Frank Shorter is a creep who would come into the running store I worked at and offer his phone number / hotel room he was staying at in Chicago.....
Frank Shorter is a creep who would come into the running store I worked at and offer his phone number / hotel room he was staying at in Chicago.....
over fiddy wrote:
over40 wrote:
That's likely it, 'tempo' is just a term bandied about these days for anything where your breathing a bit heaver. Back in the day people ran 'tempos' just by feel without calling it that, to them its just a run, with a bit of effort.
These days we are way too over analytical of things, and need to categorize and label everything (Blame the internet and Jack Daniels). 70s etc runners apart from track days, likely just ran, and ran a lot.
My high school years (1982-1986) were the only time I ever had a coach. The coach of my high school team was a teacher that had been a varsity level runner for a top college program with a legendary coach and was still a pretty good local runner that ran 10ks in the 32:00 range . In other words, he was someone who knew training. The word tempo was never used but we sometimes did "hard" five mile runs which would probably be called a tempo run today.
My understanding is that Jack Daniels popularized the term "tempo" in the 1990s and it was originally a 20 minute run at a pace you could race for an hour.
It was called "sustained" at CU a few coaches before Wetmore, and was about 20 minutes.
Seppo Kaitenenn wrote:
And yet both the first and hundredth fastest American high school, collegiate, and professional athletes at all distances except mayyybe the marathon are far faster now than they were in the 70s.
Structured, periodized, polarized training works. And it works far better than just running a lot.
Using times to compare athletes from different eras is problematic. Inevitably times get faster because someone wanting a record needs to go faster than the previous record holder. It's true that today's high school and college athletes are faster than those from the 60's and 70's, they are not internationally competitive like Lindgren, Ryun, and Liquori were. And in those days you did not have many races set up to insure fast times. There was nothing like the Stanford meets, the BU meets, etc. Rabbiting was technically illegal, it certainly happened, but it was not perfected like it is today.
More to the point, it reads like you're suggesting that structured, periodized, polar, training is a new thing and in the 70's people just ran a lot. Are you? Because there were plenty of people doing structured, etc., training back then. Periodization was one of Lydiard's main principles. Bowerman's system was very structured. We had the idea of fast, steady, runs. Bill Rodgers talked about doing them in his preparation for the World Cross Country Championships. If you ran with a group it was normal for different people to inch the pace up ever so slightly as the run went along because they wanted to be that half step in the front. That will get you to a good speed after a while.
But the language was different. We'd have had no idea what a lactate threshold was but if we had to guess might have said it was the part of your porch where the milkman left your milk. No one would say they were doing a tempo run , the term did not exist then and a fast steady run probably was not a planned thing. It just happened spontaneously. If you mentioned it in your diary, which you may well not have, you'd just say something about going hard. That part of training was unstructured but that doesn't mean all of it was.
Having said all that, people are different and respond to different stimuli in different ways. I would not disagree with your last sentence if you added "for some people" at the end. But I know runners, I was mostly one but not the only one by far, who respond very poorly to structured training and respond much better to running a lot and going hard when they feel like running and hard and easy when they don't.
runn wrote:
hoarse wrote:
Been listening to a few podcasts with Frank Shorter. It sounds like he pretty religiously ran 2 track workouts (3xmile @ 5k, and 400s at 60-62), often raced, and 20 miles “easy”, but might touch the slow end of marathon pace, just for a bit. He also ran tons of mileage.
It sounds like he ran a tempo maybe once per month. And no, it doesn’t sound like he just did this and called it something else, it sounds like he almost never touched 4:40-4:45 pace year round, unless racing.
Anyone else have success leaving out tempos, or have thoughts on if this is viable?
It seems the top runners raced more often- a 10K road race can be like a tempo run for someone like that.
I agree. From his autobiography, Shorter seemed to prioritize the 10k as a way to maintain and assess his speed. He didn't care about being the best at it, but he wanted to be better at it than any of his competitors in the 'thon. If he was running some 10ks at a more relaxed pace, bingo there's a tempo run. Whether he got his time @ tempo from racing or from speeding up during long runs, I just can't imagine he neglected this "bin" of training intensity.
I think this thread is bringing up the distinction between how runners mentally label their mileage, vs the body keeping the score at the end of the day. Body don't care what you call it, body go vroom.
Are there any runners who tell a consistent story about their training over the years?
Seb Coe has gone from 30 miles to over 100 with the passage of time.
Woody Stephens wrote:
Are there any runners who tell a consistent story about their training over the years?
Seb Coe has gone from 30 miles to over 100 with the passage of time.
The closest I've ever seen to it is in Ron Hill's autobiography but it's just a few comments here and there describing a short stretch of running, and on Bob Hodges web page where he's put his entire training diaries from many years. I'd bet that most of us do not have a real consistent story about our training over the years because we don't do the same things all the time.
hoarse wrote:
Been listening to a few podcasts with Frank Shorter...
It sounds like he ran a tempo maybe once per month. And no, it doesn’t sound like...
Anyone else have success leaving out tempos, or have thoughts on if this is viable?
I'm guessing you caught bits and pieces of him describing his training, but not the whole picture. I just read his book (My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life) and he describes frequently racing shorter races during his marathon training. Running a 10K while not tapered, during 120 mile weeks with heavy legs, is going to end up being a tempo run. While he might not have done them every week, or called them "tempo runs," he did them.
His book was very good, by the way.
Linsanity wrote:
Frank Shorter is a creep who would come into the running store I worked at and offer his phone number / hotel room he was staying at in Chicago.....
