RIP Danny Henderson

Been around for a long time, and had never heard anything negative about Danny Henderson until this thread. I did not know him but knew people who met him and they did not have anything bad to say.

WTF is wrong with people here?

Very sorry to learn of Danny's passing. In addition to being an outstanding runner, he was a warm person with a great sense of humor. As for letting D3 runners go to D1 Nationals, they actually continued the practice for a few years after Danny won D3 and in fact allowed four of us to go in 1981. The only challenge was that we ran the D3 race on Saturday and only had two days to recover for D1s.

I ran with him in the very 80s when we were both part of UCTC. I did some workouts with him. Of course he was much better.

He was nice enough to show up for a small 5k road race in a small town I come from and afterwards walked around and talked to each runner at the awards ceremony. I mean every runner.

Later I saw him at what we used to call a “ disco” I think that’s what it was called.

I asked him what he was doing and he said he worked at a place called “ Stonebridge” that worked with severely disabled people, physically and mentally.

When everyone at the table got quiet and introspective about he and what he did he brightened up and said “ hey it’s not that bad , you wanna hear cripple joke”?

He just said that because of the perceived mood change at the table.

Wow… why all the downvotes to my post? 400 meter repeats with 15-20 second rest was pretty unusual during that time. In my email correspondence with Danny he mentioned that initially the workouts were impossible to finish and that Coach Lederhouse had to modify them. I am happy to post some of the email discussion if anyone is interested. Just reply to this post if interested.

DougC - thank you for posting this and to Malmo for those original log entries.

I think a lot of us would be fascinated to see some of the discourse about those repeats "On X time" and how they may have come to modify from "impossible", as you describe, to doable.

It's an interesting concept (seen it, even done it, in slightly different forms I guess), and I suspect a little tricky if you are going on some more mundane, mainstream protocol of how to run some kind of track workout.

Originally this caught my eye because I knew and ran with a couple of Danny's College teammates years after. Only the best things ever reflected toward him - RIP.

Ignore the downvotes. There are some strange people in this thread.

I've appreciated what you and others have posted in the past about Danny's training. Not just because I love running and that the training was revolutionary in the early 80s and mirrors the Norwegian style of training, but also because I had the chance to do the same training under Coach Lederhouse - just in the pool. He used to tell a lot of stories about Danny (and still does)! he'll may even show up in this thread to say "hi". He's long retired, but now coaching adult club runners because he can't kick the bug. :)

I didn't know Danny, and from what I read about him in the included articles and posts he seemed to be a nice guy. I'm not sure why anyone would "down-arrow". The workouts he did are not that unusual. In fact, Jim Spivey whom Danny trained with was known to do some comparable workouts that proved to be very successful.

It has nothing to do with Danny. There were some trolls who decided to make up stuff about him and then downvote posts in this thread. They probably are just angry about something else in their lives.

Jim Ryun too back in the 60s. I've seen Steve Placencia doing similar stuff in the mid 80s, if my memory is right.

Henderson's system has always fascinated me. It makes sense.

Thanks Mike. I remember you as well and you are a legend. We met several times.

As for the downvotes, it's a consistent 7, so one or two troll posters with multiple logins and bad behavioral problems. You can bet on that.

RIP Danny Henderson, and condolences to his friends and family.

DougC

There was a despicable poster slandering Danny about how he abused his wife and kids and other stupid vile things that are impossible. The idiot called him Daniel and is still downvoting posts on this thread. As a fellow WC runner and teammate of Danny, you and I know both know this is stupid. The mods removed the posts, but it was another LR low due to to this poster. Danny was a kind and humble person and fantastic runner and his training under Jon Lederhouse was unusual and interesting. Malmo posted an old blog post of mine.

I coached at NC Wesleyan University from 2017-2021 and Danny was teaching Exercise Science there. We would chat every day in the lobby of the athletic department and he would tell me what types of stuff that he would do. He would often give me compliments, and I felt obligated to live up to legacy of what he was. Danny and I grabbed beers a couple times, and the guy was super nice. This is unfortunate news.

Thanks for the summary…. As you know, Danny was never married and didn’t have kids. I had a short Q&A with Danny via email. Here are some excerpts:

DH: “When I first started training with Jon, I had a 5 year old PR of 13:50. After the first year of training with Jon, it dropped to 13:30. The next year, it dropped to 13:24. The first year that I was at Indiana, it dropped to 13:23 and then never dropped any further after that.”

ME: Did you ever get the symptoms of severe overtraining?

DH: “There was one season that I badly overtrained (Fall 1983). Since I did so well the previous Spring (13:30), Jon tried increasing the training load even more. It resulted in what's called
"failing adaptation". Before that, the workouts had been impressive, however I was succeeding in recovering (adapting) between workouts. The idea was to train in a broken down state, yet see progress while doing so. If done properly, then the
taper at the end of the season produces a big payoff. That particular Fall, I did all of the workouts, but ended up running myself into the ground. All of the symptoms that you listed were present during most of my training with Jon. I
hated to talk to people about my running, because it was such a complete mental, physical and emotional drain, and talking about it just added to that drain.”

DH: “In answer to your question about what was responsible for the big jump in time, it was basically a year of insanely difficult workouts that took a long time to adjust to. It started out as Jon's experiment, because he wanted to try to apply the principles of swim training to a runner. I had just finished up a pretty good year of 1500 training, having run a PR of 3:44. Being unfamiliar with runner's training, he took swim workouts and translated them to running workouts (100 meters in the pool=400 meters on the track). At first, he just about killed me, giving me 10 mile track sets, 5 days a week, in the middle of the day when it was about 90 degrees. I've never had a darker tan in my life! I went along with the experiment, *knowing* that I would eventually fall apart, and he kept telling me that I needed to give my body a chance to adapt to the stress. He eventually learned that he couldn't squeeze blood out of a turnip, and I actually began to adjust to much more intense workouts, learning to work harder than I thought that I could.”

10 miles of track work… 5 days per week. Very unusual.