Australian middle distance training in 50's

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RunningInterested wrote:

There are 6 days of intervals plus one day of a continuos steady run. Intervals range from 100-2000m, have shorter recoveries for shorter intervals and pretty long ones for longer intervals. The volume with longer intervals seems low-moderate.

I am asking you guys, if this could work for someone who is more 5-10km road racer and want to improve his mile time?

The book scan can be downloaded here:

https://docs.google.com/a/udel.edu/file/d/0B59ZXiJsCX0rVmktUG1mT3dGeG8/edit?pli=1

Wasn't the Igloi method and that of Gerschler like this? They trained runners from short sprints to long distances with interval-dominant training. I believe in such a system "recovery" days and aerobic/anaerobic balance are achieved by either reducing rep intensity, increasing recovery interval, reducing volume, or some combination relative to athlete needs and goals.

Yes, but Igloi used primarily really short reps.On the other hand, this programs listed in the book have up to three days of long intervals in lower volume and with long walk recoveries.

RunningInterested wrote:

Yes, but Igloi used primarily really short reps.On the other hand, this programs listed in the book have up to three days of long intervals in lower volume and with long walk recoveries.

I think Orville posted on here that Igloi had him do longer (1000 yard) reps, as he was training for longer races. Schul, on the other hand, did most of his in the 100-660y range I believe.

Probably based on Franz Stampfl's training methods as he did move from Britain to Australia after the Melbourne Olympics.

Would it work? Difficult to say today, Bannister seemed to manage well off it for running a mile, and Chattaway did briefly hold the world record at 5k.

Of course it can work! If you have faith in a programme and give it a reasonable amount of time to have an effect any method of training can work. There are well documented problems with a predominantly interval based regime - but there are also well documented problems with a heavily Lydiard influenced regime. The most imporatnt thing is to have confidence in what you are doing and work hard at it over a prolonged period!

It is 2014 now, Rip.

Sorry, this just isn't type of a training Percy Cerutty would make Herb Elliot doing week after week. He made him done really long and fast runs, not just interval based workouts.

Exactly my thoughts, but I am more interested in physiological reasons of choosing a training program like this.

RI, many thanks! I read this book years ago, but never had my own copy. I remember this one fondly.

To people in The Sport now, it's difficult to convey how important Fred Wilt's work on HTT and "Track Technique" was. Many coaches and athletes were just flying blind until they got hold of this vital info. I believe Fred did all of the work gratis, by the way.

The essence of the interval "revolution" was simply that inserting pauses in training (and it's always worth repeating that an interval was the *break* between workbouts--not the workbouts themselves) enabled an athlete to do a higher volume of quality work and still recover adequately for the next training session. When someone like Iglói took over the concept, athletes were running more miles *and* at higher speeds. New records were almost inevitable.

lease wrote:

RI, many thanks! I read this book years ago, but never had my own copy. I remember this one fondly.

To people in The Sport now, it's difficult to convey how important Fred Wilt's work on HTT and "Track Technique" was. Many coaches and athletes were just flying blind until they got hold of this vital info. I believe Fred did all of the work gratis, by the way.

The essence of the interval "revolution" was simply that inserting pauses in training (and it's always worth repeating that an interval was the *break* between workbouts--not the workbouts themselves) enabled an athlete to do a higher volume of quality work and still recover adequately for the next training session. When someone like Iglói took over the concept, athletes were running more miles *and* at higher speeds. New records were almost inevitable.

You are welcome. Yup, interval is the time between repetions which are called bouts. Something 99.9% runners still don't get.

RunningInterested wrote:

Exactly my thoughts, but I am more interested in physiological reasons of choosing a training program like this.

It wasn't so much that you chose a program like that as you chose to use a program like that or not train. Really, physiology and its relationship to running was really in its infancy. Gerschler's idea of raising the heart rate to 180 and waiting until it was back down to 120 before starting the next rep seemed to have informed a lot of coaches' thinking but you didn't hear a lot of physiological talk.

