How on Earth did Peter Snell run 1:44.3 on grass running 100 miles per week??

Snell was sui generis. Just a uniquely talented athlete.

It's so sad that he never fathered children.

This was the template for modern training. It still applies with only slight variation for different distances raced.

So what actually is your question?

As others have said, he was insanely talented and trained extremely hard.

It's funny: he was slightly before my time, so the first I knew of him was reading "The Jim Ryun Story," in which I learned about Ryun beating him in the 1965 AAU mile. While that was truly an amazing run by Ryun, what I didn't know was that the race meant little to Snell, that he was on a half-hearted farewell tour. I hadn't seen his 1960 Olympic (800m) or 1964 Olympic (800m & 1500m) races; in the 1964 races he made his competitors look like children.

I also like that after his running career he got his PhD in physiology, and spend the rest of his life studying performance.

Would have loved to see him with modern training racing on modern tracks in super shoes.

Truly one of the GOATs.

Because Lydiard was way ahead of his time. Snell clearly handled mileage well and had ridiculous footspeed. He kept in touch with his top end year round, and went through an absolutely brutal hill phase after 8+ 100 mile weeks - bounding, springing and sprinting up hills 6 days per week for a month. Then they sharpened with races of varying distances. Lydiard’s methods were legit, and his hill and base stuff is extremely similar to a lot of the training described in the old Canova threads.

Snell would remind me of Ovett in someways. Strength-based, ran 100-120 miles per week in the base phase (including on some days, two 10 mile runs, one around 57 mins, the other 55 min or quicker), did hills converting from base to track, was a powerful individual with excellent acceleration. Both also won a national level x-country event (Inter-Counties in Ovett's case).

A difference was the Ovett stayed in touch with speed through the base phase (which Snell said he would have done had he had it all to do over).

Ovett was probably more on the strength side that Snell, winning the Commonwealth Games at 5000m, winning a half-marathon over the UK marathon champion, and running a 28:16 10k on road.

Snell had two daughters.

We probably all agree that Peter had tremendous talent. But he once told me "I don't believe that I had the best talent but that I had the best training." And when he said that he was not just a long retired runner dredging up memories. He had a Ph.D in exercise physiology and a lot of his research was about training for running.

Actually it was a lot of the Marathon Conditioning Phase making up that 100 MPW or what would be called now the base phase was just under threshold the way he defined it.

So there was a ton of high end aerobic work throughout most of the base phase.

So it wasn’t polarized training of slow and fast only. This is a huge misconception and why anyone that wants to learn should read his books.

We talk about thresholds and high end aerobic work like it is a brand new concept but it was being done 70 years ago.

Lydiard talked about another athlete, Michael Mackey, who was there in the early Snell years, that had better speed and endurance than Snell.

I remember that too.

I was wrong. Thank you for the correction. I had literally never heard this.

I am not saying he didn't have any jobs but I think he did most of that surveying work after he retired from racing.

I do remember that he had a sinecure with a cigarette company after he retired as well, and during his career generally didn't have to "go into the office" from 8am to 5pm year round like the rest of us.

He didn't work 40 hours a week when he was at the top of his game because the people he worked for recognized his potential and talent and were creative with his hours, so to speak.

Why do you think it is one rather than not both? Snell was a 1:42 guy who trained poorly and would have runs 1:39 with better tracks.

Snell is a bit weird in that he didn’t really start training til 18. But you look at his 1:54 or so before meeting Lydiard and it is crazy how fast some people are with almost zero training.

Once every few years it is absolutely necessary to revisit and reflect and pay tribute to one of the greatest runners ever. Seems like it's time again, with the new wave of interest and readers online now...

Christchurch, 3 February 1962, that 880.... in SNELL's own words:

"I drew on a little more effort round the bottom curve to trail him [Barry Robinson] coming up the straight.In my effort to make this contact, I completely lost track of my pace judgement and I listened hard to pick up the threads as we came up to the bell. I expected to hear the timekeeper chanting seconds beginning with "fifty..." but the first call I heard was "forty...." The fifty came up as I went past them.Now, for some unaccountable reason, Barry moved out a lane. I was thinking with particular clarity now -- probably stimulated by the fantastic time -- and instead of being shocked into easing or coasting, I quickly realised that I was feeling as good as or better than I had in many of my other races when I'd passed through the quarter two or three seconds slower. So, through some crazy impulse, I threw away all text-book procedure and sprinted. This was pure effort against the stopwatch now. Into the back straight, I still felt myself traveling fast I was sharply aware that I was well inside both world records as far as I'd gone. It was only a matter of being able to continue. This particular problem didn't present itself until the beginning of the bottom curve. Then, like a wave, the effect of that first 660 -- run in 1:16.9 -- hit me. This was the moment when the real effort of the race was needed. I felt myself slowing. I felt I had come to the end of my run -- and I was only just swinging into the straight. In a frantic effort to keep my legs going, to maintain drive, I wobbled and I was fighting to regain control, to squeeze out the extra ounce of speed as I struggled up the straight on dying legs.

