How Gesa Krause Trains (a Third European Title, Eight Years Later)

On 13 August 2026 in Birmingham, Gesa Felicitas Krause won the European 3000m steeplechase in 9:12.69. It was her third European title, eight years after her second, ten days after her 34th birthday, and three years after the birth of her daughter Lola, following a comeback she began nine months post-partum.

Laid out across a career, the record is the story:

• 2012, Helsinki: European bronze, aged 19.
• 2015 and 2019: World Championship bronze.
• 2016, Amsterdam: European gold.
• 2018, Berlin: European gold.
• 2024, Rome: European silver.
• 2026, Birmingham: European gold.

Five European medals across fourteen years, with a German record of 9:03.30 along the way. Almost nobody in distance running holds that shape, and part of the reason is physiological.

The number that falls whether you like it or not

Maximum heart rate declines with age. Using the Tanaka formula, which is the one most watches and coaches now use, it falls by about 0.7 beats per year.

Run that across Krause's career. In 2016, at 24, the formula predicts an HRmax around 191. In 2026, at 34, it predicts around 184. Seven beats gone, over the decade in which she won her first European title and her third.

Set your zones as percentages of HRmax once, in your twenties, and never touch them again, and they drift wrong as you age. Your "80% of max" is calculated from a maximum you no longer have, so the target heart rate is too high, and your easy running quietly stops being easy.

But falling HRmax is not falling fitness

The two get confused constantly. Maximum heart rate is not a performance measure. It is a ceiling, largely genetic, that declines with age in almost everyone regardless of training. A high HRmax has never made anyone fast.

What actually determines endurance performance is how much of that ceiling you can use and for how long: your threshold, your efficiency, your ability to hold a pace. Those are trainable, and they do not follow the same downward slope. An athlete of 34 can hold a higher fraction of a lower maximum than she could at 24, and end up faster.

Krause is what that looks like. Her maximum heart rate, whatever it is, is lower than it was in Amsterdam in 2016. She won anyway, in a championship final, against a field mostly younger than her.

So the practical instruction for anyone over about 30 is: retest, and re-anchor. Not because you are getting slower, but because the reference number moved and your zones are drawn from it. A tested HRmax every couple of years keeps your heart rate zones honest. Better still, anchor to threshold heart rate instead, which tracks your fitness rather than your birthday, and re-test it more often.

What we can and cannot say about her training

Krause's session-by-session programme is not public, so this is not a place to invent one. What is documented is the arc: nearly fifteen years of top-level championship racing, a pregnancy and a return to international medals within a year of it, and steady competitive presence rather than one spectacular season.

The generalisable point is not a workout. It is that the career was built to survive, and the interruptions did not end it. Marianne Vos came back from overtraining. Enric Mas came back from a blood clot. Aerobic fitness built over years is durable in a way that sharpness is not.

What you can steal from it

• Retest your max heart rate every couple of years. It falls by roughly 0.7 bpm a year, and stale zones make easy days too hard.
• Stop treating HRmax as a fitness score. It is a ceiling, not an engine. Nothing about a high or low maximum predicts how fast you are.
• Anchor to threshold where you can. LTHR zones move with your training. HRmax moves with your age.
• A career interruption is not a career end. Nine months to a comeback, two years to a silver, four to a title.
• Consistency beats peaks. Fourteen years of championship medals is a training-durability result, not a talent result.

More in this series: Faith Kipyegon, Marianne Vos and Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

Sources

• Wikipedia
• European Athletics on the Birmingham final
• European Athletics athlete profile
• World Athletics on her 2000m steeplechase world best
• Tanaka, Monahan & Seals (2001), the 208 − 0.7 × age formula

Cover photo by Stefan Brending, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.