ROBERT DENMEAD IS one of the best athletics coaches in the country and the Tullamore native boasts a stable that includes the likes of current National 1,500m champion Paul Robinson, while he’s also coached the likes of former European junior 1,500m runner, Colin Costelloe, 2008 Olympic marathon runner Pauline Curley and 2008 senior 800m champion Orla Drumm.

Those athletes, you may have noticed, are all from very different races and distances so Denmead’s knowledge of the sport and its demands is extensive.

Running is currently enjoying a boom in Ireland at present but still, there’s a huge amount of misinformation out there with regard to training techniques.

Here, we ask Denmead to clear up some of the greyness around some very common myths…

Dehydration wrecks performance

“This is true. They say that a 4% dehydration level will slow you down by over two and a half minutes in a 10k run. Now, you’d want to be pretty dehydrated to be at that level; 4% of your body weight could be between 5-8 lbs, depending on whether you’re a man or a woman. I read somewhere that it’s around 2mins 48secs if you’re 4% dehydrated so even if someone is 1 or 2% dehydrated, that’s going to result in you being around a minute slower than you could be. So you have to be properly hydrated going into a race.”

You can eat what you want

“To a large extent yes, you can eat a lot of food but then again it’s like putting petrol into the engine. If you’re going to put in low grade petrol you’re not going to get a high-grade performance out of it so you’ve got to eat the right sort of foods. Fair enough you might have a sweet tooth or whatever and get away with it if you’re running 60 miles a week but at the same time, if you want to get the best out of yourself you’ve to be careful about what you eat.”

All your runs need to be fast

“No, absolutely not. When you do a hard training session you’ve to follow it up with an easy session in order to allow the body to build up strong again. You’ve to recover from a hard training session and the likelihood is if you run hard the day after a hard session you won’t be recovered. Even the likes of Mo Farah will go out the next day after running a hard training session, sometimes it will be for two days they’ll run easy. The biggest mistake I see people making is going too hard on their easy days.”

Your knees will get destroyed from running

“There’s two ways of looking at it. I suppose if you’re pounding the road it can be hard on the knees but having said that, what’s probably worse for the knees is if you’re carrying too much weight. Running helps you to stay slim and at a good weight, and you won’t be carrying around that weight on your knees if you’re slim. And also it develops the muscles around the knees and any doctor or any surgeon will tell you the worst thing you can have is a situation where the muscles around the knees are weak because that puts pressure on the joints. So I think, again, as long as you’re sensible and you do things in the right way I don’t think running is bad for the knees. You see a lot of people who’ve done huge mileage when they were younger and they still have good knees. I think it’s more a hereditary thing in families.”

Your max heart rate is vital to know

“Not necessarily no. The max heart rate is good to know but what’s more important to know is your anaerobic threshold heart rate. That is what heart rate you can hold for an hour in a race, it’s a bit slower than the pace of a 10k race for most people. For an elite male athlete it’s around half marathon pace or for an elite female runner it might be at their 10k race pace.”

What’s the worst thing that could happen to you during the Dublin Marathon?