RE: Dave Wottle's training
I can offer up something on that, although others have much more in-depth info. I ran at Wottle's alma mater, Bowling Green, and was coached by his teammate Sid Sink. As best I can tell, Sid trained us more or less the same way he was trained by Mel Brodt, who I believe learned his stuff at Miami University and was likely heavily influenced by Mihaly Igloi.
All our middle-distance men ran cross country and were expected to take it seriously. Wottle himself was an All-American in cross country, but 10th or 12th at the NCAA meet isn't that great when you consider he won more NCAA track titles than Jim Ryun did. We did 80 to 90 miles a week, about 30 of it in morning runs, with two interval workouts a week and our weekly Sunday "long" run never exceeded 13 miles in all the years I was there. Hard anaerobic stuff all the time, and the word "peak" was rarely heard. Sid is a fine man, one of the most honest and trustworthy individuals I've ever known, but we were trained on a 1950s model. No emphasis on aerobic development, no form work, no specific power/speed development. I had some success because I stumbled on an out-of-print copy of one of Arthur's books at a garage sale, and while I didn't fully grasp it I did run 100 aerobic miles a week during the off-season, with two of those summers spent in an extremely hilly area.
Sid himself regularly exceeded 100 miles per week when he was in college. I'd guess that it was the same proportion of types of training he gave us. Much is made in local lore about Wottle's injury problems in the spring and summer of 1972 which limited his training, and the shocking way that subsequently he, a miler, tied the WR and won Olympic gold in an event he didn't specialize in. But I think those two things are probably related, especially after hearing Arthur's comments about Billy Mill's 1964 success being due to the illness that kept him from doing too much hard anaerobic work.