Was Rogers working at all in '75, or living off race winnings?
Was Rogers working at all in '75, or living off race winnings?
Not An Expert wrote:
Was Rogers working at all in '75, or living off race winnings?
working as a teacher I think-one day it says "no teaching today!" and another he mentions it snowing a lot and not having a snow day.
180 miles with a zero on one of the days. Enough said...
miles upone miles wrote:
Not An Expert wrote:Was Rogers working at all in '75, or living off race winnings?
working as a teacher I think-one day it says "no teaching today!" and another he mentions it snowing a lot and not having a snow day.
Yeah, I just saw some of that stuff looking through it some more. Was he a teacher, though, or was he a grad student (he talks about taking exams one day, and I'm pretty sure he has a Master's)?
Never mind, saw some more stuff (about taking a day off the week before Boston--"Fine weather - and a day off from Tootertown school! My decision of course")--think he was a teacher.
What a f***ing badass!
BR is the man! wrote:
Could you imagine if more elite american runners had the balls to train like this now!
No doubt, there are many hard working American distance runners out there now, toiling away in anonymity.
The incentive to do this has to come from within but USATF could obviously do more to encourage and support the effort.
BR had many unique qualities, even so I believe there are many more who can excel in this country than have arisen in the past few decades.
The passion has to be there.
The way I see it, the major differences between 1970's and today are $$$ (there is some today) and availability of physical therapist who understand runners needs, virtualy non-existent in the 70's.
Dr. Sheehan at RW was one of the few and had a column in RW where he answered injury inquiries. I wrote to him when I was a HS runner and he sent me a detailed letter that helped me much more than the trainers at school or the doctors they recommended.
Today "sports medicine" exists.
The main point of the day to day logs is showing ultimately, self reliance. If you want to excel you have to have it.
If you have a great coach wonderful, live at altitude great, drive a BMW, cool, have a beautiful girlfriend who loves the fact that you run twice a day and run races every other weekend and need to be in bed (sleeping) at 9:00 p.m, awesome.
If you don't have all of that, you still have everything you need to succeed, Bill certainly did.
I would see Dr. Sheehan at road races, and, right out of high school (1968), I had knee problems and he sent me to a podiatrist (Dr. Schuster) who, with no charge (!) fitted me with orthotics, without which I would not have been able to run the last forty years plus.What strikes me about BR's log is how many of the the second runs of the day were run only four hours after the first run, instead of, say, six to eight hours after.
Hodgie-san wrote:
BR is the man! wrote:Could you imagine if more elite american runners had the balls to train like this now!
No doubt, there are many hard working American distance runners out there now, toiling away in anonymity.
The incentive to do this has to come from within but USATF could obviously do more to encourage and support the effort.
BR had many unique qualities, even so I believe there are many more who can excel in this country than have arisen in the past few decades.
The passion has to be there.
The way I see it, the major differences between 1970's and today are $$$ (there is some today) and availability of physical therapist who understand runners needs, virtualy non-existent in the 70's.
Dr. Sheehan at RW was one of the few and had a column in RW where he answered injury inquiries. I wrote to him when I was a HS runner and he sent me a detailed letter that helped me much more than the trainers at school or the doctors they recommended.
Today "sports medicine" exists.
The main point of the day to day logs is showing ultimately, self reliance. If you want to excel you have to have it.
If you have a great coach wonderful, live at altitude great, drive a BMW, cool, have a beautiful girlfriend who loves the fact that you run twice a day and run races every other weekend and need to be in bed (sleeping) at 9:00 p.m, awesome.
If you don't have all of that, you still have everything you need to succeed, Bill certainly did.
I think I just learned more about running from reading that log than I have in 15 years of reading running books and talking to "experts". Run, race, repeat.
The race log is equally as enlightening. He ran a 2:11 in Japan on "two or three gulps of water".
billy r wrote:
180 miles with a zero on one of the days. Enough said...
Wrong. You misread the log. The week with the zero day totalled 104 miles. The week before that one was the 180 week, witho no down days- and as I have pointed out, there was a 7 day stretch covering 200 miles if you use part of the 147 week and part of the 180 week. Looking further, there is the run of consecutive days from the 3rd to the 15th- 13 days in all, where Bill covered 327 miles- an average of 25 miles per day, and the easiest day was a 13 mile single run. The "down" week of 104 gave him the rest he needed to pop his 8:54 2 mile.
