It’s not often you get TO LOOK AT THE TRAINING THAT LEADS TO WINNING A NATIONAL TITLE. But this is what you can do in Athletics Ireland’s most recent episode of their Inside Training series with Bori Akinola.
Akinola won his first senior outdoor title at last weekend’s 123.ie National Senior Track and Field Championships.
The 23-year-old is based at UCD and is coached by Adam McMullen, who leads on sprints and jumps at the south Dublin university.
The training group is large, and ex-Irish long jumper McMullen says there is a family atmosphere, a contributing factor to Akinola’s success in the last 12 months.
“They are like a family… they are all just full of chat and full of laughs and push each other on… It’s a great crew,” McMullen explained.
“Bori has got some really fast starters beside him and some fast finishers. So, they help each other out with the running.”
The training was filmed on a cold Thursday evening in March, after Akinola’s successful indoor season, McMullen detailed how the session is structured to allow a mixture of sprint specialists to train together.
“There are three groups, the 100m guys, 200m guys, and 400m guys. The 100 guys have two 150m two 120m and two 90m. The 200m guys have two 180m, two 150m, two 120m.
“Going to try and time it up so… for the second set, the 100m guys are going to jump in.”
This is a typical speed endurance session for the group, which McMullen explains isn’t always pretty.
“Everyone is going to look good at the start, but we will see if they survive or not. It sounds easy on paper but I’m hoping it’s pretty fast.
“He usually peaks after two or three runs, and then the lactic cripples him… The over distance is a good way for him to maintain that max velocity.”
As the sun starts to go down, the hard work begins, and Akinola explained how his week is planned in this phase of the season.
“Monday bit of accelerations, Thursday is a speed endurance day and then Saturday is a bit longer but not as fast so Thursday is where the real work is,” he said.
McMullen’s relaxed approach is evident throughout, providing insightful cues and promoting his athletes to think about the technical aspects of each run but in a light way.
For Akinola, with two repetitions left to run, all focus will be on recovery, which he said he has changed.
“I will get home get something to eat, shower and if I can get at least seven and a half hours sleep I will be fine by tomorrow. Sleep is my main method of recovery, once my sleep is great everything else is fine.
“I get massages once every week so I had one yesterday, recently I tried stretching and foam rolling after a session on my days off. I never really used to do that before.”
“Bori is a very raw talent. He is quite new to the sport of athletics; he just runs on pure raw speed and competitiveness”
Akinola only ran his first race in 2019, and in the space of six years has two national titles under his belt and was a semi-finalist at the European indoor championships but McMullen said there is still plenty of scope for further improvement.
“Bori is a very raw talent. He is quite new to the sport of athletics; he just runs on pure raw speed and competitiveness,” McMullen said.
“So it’s about figuring out how do I use his natural assets and fine tune them to make him a lot more complete as an athlete and a lot more consistent when he runs.
“We are still trying to nail down some of those acceleration positions because he can get a bit caught up in trying to run fast and not really having any intent behind it.”
Akinola explained he hit all his targets for the indoor season and detailed his plans for the outdoors, which are now well underway.
“I was just hoping to get under 6.70 for the 60m and qualify for Europeans but then I ran 6.61, won nationals and and still qualified for Europeans and ran 6.63 there.
“At the time, I was angry I didn’t make the final, but If someone had told me in December that I would have run 6.63 in a European semi-final, it’s very promising for the outdoors for the 100m.”
You can watch episode seven of Inside Training on the Athletics Ireland TV YouTube channel from 7:00pm on Wednesday 5, August 2025. Subscribe to the channel here.
