo has the ability to kill himself in workouts and races in a way that I have never seen," Salazar says. "He serves as a good example and motivator to the other guys, because they are damn tough."

HEAVY LIFTING

The day before the workout of 200s, Farah attacked reps of 185-pound squats and dead lifts on the top floor of the Bo Jackson Sports Center. The bright, airy space enclosed by floor-to-ceiling windows is full of hulking weight machines and a large contingent of Nike employees who shared the equipment with Farah, amid blasting rock music. The Olympian walked around in a pair of Nike Free shoes in order to subtly stress and strengthen the tiny proprioceptors in his feet and try to gain another slight advantage that might somehow boost his performance.

David McHenry, Oregon Project strength coach and former Penn State University quarterback, was surprised to learn that "Less is best" is a common weight-room mantra for distance runners. "We're starting to question it and expect these guys to lift hard and heavy twice a week," he says.

The 30-minute session began like most traditional stability routines, with Farah engaging in a series of clamshells on the ground, side planks on a BOSU ball and lunges using a weighted ball for resistance. Then McHenry instructed him to do eight consecutive single-leg power cleans while shouldering a 65-pound bar equal to half the runner's body weight--a move that could shred hamstrings if not done properly. "This is a complicated exercise," McHenry says. "It's the kind of thing people read in a magazine and then try to do at home. . . . I would not recommend it."

Next, Farah moved on to eight one-legged lunges using an 85-pound bar on his shoulders. Every few reps, the weight bested him. As he inadvertently fell out of, and then jumped back into, the proper technique, he flashed a sheepish grin acknowledging his mistake. "It all boils down to how much weight he can manage and move while in a running position," McHenry says.

To conclude the session, Farah powered through the 185-pound squats and dead lifts. The reps were few, the intensity high. Each time Farah straightened his legs and stood upright, he emitted a tight-lipped groan. The grooves and ridges that bulged out of his tight T-shirt revealed carved upper-back muscles not normally seen in distance runners. "When he first came here, he couldn't even squat 125 pounds," McHenry says. "Now he can squat and dead lift more than 150 percent of his body weight, and with ease."

Given Farah's high-mileage volume, McHenry isn't concerned about him bulking up. It might look like Farah is trying to become a bodybuilder, but the movements are all done with an eye toward running economy. "We are talking about functional strength and power rather than total strength and power," McHenry says. "Alberto trains our runners as endurance sprinters, not distance runners, so we want to get their foot-contact time down, their flight time up, and get them hitting the ground with as much power as they can without affecting their efficiency, and that translates into endurance speed."

HIGH AMBITIONS

Despite recently publishing his autobiography, Twin Ambitions, Farah is cagey when pressed for answers about his personal and professional life. The best time to catch him? When he's on the massage table, in the grip of an unforgiving masseuse.

In the Oregon Project all-purpose room, sparsely furnished with a massage table, couch, flat-screen TV and microwave, Farah holds a hot pad against his lean torso, lying in the prone position and discussing his marathon goals. "Mentally, I am ready for it, but the question is, what am I capable of?" he says. "It would be a disaster if I didn't run under 2:10, but, at the same time, the world record is 2:03:23. That is ridiculous, to ask for someone who has never run a marathon to get close to that."

His strategy for London will be similar to the one Salazar employed in his 1980 debut: run one step behind the frontrunners in the lead pack until he can see the finish line, then unleash that stinging kick. Getting used to the new form is a work in progress. "It's tough," he says. "I have been using that [bouncy] stride ever since I was a kid, but I need to do it if I want to run well."

Salazar has become famous for tinkering with his athletes' form. Unlike teammate Dathan Ritzenhein, whose stride received a major overhaul a few years ago, Farah's is undergoing a simpler renovation. At first Farah declined to speak about the specifics, but he responded to questions later via email.

"The hardest part of changing my form has been my legs--I'm not driving as high," he wrote. "As an athlete, you can train for so many years to be a 5K/10K runner. That's who you are, and it's hard to change that. Not using that technique--almost like a sprint--that's when you have to loosen up and just save as much energy as you can."

Other than running, Farah has done no special form drills to rein in his elongated stride. Initial aerobic testing conducted in January showed Salazar that the new form was already as oxygen efficient as the old form, something Salazar didn't expect to happen for many more months; however, the coach notes that the new form still doesn't seem as natural to Farah. "That makes sense, that after years of running that way it would still feel a little stilted," Salazar says. "He has to get over that psychological part.

Back at the Nike soccer field, Salazar finishes his 4-mile run in 40 minutes. "Don't want to get too fit," he jokes.

The coach stands in the middle of the long straightaway, silently watching the last few intervals with a face free of expression; it's hard to tell how he feels about Farah's adjustments. As Farah and Centrowitz lead the pack on the final 200m, Salazar spots something he likes. "See the difference there," he says, pointing out Farah's arm carriage swinging lightly at his hips and his leg turnover barely rising off the ground.

"Good, Mo. That is better," says the still expressionless Salazar.

To go from better to best, pretty good to perfect, all Farah has to do is continue to use it again and again and again, on every step of every run between now and the finish line of the 2014 London Marathon.

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