I'm sorry if cannot follow the posts very well, but here in Iten it's very difficult to use internet. Sometime we have to await one hour without connecting, some other time the connection finishes suddenly when we are reading something or writing our e-mails.
Anyway, this night (here are 11:30 p.m.) I am lucky, as internet is working.
I saw some post, and I'm surprised to see that we are at 1040 posts. I'm also proud that this record is from a post with my name, but every record is done for being beated, so.....
I read also some post regarding Brad Hudson and Ritz. Please, don't think that my connection with Brad can mean that I prepare some program for his athletes. If they run well, is because Brad is a very good coach, with the will to grow and the curiosity to experiment something new. We are in touch thru e-mail, and my contribute is to tell him my experiences and the reasons of these, also the mistakes that I did and that I don't want some other can repeat.
He asked me what I think about hills, altitude and workouts for strength endurance, and I shared with him my experiences. That's all.
About the percentage of aerobic/anaerobic in some events of athletics (like 800m or 1500m) I think that it's not possible to give numbers. An example : do you think that the percentage of aerobic and anaerobic can be the same for 1:42.88 of Steve Cram or for 1:42.something (at the moment I don't remember very well) of Patrick Konchellah or 1:43.11 of Gregory Konchellah ? Or do you think that the 1:43.88 of Said Aouita and Donato Sabia are the same ?
You can use very different percentage (from 30 to 70) of both aerobic and anaerobic energy, depending on the type of fibres and your training. Also in Marathon we know, today, that the best runners can use a percentage of ANAEROBIC energy that some year ago was supposed to be useless, if not damageous, working like a "turbo", depoending on the ability in using a part of the lactate for new energy. So, I think that to talk too much about numbers is an exercise of phylosophy, nothing to do with the ability to coach different athletes.
If you allow me to do some comment, I think that American coaches are too much scientific, and sometime lose the ability to watch inside the reality. Personally, I never met a scientist that was also good coach, because they want to use the athlete in function of training, not training in function of the athletes. Don't forget that the most important problem to solve is to make easy what is difficult, and for this goal we need to be very simple, natural in our approach, bringing our athletes to train more without too much pressure. That's the reason because too much hard training is a mistake : because athletics become a continuous examination, no more a pleasure. You can train hard preserving the ability of enjoying your training, instead too many times athletes think that training is a "must", and lose their nervous energies in fighting in training.
Under this point of view, we have very much to learn from African runners. When we are able to learn from them, we can teach them something that they don't know. From this type of mixture we can build top results : scientific knowledge applied to natural attitude and capacity of preserving nervous energies.