Charlie Francis - Speed Trap

Marty Gallagher’s review of Charlie Francis’ Speed Trap is not a soft book report. It is a hard look at sprint training, CNS recovery, all-out speed, strength, Ben Johnson, performance-enhancing drugs, and the brutal realities of elite international sport. For strength athletes, coaches, sprinters, powerlifters, and serious trainees, the value is in the overlap: all-out speed and all-out strength are closer cousins than most people think.

Charlie Francis - Speed Trap

Ben Johnson (above) at his peak: 9.79 world-record context, coached by Charlie Francis, explosive start and serious strength.

As is my habit, I reread good books. My wife thinks this is crazy, a sign of my defective personality. “How can you reread a book where you know all the punchlines?” She considers this a complete waste of time. I learn so much more during a second reading. Most recently I reread one of the best sports books I have ever read, Charlie Francis’ Speed Trap.

This is a candid, thoughtful, truthful book written in 1990 by the most demonized coach in all of sport. Charlie Francis was the man behind the disgraced Ben Johnson. He was Ben’s coach for eleven years and the man that introduced Ben to performance enhancing drugs. Charlie and Ben’s sin was to get caught doing what everyone else in the world was already doing.

The book is a great read. Charlie Francis was first and foremost a real sprinter. He won three Canadian national championships in the 100-meter dash. He ran an electrically timed 10.3 and made the 1972 Canadian Olympic team. Essentially self-taught, the book rolls through his exciting career as an international level sprinter. He came to know the top European sprinters and coaches of the 1970s.

Charlie Francis gives a harrowing account of being one building over, housed with the Canadian team at the 1972 Munich Games when Black September struck the Israeli athletic dorm. He saw the tragedy unfold from his balcony.

Charlie Francis as Sprinter, Coach, and Student of Speed

He transitioned to coach. He was a natural coach. Not genetically gifted, in his own career he had to study harder and train longer to overcome his genetic superiors. Charlie Francis fought hard in his own athletic battles. First and foremost, Francis was smart. He riddled things. As an athlete, he had to coach himself. He became his own lab project, his own ongoing sprint workshop.

Francis morphed his quest to become the best possible sprinter into becoming the best possible sprint coach. He had no backing. All he had was a mountain of knowledge and incredible empirical experience garnered from his own career. His strategic and tactical thinking made him an ideal coach. Plus, he was a people person and the sprinters respected him for his three national titles.

Charlie Francis began working with teenagers, all living in Canada and 90% with Jamaican parents. Charlie Francis had innovative ideas: he drilled technique, understood the need for strength, and extracted an amazing amount of secret knowledge from his contacts with Iron Curtain coaches.

Charlie Francis took the sum-total of all he knew and created a method. His thinking was fluid and organic; he was always looking to improve his current methodology. He mercilessly quizzed the best sprint coaches in the world, all behind the iron curtain, on how they trained their athletes. He began churning out regional and national champions. Then Pan Am and Commonwealth Games champions. Finally, world champions and world record holders.

Four Speed Trap Training Takeaways

Francis absorbed four takeaway points from his talks with the state-supported Iron Curtain coaches, physiotherapists, masseuses, and athletes.

• Train all out: only by working up to and past current limits does a sprinter get faster. All-out speed, like nitrous oxide, is available for only 3-7 seconds.
• Train all out less: classically, sprinters trained “all out” in every training session. Because they were never fully recovered, they were unable to increase top-end speed.
• Consider the CNS: elite coaches factored the Central Nervous System into the recovery equation. Optimal top speed requires a fresh CNS. Longer rest between reps and sessions.
• Performance-enhancing drugs were part of elite sport reality: Francis used minimal dosage and monitored results on the track, in the weight room, and in body fat percentile.

Speed and Strength: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Many of the contentions that Francis was discovering in the mid-seventies and early eighties were identical to the conclusions arrived at the same time in the embryonic sport of powerlifting.

• Train all out: powerlifters discovered that only by assaulting the barriers of their current capacities were those capacities increased. All-out effort can have many benchmarks.
• Train all out less: my mentor, Hugh Cassidy, slashed power sessions from thrice to twice. Furnas and Coan reduced from twice to once a week, as did Karwoski, Jacoby, and others.
• Consider the CNS: lifting at 100% of capacity in the squat, bench press and deadlift is body-shattering and CNS-shattering. The CNS must be fresh for optimal performance.
• Performance-enhancing drugs changed the competitive landscape: lesser men that used drugs beat better men that demurred. That PE drugs worked was uncontestable.

