I TRAINED A YEAR IN NEW ZEALAND IN 1977-8 USING LYDIARD BASED METHODS.
The Lydiard system, in a nutshell is...
8-10 weeks build up - lots of slow miles
6 weeks - add in hard aerobic work every other day
8 weeks racing - add in a few intervals and race off distance, then go for the gold.
as we move to racing we taper the miles.
At the time, I failed to realize how the most successful New Zealand athletes interpreted the above guidelines.. the coaches instructions.
The good guys liked to kick ass and run, not jog.
In the build up stage, i found out that the guys ran those hills very hard and half or more of the mileage at a decent pace, like 5 min a mile, which means you're going 4:30 pace at times and 5:30 at others... now that's running. This is the biggest misconception about the NZ training method.
My biggest surprise was to do an 18 mile training run with a group and we ran up a 1 mile hill, 10 miles out - flat out! 10k in the middle of the run 3 minutes off my PR. Great stuff.
When you train this way you are not that far away from racing shape.
New Zealanders realized that interval training is useful to sharpen an athlete but not to be used in quantity, red lining burns the athlete out.
So all of you out there following the "Lydiard" method, do your build up with quality "slow" miles, an oxymoron you must figure out.
Note that the deficiency in the NZ training methods is in that speed in not developed properly. At the world class level you need to be comfortable running under 50 secs per lap, which means you need to be comfortable running 23 secs for 200m.
Nowhere in the NZ training methods is speed area addressed.
The ones who succeeded had 22.0 200m speed at 18-20 yrs old and were able to keep most of the speed.
If you look at a high school sprinter that runs 21 high, he may move on to run 20 low later on, through... training.
So no doubt you can improve 1-2 seconds. In NZ the 24 second 200 m highschool guy never improves to 22 sec, rather slows a bit to 25 secs. Now he's never going to be world class like that.
At this point - enter Peter Coe, El G. new training methods which address this problem.
We still need to figure out better how to develop speed without any sacrifice in strength.
Also we don't know when an athlete is red lining properly, EVERYONE is getting injured.
We have to admit we're not very smart in this area.
When we see athletes consistently not injured then this is the day that the medical community actually has begun to understand what it's doing.