Lydiard Philosophy

weIInow wrote:

The one thing that puzzles me the most about coaching is how do I influnce someone to be more confident? If I tell someone to believe in themselves, does that often come across as me belittling their achievements so far? As though they are not really trying? When in fact what I am trying to say is that they have reached a false plateau, above which they will inevitably rise if they keep their focus?

Many runners don't seem to want to hear that kind of message, because they fear what they perceive as being put under extra pressure. What is the best way to allay that fear?

Wellnow:

Now I have a little more time to catch up--I'm still catching up; it's been a hell of a summer...

In a way, I think it's so much easier to write about training. If you have speed, do this; if you're more of an endurance type, do this... But how do you approach the athlete? You really have to know the person and observe. Then it's got to be the right timing too (like in "Miracle"). I vividly remember, I even remebe her name; I was helping out this high school XC team years ago (25 years ago and stillremember...). This young girl was very tough and a very good runner too. But for some reason, she couldn't perform well in the race. We were talking and I told her about this guy (Bill Baillie, as a matter of fact) and his "mental toughness". "So what do you think my problem?" she said. I said, "I think it's mental." That's when she just sank! Clearly a wrong statement. I tried to get her psyched up and motivate; but it went complete opposite. It was spontaneous and a split second kind of a thing; but also one of the biggest mistakes I made--and I still regret it.

When I was with Yoko Shibui this summer, I tried to choose what to say very carefully. I'd check her expression to see how my words affected her. It was live-and-learn. Some things I said right; others not so right. Even at their level, it's quite sensitive. Yoko is very much sensitive type than, say, Reiko Tosa. It's, in my opinion, hell of a lot harder than, say, explaining all this aerobic-anaerobic stuff. It's basically slow stuff and fast stuff and not much more to it. You need to do both and you need to mix them up in a balanced way and this is how you check the balance...yaddi yaddi yalla. You can bring physiology notebook and charts to the track and stop watch and all that (better if you don't have to...); but it ain't that easy with "reading the mind".

Oh, one other thing: as far as I'm concerned, talent is something people use as an excuse not to try harder. In fact, it's probably one of the easiest excuses.

NobbyH wrote:

Oh, one other thing: as far as I'm concerned, talent is something people use as an excuse not to try harder. In fact, it's probably one of the easiest excuses.

Absolutely Nobby, I think you hit the nail on the head there. But then we have to define what we mean by "try harder"? To me it means keep on reaching further and focusing on constant improvement, but that kind of commitment only seems to apply to a small number of runners. However, if one of their rivals improves, they don't like it at all. Aren't runners funny?

Wellnow, You asked a few posts ago about how Arthur influenced runners before the medals.

Right about now (your time) there will be a bunch of old guys ... 70 plus years old who meet at the Lynndale club for a jog (or walk) and do so every Tuesday and Thursday.

Most are the original "Arthur's Boys" and have never stopped running. None were Famous names ... at least Internationally .. but took to Arthur's training like Ducks' to water. It was them he "experimented" on as he tried to perfect what he felt was right.

You will see these guys names in "Arthur's Boys".

I know when I started running it was with the likes of Bruce Harrison,George Gibson, Merv Hellier,the late Ernie Haskell and John Fenton. Their enthusiasm for the sport was as infectious as Arthur's. I ran a lot of miles with those guys before I met Arthur. Of course as I have said, I ran a lot with Bil Baillie and his influence on me was huge.

But I also go back to another man .. the late Jack Dolan .. it was he who influnced Arthur and also many like me who joined the Lynndale club and were looked after by Jack.

There are many people in this country (NZ) who run because of Arthur ... they go further back than those 1960 medals.

I just heard of one guy recently who placed in NZ titles back in the late 1950's who offered to meet a group of runners early in the morning to help them with their training .. he is still running at 77 !!

Such is Arthur's influence .. And yeah ! I'm still truckin' along running with my athletes .. my age .. 60.

The Art of Coaching Distance Runners

Who's gonna write it?

ilgore wrote:

The advantage Kenyans and Ethiopians have is patience. What else are they going to do? But for a runner in the US, being a loser is a tragedy, so people abandon running to pursue real careers and start families. In a world of options, making it as a pro runner is not unlike going to Hollywood to wait tables while waiting for your big break. Why take the risk? For a Kenyan with nothing to lose, they are willing to get good at running. The same thing goes for inner city youth that do well in football and basketball. For a middle class white kid, a career as a dentist makes more sense.