All-out speed and all-out strength have many, many similarities. For starters, there is no speed without strength, which is why strength is the undisputed King of the five bio-motor attributes: speed, strength, endurance, agility and flexibility. Strength bleeds over into speed.

Sprinter Ben Johnson and Coach Charlie Francis

Ben Johnson and the Scarborough Optimists

Ben Johnson was nobody special. The son of a Jamaican telephone lineman that still lived in Jamaica, Ben lived with his mom and five siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in a tough section of Toronto. Ben’s older brother Eddie was a young sprinter that was good enough to find Charlie’s Scarborough Optimists track and field club, training at York University. Eddie had to convince Ben to participate in a workout.

Charlie was less than impressed: Ben was 15 and “looked 12.” When Ben began working with Charlie, he was 5-foot 3-inches and weighed 93-pounds.

Francis had a squad of 30 sprinters including Tony Sharp, a muscled-up 15-year-old, 170-pound man-boy that ran an official 10.4. The top female on Charlie’s squad was ranked 2nd in the world in both the 100 and 200. Ben was a late bloomer. Each year he grew and improved. In one nine-month period Charlie noted Ben grew six inches in height and added 40 pounds. His appetite was “alarming.”

Charlie Francis recounted an episode from a road trip his team took to Tennessee. “I had a refrigerator in my hotel room. Ben came by every day to make half a dozen ham or roast beef sandwiches. He’d eat these in-between his regular meals. On one occasion he consumed an entire family bucket of KFC chicken — 18 pieces of chicken, six biscuits, large coleslaw and mash potatoes — at a single sitting, and then ate a banana split.” His metabolism “was on tilt; his every other thought seemed to be of food.”

The Doping Reality Francis Described

Charlie Francis was an international sprint insider. It was impossible not to notice the masculinization of East German and Soviet women and the hyper-masculinization of the Iron Curtain men. In every sport that required strength, from high jumping to sprinting, from high hurdles to broad jump, eastern European athletes were muscling-up, en masse. What was going on? It was state-supported doping, the sanctioned usage of anabolic steroids.

Being “on the juice,” using steroids, as astutely Francis observed, was a training aid, not a performance aid. Using testosterone allowed athletes to train harder, longer, more often and recover quicker. When combined with elite-level training, being on the juice accelerated fat loss and accelerated the acquisition of lean muscle mass.

In 1972 steroids were largely unknown, ignored, and perfectly legal. There was nothing illegal about being on performance-enhancing drugs. There was no drug testing until 1972 and even then, the testing was poor. One thing became apparent: national, world and Olympic-level athletes had to use performance enhancing drugs to be competitive. Period.

When testing was instituted, the game shifted to how to beat the test. An extreme example occurred at the 1976 Montreal Olympics when the Soviet Union docked a ship, fully outfitted with a medical lab and a staff of doctors, specifically to beat the Olympic drug tests. The same cadre of mysterious men that supervised the drugging of Russian athletes now tested every Soviet athlete on the floating hospital the day before they competed.

The athlete went to the ship and was tested. If the urine was dirty, the athlete might be withheld or substituted. The Russian bench was so deep that substitutes usually had no problem winning the gold medal. This was the sprinting reality that confronted coach Charlie Francis.

If the whole world was natural, Charlie’s small, elite group of Jamaican/Canadian sprinters would likely be the best in the world.

But the whole world was unnatural. It was a world where, if any of Charlie’s sprinters wanted to win, they would need to start taking performance enhancing drugs. Charlie never pushed the choice on anyone. He didn’t have to. A topflight athlete that competes at the highest levels will grow frustrated being beaten by lesser men and women that take drugs. That athlete is faced with a choice: resign oneself to getting beat or quit — or get on the drug bandwagon and wreak havoc.

A lot of alphas chose the latter.

Drugs, and perfect training turned Ben Johnson into a human machine: at his peak he weighed 180-pounds and could bench press 352 for 10-reps and 400 for a single. He was an awesome squatter and credited lifting to giving him the quickest measured male start of all time.

