Coach hails Avinash Sable’s strong base for breaking 5,000m national mark

The physical education teacher of SK Gandhi College in Kada, near Mandava village in Maharashtra’s drought-hit Beed district, vividly remembers a district-level meet from around a decade ago. It featured his college pupil, Avinash Sable, in a 5,000m race. By the time Sable completed his 12-and-a-half rounds, as Zameer Sayyed narrated, his closest competitor was still completing the 10th lap. It was one of the many early signs of Sable’s special talent on the track.

Cut to Friday in the US. Despite the 5,000m not being his primary event, Sable made a significant mark, like he habitually does in a majority of his 3,000m steeplechase races.

Sable broke the 30-year-old Indian record by clocking 13:25.65 in 5,000m at the Sound Running meet in San Juan Capistrano, California. The 27-year-old Armyman finished 12th in a 24-man final, but erased Bahadur Prasad's national mark of 13:29.70, set in Birmingham in June 1992 when the Uttar Pradesh runner dominated long distance events. The field for the World Athletics Continental Tour’s bronze level meet was world class. Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the Tokyo Olympics 1,500m champion, won the race at 13:02.03.

Sable's feat is all the more impressive given it was only his second major 5,000m race. He clocked 13:39.43, a meet record, to win at last month’s Federation Cup.

The soft-spoken man from Mandava now owns three national records. He bettered the half marathon mark in New Delhi in 2020 (1:00:30). And he has set the mark in 3,000m steeplechase eight times since he began the sequence at the 2018 Open Nationals in Bhubaneswar. At the Tokyo Olympics, Sable’s national mark of 8:18.12 in the steeplechase heats was the quickest among those not to qualify for the 15-man final. Sable bettered that to 8:16:21 at the Indian Grand Prix in Thiruvananthapuram in March.

That’s a rich spread and frequency of setting new benchmarks.

“Sab base ka kamal hai (It’s all due to his base),” said Amrish Kumar, Sable’s long-time coach. “His base is incredibly strong. The steeplechase training over the last two years, especially before the Olympics, has strengthened it. This is very good timing considering 5,000m isn’t his primary event.”

As the Olympics was pushed by a year due to the pandemic, Sable and Kumar—he is the army’s distance-running coach—based themselves in Ooty and Bengaluru for most of 2020. The silver lining in the delay was the additional training hours Sable put in. It showed in his first event the lengthy pause when Sable set the half marathon mark that November. He went on to win the Indian GP and Federation Cup before his creditable run in Tokyo last year. This year, too, he aced both his domestic races—steeplechase at the Indian GP and 5,000m at the Federation Cup.

“If you put in a workload of 30-35km daily for a couple of years and then run 5,000m, 10,000m or a marathon, you are bound to clock a good timing. Record toh banna hi tha (the 5,000m record was bound to fall),” Kumar said.

Sable joined the army’s Mahar Regiment in 2012 and has been posted in places as diverse from Sagar in Madhya Pradesh to Siachen to Lalgarh Jattan in Rajasthan. Kumar, who made him switch from cross country to steeplechase in 2017, knows Sable’s versatility. “A 3,000m athlete needs to have the capacity and speed of 5,000m and the endurance of 10,000m; plus, the right technique. Sable has all of these.”

Sable has been in the US since last month, training with American coach Scott Simmons in Colorado. He is bound to get better training partners and a more competitive field in meets there compared to the Indian circuit. Kumar says Sable can continue testing himself in events like 5,000m.

“The 3,000m steeplechase will be his primary focus. The 5,000m and 10,000m can be secondary events—mainly to evaluate the body and different aspects like speed and endurance. Doing well in these also acts as motivation,” Kumar says. “And mark my words, the day he runs 10,000m, he will break that national record too.”

The Athletics federation had planned to field Sable in the steeplechase and 5,000m at the Hangzhou Asian Games, chief coach Radhakrishnan Nair told PTI. With the Games put off due to Covid concerns, he can focus on the world championships in Eugene, Oregon and the Commonwealth Games at Birmingham.

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