Magness Science of Running discussion thread

What about Daniels does he not like? The rigid pace targets? I'm sure on a scientific level Daniels is correct, but I think of training paces as being in more of a continuum than in discrete categories.

I'm surprised that the book has close to zero editing. I'm not talking about stuff that a professional editor would catch, but really just simple stuff. It seems that the only person that has read it was Magness and in that way, the writing is as bad as on his blog (which even fans admit it's pretty bad). A lot of the times it seems that the text was simply dictated and never edited again.

As for the content... just really confusing, disjointed. The whole book doesn't have a flow and sometimes it just comes through as stream of conscience writing. He also gets sidetracked a lot, like someone that's having a conversation and sees a shining thing and starts talking about the shining thing. Again, surprising that something like this saw the light of day.

Lastly, if a book is going to be called "Science of Running", I'd like it to be written by a scientist or at least someone with a PhD. Magness might become a great coach in the future, who knows, but his whole credibility is based on being Salazar's intern for a year.

I don't so much care that he's not a PhD, but I do know as someone with a biochem degree who has read most of the available literature, that if this were the first book I had ever read about training, I would have no idea what the hell he was talking about. He's caught in the same bind that Martin and Coe and noakes were in their books: do you go into such gory detail about the biology and chemistry that you end up writing a textbook, or do you just gloss over it an assume that the reader has a background in the subject already? It appears that Magness has chosen the latter. Not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it narrows down your audience quite a bit. Maybe this was deliberate, but from the standpoint of an author try to make money, maybe not the best way to go.

I agree. Editing should have been done! However, in terms of the information provided I think it's exactly what he wanted to get out. It wasn't suppose to be a book that just anyone could pick up and read. I'm pretty sure it was intended for a specific audience who has some background in exercise science and physiology.

Also, yea you write books, and publish for money however I don't think that was his MAIN goal out of it, hence why it was made for a specific audience? Just my thought.

My thoughts wrote:

I agree. Editing should have been done! However, in terms of the information provided I think it's exactly what he wanted to get out. It wasn't suppose to be a book that just anyone could pick up and read. I'm pretty sure it was intended for a specific audience who has some background in exercise science and physiology.

Also, yea you write books, and publish for money however I don't think that was his MAIN goal out of it, hence why it was made for a specific audience? Just my thought.

Maybe to drum up more of an audience for the blog? I really like reading it, even though I may not understand or not buy into it 100%, it's almost always thought provoking stuff.

I read his blog and generally agree with his philosophy.I'll get the book this weekend and provide my take on it.This could be a good thread.

A fan of Steve wrote:

Anyone reading this right now? I've been a reader of his blog for awhile, and I'm interested to hear what others have to say about the book so far.

I'm not very far in, but he seems to be building an argument against Daniels style training (no direct mentions of Daniels specifically, but there are a few thinly-veiled swipes in there), but I'm not seeing much disagreement yet.

I also think he could have used an editor.

I just don't get how everyone thinks he is a great coach.

He has not coached that long and has not had any real success. I know tons of HS coaches with more understanding of training, and not because of reading scientific journals, but from experience with athletes over time.

Basically he reads stuff and gives his opinion.

IF you want to talk to a very knowledgeable coach with experience check out Coach Messer.

I am reading it now. I think the content is excellent (and I too have read and liked his blog in the past), but have to agree that the editing isn't great. A fair bit of repetitiveness, plus tons and tons of grammar errors. I have the kindle edition and don't know if it's worse, but there are any number of misused apostrophes ("it's" when he means "its"), punctuation problems, and misspellings like "there" instead of "their". The worst editing error that I've noticed thus far is on a page that is supposed to show a table of ST characteristics followed by a table of FT characteristics, but the ST table is shown twice and the FT table was omitted. More generally, I think Steve is an adequate writer but it's not his strength, and some good stylistic and organizational editing would have improved the book.

But I do think that there's a lot of good material in it and would still recommend it. Just think the poor editing makes it harder to wade through the science sections and detracts from the "professional" impression of the book.

I would have to agree the editing is a let down, although I'm so used to it from his blog I haven't had trouble reading through it myself (also kindle version).

Still, if he wanted this to be THE next great text about running, my god, it needs to look as sophisticated as the ideas presented. I want to recommend it to my other coaching friends but I haven't for the very fact that, if they don't already know who Steve is (his blog, his history working with elite athletes, and his work in the field) then they won't take him as a credible source when he can't distinguish between there and their.