Out.

I'm sort of curious with recent emergence of all those young Kenyan runners, at the age of 18, 19, 20... For now, I count Wanjiru as an exception but the interesting thing is that now the opportunity is available in Kenya. If you're a good runner, the agent will pick you and and bring you to Europe or USA. They set junior record here and there... They are great runners, no doubt about it! But is it really good for them in a long run? Well, running 26:50 at the age of 19, it probably wouldn't matter that much (;o)) but, say, if they take something like a Japanese approach of slowly and gradually develop the athlete so they would become, from 2:20 marathon runner at the age of 21, a 2:08 marathon runner at the age of 27. If you're a 26:50 potential at the age of 19, well, what could he do in the next 10 years? But, it seems to me, they tend to rush it and run as much as they can while they can run well and disappear. It is a big insentive to forego, I know, but I just wonder...

I remember talking to some of the original Arthur's boys, tey told me that at one point, Percy Ceritty came and visited NZ. They had a little get-together with this "Elliot's coach"... One of them asked; "So what kind of training does Elliot do?" A typical Cerutty reply, he said; "I have no idea what he does! I have no interest in what Elliot do; I'm a makee of a man!" I remember they (Arthur's boys) used to say that, running around Waiatarua would "make a man out of a boy." At the age of 18 or 19, like Snell did, to run 22-miles with lots of hill in 3+ hours may not be the best thing to do phsyologically. But it did. I believe there certainly an element of workout that "works on your soul" more than physiology. That's exactly something I was telling one of the runners when she and I were running together a couple of winters ago. We were running around this 30-minute loop (for safety, you know...) 4 times. It was like -40F. One side of my face was starting to get numb... After 3 laps, we had enough. But we went for the fouth lap. "This is for our soul," I said. We finished the run in one piece (no frost-bite!).

weIInow wrote:

HRE, Why do so many kids quit the sport? Hmmm, I feel that many of them feel in their mid to late teens that they are missing out on having more fun partying etc. Perhaps a few of them also feel that they are expected to fulfil their parents wishes by being champion runners, but it is not what they really want. We have all seen a lot of that haven't we?

I think that generally most people who play a sport as kids or teenagers give the sport up by adulthood. I don't think that's just a problem with athletics.

As you probably know, most of our kids who do sports play for their high school. And the vast majority of them will not play once they graduate. Just from my observation that's true of baseball, basketball, track and cross country, whatever.

If they do go on it will almost always be at the university level. Opportunities in most sports here outside of high school or university are fairly rare other than something like road racing. You're not going to find many people playing organized baseball or basketball here if they aren't in some sort of school other than the handful who are good enough to play professionally.

So those who go on seem to be the exceptions. And many here who go on to university competition will quit in the first year or two unless they are good enough to have a scholarship.

I was one of two cross country runners in my university's freshman class to last all four years. Most of the guys who quit would say they wanted to have a more "normal" university experience and that they were missing too much of that "normal" experience by running cross country and track. I never got that and always felt that they were the ones who were missing something. But again, I'd be the unusual one there.

Maybe instead of looking at kids who quit the sport we should look at the ones who stay. (I once played with the idea of getting a psychology doctorate. That would be a great dissertation.) And yet if someone asked me why I stayed on rather than quit and why I've stayed in the sport for over forty years I really don't have a very good answer. I've enjoyed it. I get a sense of accomplishment from each day's run as a rule. I've made friends. I could "get" all of that from other activities.

I think Nobby is right. Getting the training right is a big accomplishment but getting someone's mental state right is much tougher. One common theme that I've heard about all the coaching giants of the 50s-70s is about the huge confidence boosts they gave to their athletes. Great leaders can do that. They inspire people and seem to hit that fine line between realism and optimism.

It seems to grow from an almost intuitive way to understand people. Nobby mentioned trying to inspire an athlete he coached and having it go very badly. If he'd known her better he'd have known more about how to handle her. I'm good at knowing how to get my son's mind in good form for racing and I think it's just because I know him so well. I recall reading once that Peter Coe said that if he couldn't coach another athlete as successfully as he coached his sone because "I'd have to live with him."