Explain
Back in the day we used to run and not be so technical with what we named our runs. But, we did do runs we called sustained runs, which generally meant we went out for a run and felt good and picked it up and sustained it for the remainder of the run.
This was back before guys shaving their legs to look cool running,
As an old timer who returned about 14 months ago, I, initially had to look up the term "Tempo run"! It was not in my vocabulary all those years ago. That does not mean we never did things that were similar. When it comes to Shorter, one thing he has said a lot over the years was, that even though the marathon was his specialty, he trained like a 5k guy. So, yeah, he ran a lot of days faster than most marathoners did. So he may not have done technical "Tempo runs" but he may have done stuff that served a close purpose? Plus he trained with Pre from time to time, I doubt Pre did anything easy. Then once he moved to Boulder that would have slowed things down but with the added altitude effect.
Woody Stephens wrote:
Are there any runners who tell a consistent story about their training over the years?
Seb Coe has gone from 30 miles to over 100 with the passage of time.
Shorter was a little ... short on details, but his characterization of his training really made it sound like he stuck to an approach throughout most of his prime, from shortly after college until his sunset years. He might be oversimplifying, misremembering, misrepresenting, but he seemed to have a go-to system that he didn't mess with.
Run6556 wrote:
Why would you run fast because you feel fine if it's not a scheduled workout? The idea of easy running is among other, building up to coming workouts which you'll want fresh legs for. Aren't you aware of these training principles?
Because running fast is fun. In college I'd guess most days ended with a bit of tempo work.
oldburgrunner wrote:
As an old timer who returned about 14 months ago, I, initially had to look up the term "Tempo run"! It was not in my vocabulary all those years ago. That does not mean we never did things that were similar. When it comes to Shorter, one thing he has said a lot over the years was, that even though the marathon was his specialty, he trained like a 5k guy. So, yeah, he ran a lot of days faster than most marathoners did. So he may not have done technical "Tempo runs" but he may have done stuff that served a close purpose? Plus he trained with Pre from time to time, I doubt Pre did anything easy. Then once he moved to Boulder that would have slowed things down but with the added altitude effect.
Right? I think a lot of times, runners might not have a workout in their log, but they were competing their buddies and picking up the pace during any run that wasn't alone. You'd struggle to understand all the injuries happening in "Running with the buffaloes" if you didn't notice the kids basically competed during every group run.
Too many think of a tempo as just being what Daniels defines it as. “20 minutes at your one hour race pace.” The thing is I don’t see a single East African doing a Daniels tempo. Instead they do progression long runs that incorporate “tempo” pace. Also they do high volume intervals like 15 x 1k around half pace with short tests. They’re still doing a lot of “tempo” running. Just not the way Daniels prescribes it.
My point is that we get too specific with what a tempo is. For me it’s any running that gets your heart rate in zone 4 (80-90%). I don’t doubt Shorter did quite a bit of running in that zone. He just did not use the “tempo” vocabulary for it.
Run Hill wrote:
Back in the day we used to run and not be so technical with what we named our runs. But, we did do runs we called sustained runs, which generally meant we went out for a run and felt good and picked it up and sustained it for the remainder of the run.
This was back before guys shaving their legs to look cool running,
Exactly. There were races, intervals, hills, your long run, and runs, whatever they entailed.
HRE wrote:
Woody Stephens wrote:
Are there any runners who tell a consistent story about their training over the years?
Seb Coe has gone from 30 miles to over 100 with the passage of time.
The closest I've ever seen to it is in Ron Hill's autobiography but it's just a few comments here and there describing a short stretch of running, and on Bob Hodges web page where he's put his entire training diaries from many years. I'd bet that most of us do not have a real consistent story about our training over the years because we don't do the same things all the time.
We're talking about their elite years. Frank was known for his set schedule. His career was defined by how long he was able to hold that unvarying routine.
My college coach gave us summer workout calendars with "tempo run" on a day or two every week, and that was in the late 1980s. What tempo meant, I am sure I did not know. I think I thought it meant to go moderate pace.
Once in a while, Frank did exactly what we would call "tempo runs" but not in the way we would expect.
A few days before a big marathon (he speaks of Fukuoka) he would go to a (presumably dirt) track, put on spikes and run 4 miles at 5:00 pace. A rust-buster kind of thing. Being so close to the race, this could not have been intended to improve high-end aerobic fitness. I think it was intuitive for him to remind the legs, heart, lungs and pipes, which had already been thoroughly prepared, of what was required. Like the standard 4x200 that a miler might do a few days before.
GettingFasterDude wrote:
I just read his book (My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life) and he describes frequently racing shorter races during his marathon training. Running a 10K while not tapered, during 120 mile weeks with heavy legs, is going to end up being a tempo run. While he might not have done them every week, or called them "tempo runs," he did them.
His book was very good, by the way.
Agreed. His book was very good, although I liked Bill Rodgers Marathon Man a bit more.
0812 wrote:
I was training for my first marathon earlier this year, attempting sub 3. Ran 70 miles at an easy pace and did tempos, with the hardest being 10 miles at 6:40 to 6:50. Ran 37 low off this in a 10k before the marathon. Months later dropped down to 40 miles per week at an easy pace and introduced intervals for the first time. Just ran 35 for the 10k. Conclusion - tempo runs have to be specific and for 5/10k that means running them hard, which just isnt realistic for most people to do every week without getting burnt out or injured.
You do realize you don’t have to the same workout each time out right? One day is a tempo/fartlek at marathon or half pace. The other workout intervals at 5k or 10k pace. Depending on where you at fitness wise and goal race you have.