How did you train?
I trained totally differently from most athletes. Traditionally, the furthest you would run in practice for the 400-metre hurdles would be 300 metres, but I would run up to six miles up and down hills and across golf courses to build up stamina. I used to train with Henry Rono, the Kenyan long-distance runner, who broke four world records in 1978. He was my room-mate in California.
One of the most important things was my use of physical therapy as a rehabilitative measure. When I was training in my prime I used to go to a physical therapist, Ken Yoshino, four or five days a week immediately after practice. We used a lot of techniques that are common now but that everyone thought were really strange back then.
Such as...
We did something called "proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation" stretching, which is a dynamic stretching where a therapist stretches you while you resist. You do it after you've sat in an ice-bath for 20 minutes. It cuts down on any pain and the inflammation and swelling you get from high-intensity running. Most people think that if you stretch when you're cold you'll be stiff as a brick, but actually you get a much better stretch, because the cold anaesthetises the nerves and makes the muscles relax. In addition, as your muscles warm up all the lactic acid drains out of them as the warm blood flows back in. You get a total flushing of the whole area, which also cuts down the number of micro-capillary tears. But you need to do it with someone who knows what they're doing or you could tear a muscle.
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=1868672