Poor Paula. She trained for the marathon for years, debuted 9 seconds off a new WR, and then went back to the track and nearly broke 30 minutes.

And then it took 6 years for anyone to do better than that.

Hey Nobby,

I think Rod should be knighted how about you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lriLRJrzGlE

Cheers Kim. Would it be true to say that Auckland is/was a runner's paradise? Does living there inspire people to run?

You were born in 1949? so you must have been at the impressionable ages during the time when Arthur Lydiard coached Peter Snell, Murray Halberg and Barry Magee won their Olympic Medals and set World Records? Did they all inspire each other? What was the atmosphere like around them?

Nobby, perhaps 19 is the optimum age for many of the Kenyans to run a fast 10000m? Why should running be different from swimming where kids have to be extremely dedicated to make it. Aerobic capacity peaks in teenage years and declines from our early twenties as our bodies slowly begin to age. But we continue to improve for severla years because we get more used to the training and racing. So maybe the peak age for a Marathon should be sometime before we hit 30, but that often doesn't happen.

I think Wanjiru's training is very interesting. It is obviously influenced by both Japanese and European training. The long slow runs is a Japanese tradition right? But he also does 400's. which is very unusual for Marathon runners these days. Didn't he also run a 1.48 800m when he was 16? I think that Sammy Wanjiru has a different personality to most runners and a different approach, one which we should perhaps pay more attention to?

I thinks its' a shame that any talented youngster can suddenly disapear, but this happens all the time in all sports. If they miss a few months of trainig for whatever reason, they might never get back to where they were.

Good points HRE, enjoyment, balancing realism and optimism, learning to undestand how to talk to each individual..... all positives, so important to reinforce, to keep everyting moving in the right direction.

MarathonMind wrote:

Poor Paula. She trained for the marathon for years, debuted 9 seconds off a new WR, and then went back to the track and nearly broke 30 minutes.

And then it took 6 years for anyone to do better than that.

I think the point Nobby was making is that Paula has never won a Gold Medal on the track in the World Championships or the Olympics, nor any Olympic Medal in the Marathon her best being a Silver in the 10000m in Seville 99. This is a huge source of disapointment to her.

I don't know how familiar you are with our "major" sports here, but we had a baseball player called Pete Rose who has the record for most hits in a career. He's been retired for decades now.

When Rose was a kid he decided the only thing he was going to do in life was to play professional baseball. But he wasn't THAT good and everyone told him it wasn't going to happen. HE ignored them and focused on the sport and of course proved everyone who said he wasn't good enough wrong.

You read that story and think that the reason he became the player he becamse was because of his mental approach. It's not hard to find similar stories about other successful athletes to corroborate this.

But you only ear about the ones who did succeed. We have no idea how many accountants or shop clerks there are who also decided they were going to be a top athlete but never did.

My wife used to have a friend who was about 40 years old (this was a while ago) and who desperately wanted to get pregnant. She'd done all the high tech stuff unsuccessfully. One day she was visiting and we got to talking about the role of belief systems in creating outcomes and she said, "So you're saying that if I believe I'll get pregnant I will."

I didn't really answer. Maybe she could have gotten pregnant is she only believed she could. But what I wonder is whether it would even be possible for her to believe she could. There's difference between telling yourself a thing and really believeing that thing.

By the way, I'd recommend Charlie Spedding's book for some interesting thoughts on the role of the mind on performance.

I think running IS different from swimming particularly because of gravity. In swimming, you can more or less be "floating" in water whereas in running, propelling your entire (fat) body forward against gravity and that would involve a lot more muscular development. I wonder if aerobic/anaerobic component of these two sport somewhat different??? I say this because, for someone like me who's not a good swimmer, it's hard to breathe!!! In other words, for someone who's working at the maximum exersion, they have to spend extra time not breathing in water... I think also there is some social aspect there as well. Like you said, kids would "have to be extremely dedicated..." They practice up to 6 hours a day which, of course, with running, because of muscular trauma, pretty much impossible. And because of that, it (swimming) had been a youngster's sport--they can afford to spend that much time. Of course, with the professional attitude and now "older" people can afford to spend that much time training, I'm sure things are changing... How old was Michael Phelps?

