Bjorn:
Your comment got me thinking a bit. Yes, your aerobic development is a progressive thing and it takes years and years of marathon-type training. According to Lydiard, and East German exercise physiologists, you can develop your anaerobic capacity, or your capacity to exercise anaerobically, can be developed to maximum in 4 to 5 weeks.
Now speed… If you meant “speed” by your maximum potential speed, sure, it would take years and years of practice; just like you’d train several years, as everything else, to become a champion sprinter. I don’t know how many years of hard training it took for someone like Carl Lewis or Maurice Greene or Jastin Gatlin to become a champion sprinter but I’m sure it took them at least several years.
Now in the scheme of Lydiard program, according to Lydiard, your speed would “come back very quickly”. In fact, one of the things you would need to watch out during the track training schedule is NOT to sprint full out too early because your speed would come back too quickly if you do. When Lydiard said you need to work on your speed 52 weeks of a year, that means that you should work on your suppleness and technique such as hill exercises or fartlek or sprint drills—particularly hill exercises—pretty much year round. That did not mean you should sprint flat-out every week.
I know coach Renato popularized short hill sprint year round. I guess I have nothing against it to say don’t do it. But if I were to advise someone, I’d leave flat-out sprint work till later; though I would definitely include some sort of hill springing and bounding exercise or easy strides (fartlek) a couple of times a week throughout even the conditioning period depending on what type of “conditioning” you’d do. That was certainly something I should have done more often.
As far as “speed requirement” for various distances is concerned; I don’t believe Lydiard had any specifics at all. He has always kept his stance to that your 200m time is your “basic speed” and this is what determines which distance you’re best suited for. For instance; if your best 200m time is 25 seconds, there’s little chance you can become an 800m champion. Bear in mind if your 200m right now is 30 but you’ve never really practiced your speed, there’s probably room for improvement; but, as Lydiard always said, you cannot make a basically slow person fast though you can make him “faster” by practicing. If you become obsessed with sprinting practice just for the sake of bringing your 200m time down, then you lose balance too. I just went out for an hour jog with my wife the other day. She wants to improve her 10-mile time so we’ve been doing some faster work. I was barely keeping up with her but just wanted to see her speed progression and asked her to sprint (or at least pick up the speed). I’m basically pretty fast even if I don’t practice much and I overtook her easily. But I would have had a tough time keeping up with her if we both ran a half marathon right now. I just hosted this Japanese lady who ran 2:25 at Osaka marathon in 2000. Her 10k time at the time was “only” 33:05. I don’t think it’s a good idea to set a requirement time for shorter distance as an indicator for a longer distance. Everybody reacts differently at different distances.
JJF:
Does Tom D still think of me when he does the Lydiard hill bounding?