Clarke used to do about 20 kms most mornings around Caulfield racecourse (turf) often barefoot. Pace often cranked up pretty quick, last laps often close to 3 min km pace. He would do another run later in the day, sometimes reps eg 10 x 400 around 60s. He race prolifically so didn't need to do much speedwork. On Sundays he usually hammered out a 27 to 35 km run in the steep forests of the Dandenongs.
For what it's worth, Ron typically did a 5-6 mile morning run with his wife riding along on a bike. He told me he did not consider that run as training but rather as time spent with his wife. After work he would go to the Caulfield Race Track and run with his friends and club mates. The track was 1.2 miles long and he said they often ran in bare feet. There were several Australian Olympians and internationalists in this group. Both Ron and Trevor Vincent, '64 Olympian in the steeple, told me that the run would begin easily, everyone ran in a group for a while but the pace would accelerate and guys would drop back. In his early years there Ron struggled to keep up with Trevor and Tony Cook, '64 10,000 and marathon Olympian, but by 1962 that changed and he was usually on his own in the last miles. He might be running 4:30-4:50 miles in the late stages. The runs lasted an hour. He told me that sometimes on Thursdays instead of running at Caulfield he'd do a road run with Derek Clayton and some others. It could go for about 18 miles and he said he and Clayton burnt off everyone else early in the run. More often than not he raced on Saturdays and pretty much always did a run of two hours or so in the hills on Sundays, always with a big group.
The story of three runs a day is accurate but only to a point. In 1965 he did experiment with a lunch time run in addition to the two mentioned here. It was not something he kept to but Sports Illustrated sent a writer, Gwymlin S. Brown I believe, and a photographer to Australia to do a story about Ron. (Imagine SI doing that today.) They got there when Ron was doing the three a day experiment and Brown wrote that into the article as how Ron trained. Evidently Fred Wilt took that as accurate and reproduced it in the training profile of Ron that he put into "How They Train; Long Distances."
So yes, the often hard one hour run is something common to Musyoki and Clarke but Ron had a second run. Interestingly though, as I said, he did not consider that run part of his training and told me he'd have been "exact;y the same runner if (he) didn't do it." So maybe you could say he was like Musyoki and just did the hour most days.
Sorry. You are correct HRE he did his Caulfield runs in the afternoon.
What I recall about Mike was that he said he ran one hour a day, and sometimes it was 12 miles and sometimes maybe 9 miles or whatever distance it was one hour.
That was Ron Clarke's training as well. Due to family pressed for time. Normally around a Hippodrome = horse race course.
Sounds as though you may be confusing him with Jack Foster.
I'm generally cautious about assertions that elite runners run low mileage. It often turns out that they don't count a lot of the slower or less structured stuff. It's funny: slower runners count every stupid step; faster ones often ignore a lot of their activity as "training."
Sounds as though you may be confusing him with Jack Foster.
I'm generally cautious about assertions that elite runners run low mileage. It often turns out that they don't count a lot of the slower or less structured stuff. It's funny: slower runners count every stupid step; faster ones often ignore a lot of their activity as "training."
It seems to me that today we've sort of agreed to count every step as part of our overall volume but in the past there were people who didn't count morning runs or warm up and cool down runs. That seems to have been the case with Musyoki's one hour a day. And of course Lydiard's hundred mile week was all supposed to have been done in one session but with easy "supplemental" runs that were not counted in the totals. But Snell told me he was a bit annoyed with Arthur for saying that because, Peter said, "We counted every step."
When Ron told me he'd have been the same runner he was had he not done the 5-6 mile run I was intrigued but also thought "How does he know?" I certainly was not going to argue with him and certainly respect that opinion but we know what he became on two sessions a day but have no way of knowing what would actually have happened had he just done the one.
There are too many people who have done very well on only one run a day to say you can't succeed that way. But it's also true that it's very hard to find anyone who hit it really big, Olympic medals, world records, etc., who only ran once a day. Musyoki may be the closest.