Wanjiru is an interesting case. As you know, he came to Japan when he was in high school. Interestingly, when he won the gold medal, there was an interview with his high school coach in Japanese magazine. He said that Sammy was already fast (as, as you pointed out, an 800 and 1500m runner) so he (the coach) had to teach him how to "run slow and far" (30k while in high school). Of course, because he was a speedster, he had a hard time pacing himself. You're right about his 400m repeats but, when you think about it, that's how Frank Shorter trained. I saw Yoko Shibui doing 200m repeats in Flagstaff in her preparation for Berlin. She also did 400s as well. Also, I would probably say Japanese tradition is LONG RUNS, not necessarily long slow running. Slow, yes, they do do that; but, as you know, they do lots of long tempo runs as well--more so than Americans.

Hate to say, perpahs one of the BEST books on mental side of running is called; "Seek, Nurture, Develop" by Kiyoshi Nakamura. "Develop" may not be the perfect translation; it's more like "make it live". As you know, he was known to give a preach (mental side of it) before actual workout up to 3 hours! It's 100% physical, 100% mental, man!

In my observation, the best runners definitely are the ones who believe in themselves the most. Would it be true to say that that was Lydiard's belief too?

HRE wrote:

Fred Wilt did a series of How They Train books in the 60s and 70s. The earliest one I have was written around the Rome Olympics and focuses on athletes running the 880 to six mile. Nearly all of the athletes profiled were at the peak of their careers by 1960 or before.

Very, very, few of these guys did any sorts of extended steady runs. The exceptions to this that I can recall were some Australians and a British guy whose name I can't recall.

Jim Peters

As I understand it, swimming coaching is very disciplined and structured. Yes there is also the social side to it as well, and possibly young swimmers have a better social life than young runners?

Regarding the phsyical stresses on a young runner's body, surely 70 miles per week is enough for a 19 year old but not too much (after a few years of build up) that they break down?

I think in future years, this is the way forward for young non-African runners, to train well in groups like swimmers do, and have a decent social life so they don't feel like they are missing out on the really important stuff that young people do.

Thanks for the info about young Wanjiru Nobby, do you have any more please?

What we have is very interesting:

Samuel Wanjiru Marathon Training

In an interview with Japanese Asahi newspaper and re-posted in Japanese running news, the guy shared his marathon training plan as he trained for the 2008 Beijing Olympic marathon.

(1) July 9: 38 km cross-country at a slow pace around 4:30 per km

July 10: easy day

July 11: speedwork (400 m x 10)

(2) July 20: 30 km pace run on flat ground in around 1 hour 34 min.

July 21: easy day

July 22: easy day

July 23: speedwork (3000 m x 3)

(3) July 30: 38 km cross-country at a slow pace around 4:30 per km

July 31: easy day

August 1: speedwork (400 m x 10)

(4) August 10: 30 km pace run on flat ground in around 1 hour 34 min.

August 11: easy day

August 12: easy day

August 13: speedwork (3000 m x 3)

Daily Workouts

Other than that he also runs about 15 km at 7:00 am or 8:00 am in the morning before he eats breakfast. He start’s around 4 minutes per km, drops it down to 3:30 in the middle, then ends up down at about 3 minutes 5 seconds.

Doe he do any Strength Training?

” I never do any strength training. You can get enough strength from running on cross-country-type courses.”

J.R. wrote:

HRE wrote:

Fred Wilt did a series of How They Train books in the 60s and 70s. The earliest one I have was written around the Rome Olympics and focuses on athletes running the 880 to six mile. Nearly all of the athletes profiled were at the peak of their careers by 1960 or before.

Very, very, few of these guys did any sorts of extended steady runs. The exceptions to this that I can recall were some Australians and a British guy whose name I can't recall.

Jim Peters

Nope. Peters turns up in a later edition. The 1959 version doesn't cover marathoners. The guy was Tony Weeks-Pearson and he did a couple of good paced nine muile runs each day with frequent twenties on Sunday. No intervals at all which was very unusual for a non-marathon runner of that era. I think he's the only guy in that book not doing any interval work. Most do almost nothing else.

Even Buddy Edelen is in there but his training is nothing like samples from later years.