CNS Recovery and All-Out Sprint Training

Charlie’s quest and learning curve had me nodding my coach’s head. Top European coaches were resting their athletes for longer periods between sprint reps and between “all out” sprint sessions. Charlie concurred: “I conducted all our speed work at 100% of my runner’s capacity — and since my runners always had adequate recovery periods between 100% speed workouts, their capacity was consistently high.”

Francis elaborated. “My theory is simple: sprinters need to train at race pace both to imprint the higher speed on their muscle memory and to acclimatize their muscles, tendons and ligaments to the demands of all-out running.”

The East Germans opened Francis’ eyes to “two-dimensional thinking,” viewing the problem not only as one of muscular fatigue and recovery, but also central nervous system fatigue and recovery. The theory being that unless the CNS is fresh, there can be no true 100% sprint effort. It is a physiological impossibility to produce a true 100% effort with a fatigued central nervous system. Western coaches were unknowingly burning out their athletes.

How long does it take to recover between all-out sprint reps? How long does it take to recover from an all-out sprint session? This was the 64-dollar question. Ultimately, everyone is different and has differing rates of recovery. Francis wanted his sprinters recovered and fresh in two dimensions: muscular and CNS. Fresh and rested athletes created the possibility of breakthrough sessions.

The book is a mixture of athletic insights, hardcore coaching techniques and tactics, personalities and high-level competition. It is about the quest to increase raw human speed and how, if you want to run with the big boys, everything is considered: body biomechanics, pharmaceutical alchemy, strength training, nutrition, massage, psychology. This candid book documents the rise of Ben Johnson and relates how he and Francis morphed Ben into the fastest man in the world. He got caught. Dumb ass.

He should have had his own hospital ship.

This content has been approved by Angela Coon @ www.charliefrancis.com.

Training Notes for Modern Strength and Speed Athletes

The modern takeaway is not to copy the drug culture of an earlier era. The useful takeaway is the training logic: all-out efforts require full recovery, speed depends on strength, and the central nervous system is not an afterthought. Whether the athlete is sprinting, squatting, benching, deadlifting, or performing high-output conditioning, the same principle keeps surfacing: maximum output is not available when the athlete is chronically tired.

For facilities, coaches, tactical athletes, and serious trainees building sprint or speed-conditioning spaces, the right tool depends on the goal. A curved manual treadmill such as the Assault AirRunner Classic can support high-output running sessions without a motor. A commercial treadmill such as the Spirit Fitness CT900 Commercial Treadmill can support controlled indoor running and conditioning. For athletes seeking sled-style conditioning indoors, the Spirit Fitness commercial slat belt sled treadmill may be relevant when programmed intelligently.

Safety note: sprinting, all-out conditioning, heavy strength work, and high-intensity speed training should be scaled to the athlete’s current ability, recovery, technical skill, and health profile. Performance-enhancing drugs, doping practices, and drug-test evasion are discussed here as historical context from Speed Trap, not as advice or endorsement.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Charlie Francis’ Speed Trap about?

Speed Trap is Charlie Francis’ candid account of sprint training, Ben Johnson, elite coaching, performance-enhancing drugs, international track politics, and the pursuit of maximum human speed. Marty Gallagher values it because it connects sprint training to broader lessons about recovery, strength, and performance.

Why does Marty Gallagher connect sprinting and powerlifting?

Gallagher sees a deep overlap between all-out speed and all-out strength. Both require maximum effort, careful recovery, fresh central nervous system output, and enough strength to express power at the highest level.

What did Charlie Francis emphasize about CNS recovery?

Francis emphasized that the central nervous system must be fresh for true maximum speed. Gallagher connects this idea to powerlifting, where maximal squats, bench presses, and deadlifts also require recovery beyond simple muscular rest.

What were Charlie Francis’ key sprint training ideas?

The key ideas were to train all out, train all out less often, respect central nervous system recovery, and monitor performance through sprinting, strength training, and body composition. The larger lesson is that true maximum efforts cannot be performed carelessly every day.

Does this article endorse performance-enhancing drugs?

No. The article discusses performance-enhancing drugs as part of the historical reality described in Speed Trap and elite international sport. It does not recommend, prescribe, or endorse drug use.

What can modern coaches learn from Speed Trap?

Modern coaches can learn the value of rested effort, precise sprint practice, strength development, individualized recovery, and honest performance monitoring. The book’s most useful lessons are about training logic, not copying every part of the era it describes.