Nobby, good year to you, too. And all the best for Lydiardfoundation.
You explain the reasons because Lydiard didn't do, with his marathon runners, the adequate volume and intensity for reaching their best possible results.
This is not my point. It seems you think every time I go to describe WHAT WE DO TODAY AND LYDIARD DIDN'T DO this can be an attack to Lydiard's methodology.
Nothing more wrong. I don't speak about the reasons because the athletes of 50 years ago didn't do long and fast run, long intervals or an adequate volume of intensity. The reasons can be many : from different ideas in methodology, to problems connected with the different professional level of athletics (at that time without money, so not professional), from personal situations to different enviroment where the athletes lived.
So, I don't criticize Lydiard's phylosophy : I simply analyze facts, and facts are that training of 40-50 years ago was not complete and productive as the training of today (especially when we speak about marathon).
Many times I explained a coach must use what he has. Percy Cerutty used the beach because he had the beach, African use altitude because they live in altitude, Ingrid Kristiansen used treadmill because she lived for 4-5 months in a temperature of -20°, ice on the roads and snow.
The performance of an athlete is the product of his training and his life : I told training is not only what we do "officially", but includes how we eat, how we rest, how we organise our life. Training is everything able to modify the situation of the body and of the mind, and can't be separated from the normal life.
So, not all we use today with the best Kenyan runners can work for everybody. But, also in the past, the training of Walker, Dixon, Quax and their way of living, could work for everybody ? In 1972 they competed in Rieti meeting. During the night, myself, Luciano Gigliotti and Francesco Arese (european champion of 1500m and Italian Record Holder of 800 in 1'46"6, 1500 in 3'36"3, 3000 in 7'51"2, 5000 in 13'40" and 10000m in 28'27") spoke with them for hours, drinking whisky. But, while we Italians poured out whisky in a flowerpot, the New Zealander continued to drink, and at the end eveybody drank one full bottle, and the next day they had to fly to Sweden for another meeting. They didn't go to sleep, went to the airport practically drunk, and next day won the race (if I remember, in Stockholm) with time about 3'34" and for Quax 5000 in something like 13'20". Do you think this was possible for everybody ?
I'm a deep connoisseur of the history of methodology, and I have a deep respect for all the Coaches producing something new in training, from the beginning of last century. In this gallery, Lydiard of course has a place of first importance. However, like Gipsy well explained, every coach builds his knowledge on the foundations that other coaches gave him. Nobody invents anything, nor Igloi, nor Van Aaken, nor Lydiard, neither Renato Canova. But we try to push the athletes to overtake their actual limits, using the experience other already did, adding something more.
When the training becomes more precise, because the goals are more important, we need to use ALL what we know from the past, in order to modify the future.
You can't be a space scientist without knowing mathematics, but you can be a mathematic without knowing the space science. At the same level, we can't be coaches of top runners in the world without knowing the basic rules of physiology that Lydiard codified, but the fact to know those rules doesn't make a top coach, and when in this thread we read something from people speaking about what is working with joggers or normal athletes, we continue to explain we are speaking about two different worlds.
When we speak, for example, about the effects of blood doping (EPO), and I assert the top African can't have any benefit with the assumption of this kind of doping, and of course the most part of readers (and also doctors) say I'm or mingled with doping (so I try to "sidetrack" people from the argument) or completely stupid, I have to meet persons not knowing anything about what happens with the top runners in altitude and with their kind of training : they never had any investigation for this specific situation, but speak basing their assertions on some study involving different "animals"...
And it's not difficult to understand that, if I want to increase the performances of a runabout, I can do it easy changing, for example, the exhaust pipe ; but the same system doesn't work if I want to increase the performances of a Formula One, already at the top, and their development depends on very deep and fine research, so the solutions are not the same.
At the end, in many cases somebody, speaking about the progress in the performances, gives merit to a mental change, or to the improvement of materials (tracks and shoes mainly). But now the biggest improvement is in the Marathon, therefore a race on the road, and the roads are the same of 30 years ago, the shoes sometime also worse.
Is it so difficult to accept the idea that the change of methodology, moving to a higher intensity of the extension, can be the main reason of this change ?