Hi,
I'm the 41-year old in question. Flattered to have sparked a little conversation.
If I can chime in, my self-experiment was meant illustrate some things I learned while making an 800M comeback. It was meant to be my athletic "last hurrah", so I wanted to do everything as perfectly as possible. I carefully logged everything I did during a 900 day period (where I did some sort of training every day). I also did about 2,000 hours of research -- Internet, books, coaches, top U.S. athletes etc.
Of course, that doesn't make me a guru, so take what I say as points for discussion, not debate.
The yin-yang graphic in my write-up (http://tinyurl.com/7kara2x) summed it up nicely. Basically, I ran a lot faster (or equally well with less effort) when I focused on speed/strength versus endurance.
They say the 800M is 60% aerobic (pick your number), which suggests that 60% of one's training should be focused on aerobic conditioning. There are two things wrong with that:
1. They also say the 200M is 28% aerobic. Again, pick your number, but how many 200M runners spend 28% of their time on aerobic training? I don't know many that spend ANY time on aerobic conditioning (unless they also do the 400M).
Thus, as someone suggested in an earlier post -- knowing aerobic/anaerobic splits is USELESS unless you know how to use that information. This brings me to point #2.
2. EVERY activity has some sort of aerobic component to it. Therefore, even a 400M runner who does zero distance work is gaining some level of aerobic conditioning via track workouts, circuit training, etc. Basically, anything that gets the breathing up.
If we use the 200M runner as the baseline, we can make a hypothetical assumption that you can subtract 28% (let's round up to an even 30%) from the aerobic/anaerobic equations to determine how much time one should dedicate to the development of each system.
For the 800M, that changes the split to 30/70.
Thus, when my training exhibited more of a 60/40 split, I was theoretically spending 30% too much time on aerobic activities (and 30% too little on the rest). My resultant times were generally in the 2:00 range.
On the flip side, my recent training has exhibited a 0/100 split, which is 30% light on the aerobic side. Again, my resultant time was 2:00.
Is it a coincidence that my time was he same when my aerobic training was hypothetically 30% too much and 30% too little?
Incidentally, in the final months before running my 40+ PR of 1:56.20 my training was consistent with the adjusted 30/70 split I mentioned above.
Of course, being an "old man", doing so much strength/speed training didn't leave room for running distance. My body simply couldn't recover fast enough. As a result, I started doing almost all of my endurance work on an elliptical machine.
Thus, the term "NO RUNNING" was born. Sensationalist? Sure, but if it helps one kid to run a faster PR...or an old man like me to run 1:59 one last time, who will complain?
There's a LOT more to it than I can discuss here, but feel free to ask questions (or heckle me) here. If you leave a comment under the FasterThanForty article (http://tinyurl.com/7kara2x), I'll answer more quickly, since I get email notifications there.
Cheers,
Mark Gomes