Which is why I posted that. I understand the differences between the 70's and now, training wish, but, how do you recover for this! The training is not the problem, the recovery is.
Notice how many times he says ran an easy, slow, or ok pace. You need to recover from workouts (like tempos, intervals, etc...) BR did those workouts but for the most part it seems he ran mostly easy mileage. Now if you go out and run hard every day then yes it would be extremely difficult to maintain his type of mileage. But he didn't. He seemed to listen to his body and focus on getting in a hell of a lot of aerobic running.
Once you start running easy - recovery is very different. Most of us are so used to doing "workouts" that of course we need a day to recover from them. But when you just run (and run easy-to-moderate starting out easy) you will find that you are not sore (or as sore) the next day.
I can do a long run of 20 miles (this is from last Summer) which was my longest run in years and be fine come back the next day and do another long run of 16, Why? because i did not try to run the 20 miler at any particular pace, I just ran. I did not expect to feel good enough after a 20 miler to do this - so it suprised me too. but that is the beauty of this kind of easy miles training.
This Summer and now into the Fall i have put three 20 mile days in a row...i was tired but not sore. faster-paced running, where we are burning glycogen, is what makes us sore. I have recently gone as far as 30 miles (which sounds crazy, but it was not really a big deal once you learn to run easy...i mean if you can run 2 and 1/2 hours or so and cover 20+ miles going for 3 and 1/2 hours and covering 30 miles is the next logical step) anyway the day after the 30, I ran a faster paced 20 miler. how did i recover? I don't know - i just know that the 30 didn't tax my system that much since i wasn't pushing the pace.
to put this all another way - i ran for years in college and after college using the (hard-easy) approach. My easy days in college were 4 in the morning and 8 in the afternoon. The hard days were pretty hard. Now the hard days are more controlled. Instead of tyring to get a "workout" I try to work on running effeciently. So the next day, instead of needing a recovery day, i go long (20+ miles). In a way, instead of going hard-easy I like to think of it as working on effciency- then endurance...but both days are about running conmfortably (but at different paces). It is not easy to change the way you/we train. It took me 3 years. .
Yeah, we don't know for sure, but BR's easy pace was probably in the 6 to 7 minute range. Whereas Derek Clayton was doing the same type of mileage but hammering away at 5:30-6:00 ALL the time. Hence, Clayton's many injuries and relatively short career, whereas BR logged in a ton of wins over a much longer career.
Derek Clayton was a Clydesdale compared to BR who was/is a bird who never/barely touched the ground. Two very different human beings. Wear and tear issues had very little to do with pace of training.
chubbymcdonald wrote:
Derek Clayton was a Clydesdale compared to BR who was/is a bird who never/barely touched the ground. Two very different human beings. Wear and tear issues had very little to do with pace of training.
I don't think anyone can really say for certain which issues had the biggest impact on longevity. Why wouldn't pace of training have something to do with it?
jack343 wrote:
I love this stuff. None of this worrying about VO2 maxes and whatnot, just run baby. Look on the part where he mentions the world XC race, it says "12k (?)" under the mileage section...as if he wasn't even concerned with exactly how far he was RACING. Just went out there and ran his ass off. That is awesome.
YES! OMG how did he run w/o knowing his VDOT or w/o getting his blood lactate measured every 10 mins.??? Does he mention whether he obessed over his tempo pace? Did he run all those miles w/o an iPod?? Sports beans? Gu? Nike Shox shoes?
MarathonMind wrote:
Yeah, we don't know for sure, but BR's easy pace was probably in the 6 to 7 minute range.
Based on the (admittedly rough) times and distances listed in the '75 log, I think some of his easy days may have been slower than that. It seemed like they ranged mostly from mid-6 pace to sometimes pretty near (or sometimes even slightly slower than) 8-minute pace.
A Clydesdale huh? Then that makes 2:08:34 in 19freaking69 all the more impressive.
You're probably right, since Ed Whitlock's success with that kind of training has yielded him phenomenal results.
You're right. If covering a certain number of miles is your primary concern then you're going to do those runs at whatever pace or effort level that you can. Almost everyone I know who has a hard time running big miles has been someone who feels like they need to run a minimum pace or there was no value to the run.
In my best years when I was approaching these sorts of mileage totals I might have run close to 6:00 pace at times and close to 8:00 at other times. I just did what I needed to do to cover the distance and ran as hard or easily as I felt like doing.