Interesting training method in 'Speed with Endurance' by Bill Squires and Bruce Lehane

A lot of times in those days you'd be doing a distance run and you'd really get cranking. You might be at your marathon pace, you might be a bit slower, you might be noticeably faster. But a lot of it was unplanned. Sometimes a bunch of guys would get together planning to run 10 miles or so and you'd know that there wasn't going to be a lot of mucking around but you wouldn't say something like "Let's get in six miles at 5:30s."

I remember an interview done with Jeff Galloway in the mid 70s where he said he'd been planning to do interval sessions all season long but would often be really tired because he'd been teaching all day so he'd bag the intervals and just do a distance run. But he said he usually started to feel better as the run went on and it would end up being pretty fast, sort of the ancestor to the tempo run.

It might be hard to get people from that era to say whether they did tempo runs or not. The term and concept didn't really exist. But it was not at all uncommon to run ten miles or so where you'd go "out" in maybe 30-32 minutes and come back in 27-28 or even faster if you were pretty fast. But we didn't really have a name for it and it was not always planned, sometimes not timed. If we had a name for it it was probably "run to the barn" and you might do it for days on end or you might do it sporadically if you weren't feeling great and you may not even record it in your log except for the distance covered. If you were PLANNING on running fast you probably were going to do intervals, though there were plenty of exceptions. Clayton, for example, trained almost exclusively on what we'd now call tempo runs.

I don't really like planning my runs or setting up workouts with time brakes so I end doing a lot of "Running to the barn" or runs where I come back 5-10 minutes faster than I went out.

Question, if I mix in strides can I train solely like this? And is this similar to what they did back then?

That has generally been my strategy since college. Unfortunately my strategy also did not involve warm ups (impatient and in grad school time is crucial) so I've had two sidelining injuries in the 3 years. Looking to go back to intervals and all that now

I think you're on to something. It seems that there is too much emphasis on these long time trials. Hall had good results with them at first but he was still benefiting from his track days when he was in 13:15 5k shape. The faster running guys like Rodgers and Shorter did made them more efficient at the slower marathon pace, the mileage and long runs made them stronger than hell. Also, as someone else mentioned, there were days when the older generation just ran. No one seems to go out for a "hard 10" anymore. It's either a structured timed workout or a recovery run. This may be one reason that the US has very little depth in the marathon right now and that our marathoners haven't progressed like our 5 and 10k guys.

First off, thank you HRE for an experienced response, I remember Shorter saying that as well, run 'tempos' when you feel good on easier days.

So I was thinking more about this and tried to relate marathon training to how most interval workouts are designed. Say you want to do 1000s at 5k. In this case you normally do 6 (6000m total) such that you run more than the actual race distance but you have rest in between. If you truly run marathon pace in a workout, you should not get fatigued until ~18-20 miles. Thus any workouts you do at marathon pace that are less than that may not actually benefit you over that distance and may only tire you out. With that being said, the marathon is a different beast than a 5k or 10k so a different approach may be needed.

There was a thread here a while back called "No interval work success." Maybe I'll dig around later and see if it's retrievable.

You can go through the old "How They Train" books, back issues of Runner's World and Long Distance Log, etc. and find a healthy number of people who got very good results without doing interval work. Ron Clarke, Jim Peters, Dick Taylor (the British one, not the Kiwi), Bill Adcocks, Clayton, as I mentioned did little or no interval work. In Don MacGregor's recently released autobiography, he said that he looked through his diaries before Munich, where he got 7th in the marathon, and all he saw for faster work was a 3-4 mile fartlek and a set of 100 yard strides. Heck, Wilson Waigwa ran a 3:56 mile in the 70s and swore he never ran intervals. So sure, you could train that way and do pretty well.

But, as the OP points out, guys like Rodgers, Shorter, etc. did do interval work consistently. Most people did. I was just pointing out that the absence of references to tempo runs in their logs does not necessarily mean they didn't do them or something that closely resembles them.

Van Aaken had a session he liked to have his marathoners do, evidently. It was 5 x 5,000 at race pace with something like a 400 walk (I'm not 100% sure on that part) at your anticipated race pace. Obviously, one big difference between the marathon and track events is that covering the whole distance at race pace, even with some recovery thrown in, might be a bit much.

He also had another way of approaching this. He'd have a weekend where his runners would run twice each day and have a combined total of 26 miles from the four workouts at race pace.

In the 50s and early 60s the Japanese evidently got ready for marathons by doing long sessions of 5,000 meter reps on the track.

A few more brain cells reactivated themselves a little while ago and I remembered an interview Amby Burfoot did with BR after he won Boston in 1975. They were talking about Bill's training prior to the Marathon and his third place finish at the World Cross Country Championships a month earlier. Bill mentioned that his mileage had come down a bit from the early part of the year but he had been doing a lot of hard runs of 3-8 miles. He called it FCR (Fast Continuous Running.)

Thanks for the info. I don't understand why they didn't mention this type of training in the book (unless I missed it), as it seems relevant enough to mention it.

bump

HRE wrote:

A few more brain cells reactivated themselves a little while ago and I remembered an interview Amby Burfoot did with BR after he won Boston in 1975. They were talking about Bill's training prior to the Marathon and his third place finish at the World Cross Country Championships a month earlier. Bill mentioned that his mileage had come down a bit from the early part of the year but he had been doing a lot of hard runs of 3-8 miles. He called it FCR (Fast Continuous Running.)