JOHNNY GRAY TRAINING

og wrote:

can someone translate Igoli's terms into times. Assume the person's pr in the mile is 4 minutes

What pace per 400 does Easy, Fresh, Good and Hard translate into?

Obviously you didn´t read the above poster. Those terms have nothing to do with specific paces.

I'm being trained by Johnny Gray right now, he is head coach of the XC team and distance coach for the track team at Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, CA.

The way he trains us is with the Igloi method. He never tells us the full workout ahead of time. We run large amounts of interval work, in short to mid distances (200-1600 meters). He gives workouts in terms of easy, fresh, good swing, good speed, or more rarely tempo, hard, or all-out (used only in the last, short interval of a practice). We train hard Monday-Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, go easy Wednesday and Friday, and rest or go very easy on Sunday. We usually do around 60 miles a week. The training has improved our team tremendously, I'd call him an excellent coach.

Hope this helped.

Someone wrote that Johnny never followed in race. He followed all the time. Go to Youtube. He followed in Zurich all the time, won, lost. He followed at the Olympics two out of four times, being crushed in three of those races. He actually took the lead more later in his career.

Johnny's AR is still standing, and it looks like it will be standing for a at least a few more years. Maybe Wheating, who is in the embryonic stages of his 800 career can take it down, maybe not.

I actually live up Coldwater Canyon, not too far from Harvard Westlake. Maybe I should drop by to see Johnny. I raced him in HS and a couple of times when he ran for SMCC. I guess I should more correctly say I was in the same races as Johnny. He was much faster than I was. I raced him back when he had a big ol' Afro.

The coach is inaccurate in categorizing Igloi's system as not high mileage. Depending on the event it was inordinately high. Coach Merle McGee reported 250 mile weeks during his career. Gray had workout weeks doubles included well in excess of 60 miles per week.

My Monthly mileage while still with Coach Igloi in 1966 was 367, 474, 543, 519, 500, 475. off of 13 workouts a week.

I was one of those rabbits! As a Bud Winter, Tommie Smith trained sprinter I once tried to give Johnny Gray some advice on his running form. (back on his heels all the time). He looked at me and bluntly said "who the f*** are you to give me advice!" I spent the next six months as his "rabbit" trying to unsuccessfully proved to him I was somebody! lol One thing we did have in common was we both got severe hernia's from Merle's workouts. Mine took me out of the next track season...

Word.

crazykyle26 wrote:

he uses words like fresh good speed and good swing for different speeds for training and thats it

It's not just different speeds it different types of running strides to use the muscles in different ways. Khadavis "KD" Robinson has an excellent video on you tube.com which explains the different running strides of Igloi. Robinson was a teammate and was coached by Gray at SMTC.

Fulton J. Sheen wrote:

crazykyle26 wrote:

he uses words like fresh good speed and good swing for different speeds for training and thats it

It's not just different speeds it different types of running strides to use the muscles in different ways. Khadavis "KD" Robinson has an excellent video on you tube.com which explains the different running strides of Igloi. Robinson was a teammate and was coached by Gray at SMTC.

Gray also explains it a bit in the long Letsrun interview. Good swing emphasizes knee lift and therefore stride length, while good speed emphasizes turnover (stride rate).

I'd love to see the KD video on this.

We can see that. Why are you stating the obvious.

Fresh as in effort not speed.

learning the terms wrote:

Fulton J. Sheen wrote:

It's not just different speeds it different types of running strides to use the muscles in different ways. Khadavis "KD" Robinson has an excellent video on you tube.com which explains the different running strides of Igloi. Robinson was a teammate and was coached by Gray at SMTC.

Gray also explains it a bit in the long Letsrun interview. Good swing emphasizes knee lift and therefore stride length, while good speed emphasizes turnover (stride rate).

I'd love to see the KD video on this.

I doubt that all of those intervals were run at speed tempo.

I'm sure there were some swing tempo intervals in there.

The Monday, off season would probably read something like 16x220, 3 fresh swing, 1 hard speed.

Similarly, Tuesday would read 8x440, 3 fresh swing, 1 good speed.

I am translating into the terminology in use when I was with the LATC in 1963-66. Merle may have changed things, but I doubt it. We all learned to think in those specific terms, e.g., easy, fresh, good, hard, very hard and all out. Swing tempo and speed tempo. There would never be such a thing as 10 x 440 fresh, it would be 10 x 440 fresh swing or 10 x 400 fresh speed.

I would have to dig out my old training diaries, but I cannot ever running repeats at easy, other than the usual 20x100m at the end of training, which might be 1 easy, 1 hard speed, or one easy, one all out, for example.

meeee wrote:

what kind of training did the guy do? i mean he holds the american record which is pretty close to the world record, he had to be doing something right.

Not only did he run many, many very fast times, he competed at a world class level for a helluva long time.

You would be correct...........and Merle didn't change anything, same terminology. I trained seriously under Merle from around 1980 (I can't exactly recall when he became a coach for SMTC, I had run with Joe starting around 1979) through 84, and off and on till around 1988 or so. The one thing he did change from Iglois training style was the number of interval sessions/week. We were doing M,T, TH and Sat interval sessions as I recall he cut the Saturday session back to a road workout in San Vicente as most of the runners couldn't handle it. I do know that Johnny and Jeff West were doing twice daily intervals for a time, I believe out at Crenshaw HS.

I love this thread. Very interesting and different. The fact that Gray, KD, and Duane Solomon all trained in this method obviously means there's something to it. They all have that powerful knee drive and sprinter form. It's the hip flexor strength a lot of us lack. Rupp actually has a strong knee drive. Not a lot of wasted back kick. Bekele is a great example of that "swing" type of powerful stride.

Gray was before my time but he seemed like a great personality and great for the sport. Letsrun should get him on one of the podcast episodes.

asfadfs wrote:

I love this thread. Very interesting and different. The fact that Gray, KD, and Duane Solomon all trained in this method obviously means there's something to it. They all have that powerful knee drive and sprinter form. It's the hip flexor strength a lot of us lack. Rupp actually has a strong knee drive. Not a lot of wasted back kick. Bekele is a great example of that "swing" type of powerful stride.

Gray was before my time but he seemed like a great personality and great for the sport. Letsrun should get him on one of the podcast episodes.

Johnny Gray is a TRUE track legend!!! Will always be one of my great track idols.

what a typical week should look like to prepare a 10k?