Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:
First of all, you are a complete idiot. Second, go and read his 1978, Run the Lydiard Way, all the programs have two time trials per week. I had talked one on one a couple of times with him, as had my friend/coach, as had my father and we can all testify that in 2004 he wasn't the Arthur Lydiard that we all know and love. The best Lydiard base guide is by Quax on youtube. Lydiard had fartlek on a Monday, time trials on Wednesdays and Saturdays with the rest being aerobic. He is all on record as professing that his athletes worked on speed each week of the year.
Nope, you are.
Then who the hell was the Arthur Lydiard that McMillan interviewed? It´s far more accurate source than some youtube video DICK QUAX talking in it, and I don´t even know the video and what he might have said in it. But even so his methods might have been a bit different than Lydiard suggested.
Lydiard definitely suggested high mileage and did not suggested two weekly time trials throughout the BASE phase. You didn´t "work on speed" by time trials.
There is more info that mentions among with other things the differences between his first and second book, Running The Lydiard Way, the book you mentioned;
"Lydiard wrote two books, Run to the Top and Running the Lydiard Way, that somewhat contradicted each other in regards to whether you perform “workouts†during the base phase." Eh, I´m not convinced.
"A new way to think about base training
Misconceptions about base training
Unfortunately, as the concept of base training spread, many misconceptions about how to properly implement emerged.
As with any training method, not all coaches agreed with the exact approach and so they tweaked and changed some of the concepts to better fit their training philosophy. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big issue since those who believed in Arthur’s way of training could just go back and follow his principles exactly.
That’s where we run into two problems.
First, Lydiard didn’t believe in writing general, one-size-fits-all training schedules, which are prevalent today (as a coach, I can definitely understand his hesitation). As such, he didn’t clearly document a specific, template schedule to follow. Much of what we know now about the base training phase comes from his lectures and schedules of the athletes he coached. As such, there is a lot of room for interpretation.
Second, Lydiard wrote two books, Run to the Top and Running the Lydiard Way, that somewhat contradicted each other in regards to whether you perform “workouts†during the base phase. For whatever reason, most coaches and athletes took away that you shouldn’t be doing any workouts during the base phase.
In reality, Lydiard’s base training phase included two workouts.
The first was a fartlek workout, which ranged anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes of harder running with a long recovery between each repeat. The pace of the repeats was anywhere from 5k to half marathon pace, depending on the length of the repeat and the recovery between. The effort was designed to be moderate and run by feel rather than pace. Lydiard was a big proponent of running by feel, a concept absent in training these days thanks to GPS tracking devices.
The goal of the workout wasn’t to run hard – in fact, Lydiard discouraged against running hard enough to accumulate lactic acid. Rather, these sessions were meant to “turn the legs over†and provide a change of pace. It may seem like semantics, but there is a difference between this type of workout and what we usually think of as speed work (which is running VO2max intervals and running as hard as you can).
Lydiard’s fartleks help maintain efficiency by stimulating the central nervous system and activating more slow twitch muscle fibers. More importantly, they help reduce injury by gradually introducing speed into a training schedule. Many runners get hurt when they try to run at speeds their muscles, tendons and ligaments aren’t ready for. These base phase fartleks help prepare those muscles for the harder workouts after the base phase.
The second workout staple in Lydiard’s plan was the steady state run. Like the fartlek, this steady state run was designed to be a moderate effort – not hard."
https://runnersconnect.net/coach-corner/base-training-running/Lydiard people (HRE etc.), please chime in.