Especially when he's calling into question so much of what the running community takes for granted, I feel like he can't have these common sense errors. Spelling and grammar errors on top of radical ideas just reads of crackpot (even though I agree with his stuff, from the outside in that's the impression I'd expect).

Here's hoping he cleans up the next version a bit.

Just finished reading a couple of days ago.

I really liked the book because it's not a "system" book, ala Coe, Daniels, Lydiard. There is no "Magness System".

In a nutshell, Magness talks about adaptation and how to progress workloads/workouts to achieve adaptation. He talks a lot about how different types of runners react to different types of training. In my opinion, it's probably what a Canova book would look like.

It was nice to read something new, however, the organization was messy.

I am too young to know personally, but my high school coach said that the first edition of Daniels suffered similarly, albeit not in a grammatical error sense. He said that charts were sometimes duplicated, or just not labelled correctly. I only have the second edition.

If what has been said is true about this not being a 'Magness System', that could have real benefit. I often recommend Daniels to give people a general background of good training practices, but then they feel compelled to follow it completely. That, or a good source (Daniels, Lydiard) is cast aside be a whole slew within the running community, because they've declared their allegiance to the 'other' system.

Not to derail this thread, but has anyone read the third edition of Daniels? Anything new worth noting?

It would be a promising first version but needs another year of revisions, edits, post-production.

I'm certainly learning some things as I'm reading it, but I agree that it's helpful to have *some* background in this stuff, even if it's just having read Daniels a few times cover-to-cover. And having obsessively read every RT training article and training-related message boards obsessively.

The problem is, this isn't because it's so deep and sophisticated - it's kind of "middlebrow" - but simply because it's put together relatively poorly.

I'm looking forward to the more training-oriented parts of the book (I'm still in the science chapters).

Coach Cookie wrote:

... stream of conscience writing...

Am I the only one who doesn't give a f*ck about the editing? If I wanted a perfectly edited book I'd go pick up The Sound and the Fury.

As someone with a decent science background, I like the way this book was put together. If I didn't have this background though, I don't think the science chapters would be useful unless I read some A&P/Kinesiology primers first. The training chapters are definitely useful for anyone and still make the book worth a read if you're not a science person at all.

Complaints about editing aren't all about style (though that's certainly distracting). A good *editor* (not copyeditor) will help an author really clean up and focus a manuscript content-wise.

This means pointing out sloppy writing, awkward transitions, points that need to be clarified, items that could use more or less focus, interesting veins that could be mined further, etc. It would be a better book, not just a stylistically neater book, with the help of a good editor and some more revisions.

state wrote:

I am too young to know personally, but my high school coach said that the first edition of Daniels suffered similarly, albeit not in a grammatical error sense. He said that charts were sometimes duplicated, or just not labelled correctly. I only have the second edition.

If what has been said is true about this not being a 'Magness System', that could have real benefit. I often recommend Daniels to give people a general background of good training practices, but then they feel compelled to follow it completely. That, or a good source (Daniels, Lydiard) is cast aside be a whole slew within the running community, because they've declared their allegiance to the 'other' system.

Not to derail this thread, but has anyone read the third edition of Daniels? Anything new worth noting?

I actually bought both books together. Nothing groundbreakingly new in the Daniels 3rd Edition, however it looks a lot nicer.

Yes, the editing is bad, but the content is there.

I didn't think the book was disjointed, but maybe that is because I my head is.

I like it - although surely he could have spent the time to learn how to use an apostrophe.

The first half goes into huge detail about the science, and by doing so it gets across the point that the science cannot tell us how to train and that there are no magic paces. He could have just said that in one page, but it might not have sunk in. If you wade through it all with even a vague understanding, it sinks in: the physiology is too complex, so forget all about training at "VO2 max pace" or "LT pace" or whatever.

In terms of the training, I think it's a great description of what good runners do and what works. And again he's explaining that it's complex, that there are different kinds of athletes, and that you adapt it to the situation. He does NOT spell out schedules.

The training portion is in some ways the best write-up you will find of everything Renato Canova has posted.

eurodonkey wrote:

The training portion is in some ways the best write-up you will find of everything Renato Canova has posted.

Except Canova is a better writer... j/k... sorta...