British race walker is going from strength to strength as he prepares to represent Britain at the Tokyo Olympics

Former world junior champion Callum Wilkinson qualified for the Tokyo Olympics with a 20km race walk personal best of 1:20:32 in Spain on June 5.

His performance, courtesy of a sixth-place finish in a world-class field, drew a deserved line under the qualification process which he’d gone part way to achieving with victory at the trial event in London’s Kew Gardens in March.

It not only reinforced the 24-year-old’s position as a competitive and talented senior athlete but, from a personal perspective, provided confirmation that relocating to Ireland following his disqualification at the 2019 World Athletics Championships had been the right decision. 

“After the World Champs I decided I needed to do more to work on my technique, as well as making the next step,” he says. “I asked Rob [Heffernan, the 2013 world 50km race walk champion and 2012 Olympic Games bronze medallist] to coach me, and within two weeks I’d got myself a one-way ticket to Cork and started training.” 

Heffernan’s training group, which includes Ireland’s Brendan Boyce and David Kenny and South African Wayne Snyman, has provided Wilkinson with an opportunity to re-double his efforts to be the best version of himself. 

Importance of technique

Technique – the subject of constant and intense focus – was one of the key drivers for Wilkinson’s move to Cork and Heffernan.

“[Technique] is one of the things that I find so difficult to explain to people,” he says. “I like to think that technique in race walking is a lot closer to an art form, so maybe closer to the technique of a hurdler or even a high jumper than it is to running.

“If you’re walking on average 20km per day but you’re taking just under 200 steps a minute, there are so many different opportunities to work on technique and, on the flip side, for bad technique to settle in.

“I also like to compare the fact that when you’re out running you might be looking around you or listening to music, but in race walking you can’t have that. You’ve got to be constantly and intensely concentrated on: ‘Where are my arms, what am I doing with my head, what is my positioning like?’”

Additional training 

With good technique integral to race walking success – and a strong upper body required to drive that technique – it’s crucial to build strength in the gym to sustain the effort.

“There’s a requirement for a certain level of strength and conditioning to do 140-150km weeks with the focus on technique, because without it you’d break down,” says Wilkinson, who is the reigning European under-23 champion and British 10,000m race walk record-holder.

“Additionally, we train morning and night and we’ll do 30 minutes of activation, mobility, stretching beforehand. When we start training we’re ready to go, our technique is going to be on point from the start of the session, not warming into it. The focus is on making sure that we’re ready, so we’re doing maybe seven hours of mobility activation on top of all the gym work to make sure that we’re able to walk our best and that adds up.” 

Favourite session 

“It’s a tough session, but I’d say something like 8 x 2km at race pace, with 400/500m recovery (can be on the road or track). There’s a lot of focus on the session – it’s a big session – and you can put pressure on yourself. If that session goes well it’s a real confidence builder.”

Least favourite session 

“15km, where the last 5km would be 100m fast, 400m steady. It’s not a particularly hard session, but there’s something about it that I always either feel bad in the session or I just know that I’m going to feel bad! It’s often deliberately at a time when we need to shake the legs out – when you want a recovery day but you’re not getting one!”

Wilkinson is rightly proud of his world junior title, but he is committed to continuous self-improvement in order to succeed as a senior on the global stage. After the disappointment of Doha 2019, Japan beckons as the land of opportunity. “I’m going to be aiming to be as competitive as possible,” he says. “I’m definitely aiming for top eight, but with at least one eye on a medal.” 

Periodised blocks

Wilkinson doesn’t work off a seven-day cycle, but instead trains in blocks leading up to a race where each period is focused on a specific training element.

“We might have an eight-day period where we’re looking at our endurance work, so that’s where we’d do our real mileage work,” he explains. “We’d have a 25km or 30km session round there, a little bit of speedwork, maybe 6km and some 200s to fire up the legs, but actually you’d be focused on that being a stamina block.

“Then we might move into threshold work, then move on to a speed block which is about working on sharpening up before a race. 

“We rest when it’s appropriate to the training, so sometimes that’s two rest days in a week, sometimes we might not have one for a month.”

In a heavy mileage block Wilkinson will do a long walk of up to 30km, which would be his maximum as a 20km athlete.

“Quite often it’ll be broken up, or sometimes it might just be a straight 30km,” he says. “When we’re easy, walking would be anywhere from 4:48 (km) up to 5:05/5:10, so it’s quite a big range depending on the time of the season. It might be that you start at 5:10 and by the end you’re walking 4:48 just naturally, not a deliberate progression.”

Speed sessions

“We do turnover work which is just leg speed, so that might be on an evening and we’d do 4km then 100m on, 100m off,” says Wilkinson.

“An example of a track session would be something like 10 x 600m-400m, with the 600s at 2:21 maybe, then 400s at 1:55. The track is a very good place to focus on technique.”