But after going through the tapes, I didn't need anyone to tell me the times. I knew I must have gone inside the records. There were men running from all over the place, mostly with cameras, and in a semi-detatched way I watched the other runners come in. Dupree was second and then Bork. Then I ran off into a victory lap. I was unconcerned about the particular time until it came over the public address system some time later.The most remarkable feature of the race was the speed and ease with which I recovered. I've experienced this before after good performances, which suggests the ability to recover really stems from the mind. When you know you've really achieved something, the body seems to relax into a nerveless state in which it's apparently unaware of any distress and in which functions effortlessly return to normal.

The odd way the race was run is perhaps shown most graphically by the 220 yard fractions. I ran 24.8 for the first crazy 220; 26.2 for the second, easing back then after the first mad rush but still trying ot catch Barry; 25.9 for the third, after realising that I could get th eredord; and 28.2 for the fourth, struggling to get to the finishing tapes. These added up to 1:45.1 for the half with 1:44.3 for the 800 metres on the way. I broke the half by 1.7 seconds and the 800 by 1.4 seconds.As a performance, it was one that, right up to the final in Tokyo, I never thought I could do agian.

My best 220 time, incidentally, is 22.4 seconds. I've never trained for the 440 but I honestly believe that my capabalities are not very far inside 48 seconds and definitely not inside 47 seconds, so this performance brought home the truth of one of the first statements Arthur ever made to me: that the main requirement of the top half-miler is endurance. He pointed out that a 1:50 half was only two 55 seconds quarter, that most half-milers can run at leats five seconds better than 55 for a quarter but few of the stamina to sew two good ones together to make a good half mile. I was able to run the first quarter of this race as men like Mal Whitfield and Tom Courtney had done before me -- within a few seconds of the best I could manage for a quarter -- but where they weakened badly in the second quarter, my stamina built up through marathon type training, was able to combat the dreaded oxygen debt and chip in another quarter with comparatively little speed loss. My second lap was 54.1 seconds. Compare that, too, with the 53.2 second final lap I ran in Invercargill three days earlier."

From "No Bugles, No Drums" by P. SNELL and G. Gilmour. An epic account.

Now, watch and learn from this NZ TV special in 2000.... not only about Snell and Lydiard, from the masters themselves, but from SNELL's rivals George Kerr, Roger Moens, John Davies, and then Murray Halberg and John Walker. This production is legendary and it's pure gold.

nzonscreen.com

This is Your Life - Peter Snell | Television | NZ On Screen

This is Your Life - Peter Snell - In September 2000 New Zealand's greatest athlete was surprised with the 'Big Red Book'. Paul Holmes reunites Snell with figures in his life, from the Rome 800m silver and bronze medallists, t...

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To anyone who has ever run competitively, bronze medalist and compatriot John Davies' animated description of racing SNELL in the 1964 Olympic 1500 is spine-tingling. Davies was in no doubt about how great SNELL was. WR holder and favorite Roger Moens' laconic summary of being run down in the homestretch of the 1960 Olympic 800 by the then-unknown SNELL is equally impactful. "I saw this black shadow...beside me...passing me....He was the best. That's all."

If Jakob's rivals pay tribute to him in this way, 35 years after they've all retired, then Jakob can stake his real claim to be GOAT.

I'm not arguing it isn't, you were.

Your quote: "It isn’t shocking that the only difference between now and then is equipment."

But in the first sentence you stated that poor training was the difference between him being a 1:44 and a 1:42 guy.

Unless you don't know what the word "only" means, you're contradicting yourself.

Doping was unknown in md and distance running then. There were no drugs known then to increase endurance. Blood doping didn't appear till the '70's. The '50's and early '60's were still the era of amateur sport. Little more than a glorified hobby. It was, in many ways, a more naive era. I remember it. I grew up in it.

Short course.

I remember Snell coming to my school as a youngster. When he ran across the sports field we were in awe of his massive calves. Legs "like a Percheron", one sports writer said. He exuded power. That is what his competitors thought as well - as his friend and rival John Davies said. As a schoolboy I raced on the grass track in Whanganui where only a few years earlier he had broken Elliott's world record. In our country it was hallowed ground.

He inspired many - I was the least talented of them - but others such as Walker, Dixon, and Quax carried on the tradition he established with distinction. (Before him of course had been Lovelock and Snell's great contemporary Halberg.) And this from a country of then only 3 million.

In later years I had the privilege of interviewing him. A gentleman, who spoke thoughtfully and with consideration, and carried his enormous achievements without ego. As Rod Dixon reportedly said, while watching Snell's stupendous finish in the 1500 final at Tokyo '64 (the only time he raced the "metric mile"), "he was really something!"