Having started at basically the tail end of that era I can tell you that the vast majority of coaches saw no point in any running that wasn't reasonably close to your race paces. If you wanted to work on endurance you did longer intervals and if you wanted to work on speed you ran shorter intervals. Really, that was all anyone did other than warm up and cool down running and maybe an occasional "recovery" day. Only marathon runners, and they were fairly rare, did extensive steady runs.

Even guys who trained away from the track, Hagg, Andersson, Jazy, pretty much were doing intervals, that's really what fartlek is. I struggled for years with my college coach, who was really a great guy to whom I'm always indebted, when I found that I responded much better to slower, steady runs than I did to repetition work. It really wasn't until Lydiard's guys were so successful and people saw how they trained that coaches, at least American ones, began sending people off the track for steady runs and lots of them did it reluctantly fearing that the runners would disappear, sit under a tree for an hour, dump some water over themselves to look like they'd sweated, and run back to the coach.

And you also have to remember that running was very uncommon then. A lot of us were reluctant to do it in public view so there was another reason why so much training was done on the track. That's what a track was there for and you didn't practice anywhere else just as you didn't practice baseball anywhere than on a baseball field.

Would it work today? Sure. Why wouldn't it? It worked in the 50s and the human body is no different now than it was then. Would it work as well as the sort of things we've been doing from the 60s on? I don't know. I think significantly bigger volume is a big reason people started getting faster and I don't know if people in general would tolerate 120 mile or more weeks on a track. But certainly, you can develop your cardiovascular system doing big numbers of reps as Zatopek and many of his imitators proved.

RunningInterested wrote:

You are welcome. Yup, interval is the time between repetions which are called bouts. Something 99.9% runners still don't get.

While this is true it makes no difference to how the workout works.

Unless you find out that an athlete is reversing the work with the rest. Never heard of that happening.

it is important to make the rest and recovery days easy to obtain not kill yourself on recovery days

In the early 1950s the East York Track Club (Toronto) was a sprint club. They had a fine sprint relay and in 1956 Coach Fred Foot and his whole sprint team that went to Melbourne, Australia as part of Canada's 1956 Olympic Team. Coach Foot learned about interval training from some of the coaches and at the Olympics and began to use it when he returned. His club expanded to also include middle distance and eventually distance runners.

In 1962, teenager Bruce Kidd (EYTC) won the US, Cdn and Uk 6 mile championships and was ranked number 2 in the world at 5,000 meters by Track and Field News.

In 1963 and 1965, 800 meter runner Bill Crothers (EYTC)was ranked number one and won a silver medal in the 1964 Olympics 800 meters. He ran 46.2 for 440 and 1.45.6 for 400 meters. His training was all intervals. He ran 6 days a week He only ran as long as 10 miles once in his life.

In June of 1966 David Bailey (EYTC) was the first Canadian to run a mile under 4 minutes.

East York Track Clubs relay teams continued to do very well at all distances and the club put at least one runner on the Canadian Olympic Team for the next 20 years.

There were no drugs in those day and we all worked or went to school full time. 3 of the runners who were with the East York Track Club while I was there went on to earn Ph.Ds

By the way, I never walked the intervals while training with Coach Fred Foot or Coach Mihaly Igloi.

Some great responses, thank you!

It looks like the author of the article in the Fred Wilt's book is Allan Lawrence. He won the bronze gold medal in 1956 Olympics in 10.000 meters.

This is his webpage:

http://www.coachallawrence.com/

I will try to contact him and ask you more about this article and his training philosophy behind him.

It works if you buy in. It worked back then because it was thought was THE way to go if you want to succeed. Therefore no one questioned running on the track everyday.

The reason it won't work today is that you will not get an athlete to fully buy into running on the track everyday. They'll need on the internet or hear about friends at another high school getting runs in on trails and roads. Seems like athletes today are more prone to burn out from an intense way of training, especially because today athletes are aware that there is more than one way to skin a cat.