LYDIARD OR DANIELS?

Great stuff...

Bump

When I traveled a half way across the world (well, perhaps more like a quarter way...) to New Zealand to study the Lydiard method of training in 1984, I met this young runner in New Zealand. He asked me why I came all the way from Japan. I told him I was studying "the Lydiard Way" of training. He asked me what it was. Yet, Lydiard lived only a couple of miles from this young man.

In the fall of 2000, I went back to Japan. With a jetlag, I was up late watching TV. There was a re-run of this program on a great sprinting coach named John Smith. They showed quite extensively what his training philosophy is and how he analize phases of 100m race and certain exercises that he and his HSI group do. I had never heard of anything like that in any running magazine or any literture in the US, yet I live in the US.

I was talking to this Japanese coach this morning and I asked him to get me a couple of information from Japan; one is a training philosophy of coach Fujita (Mizuki Noguchi's coach) and another is a print out of sprinting technique presented by coach Tom Telletz, Carl Lewis' coach, which turned around the conventional running technique in Japan completely up-side-down in the 1990s. Has any of you readers heard about it? Yet, these two sprinting coaches live and work right here in the US.

I just hope people can see what's valuable and what actually works instead of some media hypes. I hope Dr. Daniels gets proper recognition and people actually study his trainig method "correctly". I hope Alan Webb gets appropriate "evaluation" and, instead of simple bashing, if he turns out to be a real, people study his progress and many more can follow his footsteps. And if things, by any chance, didn't work out for him, people would analize what happened and why it didn't work out so many more young telented athletes will NEVER be wasted.

Just bumping this up because it's an incredible thread.

Nobby,

Found it interesting that you mentioned Tom Tellez. I just saw him yesterday before he headed out to talk to some Japanese sprinter.

I also agree that sometimes coaches in their own nation are sort of taken for granted. For some reasons athletes tend to look to far away places for answers when sometimes the answer can be, as they say, right under your nose. Don't know why this happens but it can be seen in America, Australia, New Zealand, etc. with some of their top coaches in the past not having as warm a reception in their home country as they do in other countries around the world.

You are never a prophet in your own land.

(somebody else said that)

Tom

It seems that a coach from a foeign country is often given higher regard; and if they only speak a foreign language then they are even more highly regarded. I remember when the Soviet national nordic ski coach once came to a clinic I was giving on altitude training and asked me if he could have his interpreter translate during the session. He told me they used altitude training in their program and he wanted to find out why. Gotta love it.

2 years ago Athletics NZ bought Joachim Cruz out here for a series of Seminars. They were excellent and Joachim was an outstanding presenter with a great sense of Humour.

Interestingly he had the same message as we have tried to push here. That each must find what suits him.

When he went through what he did for training he even said occasionally "I did that !, Man I would never give that to an athlete now! ".

But the problem was some Coaches fell onto what he had presented and we saw 12 year old kids trying to do what Cruz did just prior to winning in LA.

I know it is not what Joachim was trying to tell us but he had a neat accent and an Olympic Gold medal. The masses were impressed.

What is crazy is that I don't believe that anyone even contacted Arthur to see if he would "chat" with Joachim.

I wonder what would have come out of that. !!!!!!

Bump. C'mon Team !!!

Kim Stevenson wrote:

What is crazy is that I don't believe that anyone even contacted Arthur to see if he would "chat" with Joachim.

I wonder what would have come out of that. !!!!!!

I always thought it would be great if you could just get a couple of the top distance coaches/athletes together and just let them talk, debate, whatever. I would have payed a lot to see a transcript of someone like Lydiard sitting down and talking with Peter Coe. I think such talks could be of great benefit to a lot of people. It's a shame that it's never done and recorded for the public to see. I can think of a lot of interesting discussions that would be brought about if a lot of today's top coaches sat down and talked training.

RE: hill training for marathoners

On the advice of Nobby posted here several months ago, I tried a 4-week hill phase as part of my marathon plan. I did hill twice a week, and did them the way Ron Daws did (run strong instead of bound). I kept my weekend long run plus a midweek 2-hour run. My base phase had me at 70-75 miles per week (plus extra easy running), and in the hill phase I kept it in the 60s.

After the hill phase I did a 5k and the results didn't impress me, and I thought I had wasted my time or even gone backwards. Well. . .

I'm kind of mish-mashing the anaerobic and coordination phases together, based on previous experience of what works for me. Every second week I'm doing a 15k time trial (among other things). I've just started this phase and I've only done one of those time trials, but the results are good. I'm stunned at how much faster I can run now than before the hill phase -- nearly as fast as I could race a 15k just two months ago. My milage is now up around 80/week and I don't feel "peaked out" yet -- I know there's probably another 6 weeks of improvement left in me.

Aside from the physical issues, the biggest problem I have with marathoning is mental. It's very difficult for me to wrap my mind around running that fast for that far. These kinds of workouts with these kinds of results are exactly what I need, and that might be the greatest part of the Lydiard system. You feel totally in control of making things happen on the right day, and the time trials are such specific training that you KNOW you can pull it off on race day.

That is really neat.

I know when I asked Bill Baillie what I should feel like running the Time Trials, he said you should feel as though you could have gone a little faster. Almost frustrated that you could not go quicker.

I vividly remember my first 5k Time trial, It was 16:40, My best RACE time prior to that was 16:30.

It was easy. I did it with Bill (and others) and he controlled the pace because he could see us young guys turning the thing into a race !

Another reply to myself !

Just heard from HRE, he will be here in Rotorua and staying with me this weekend after having spent some time with Barry Magee in Auckland.

Hope between the 2 of us we can come up with some more enlightening information.

Cheers Team !

I wonder how many sec you would improve while coming out from 20 week solid basework and then do the 12 weeks of hill and anarobic trainng. Maybe 50sek in 5km?

I heard Knut Kvalheim improve from 8.10 to 7.42 after the faster work (ca 10sec/km). Lydiard used to tell once Fast training is started your max level is decided for the season. Only thruogh more base can you reach a higher max level. So I wonder how much this limited imbrovment can be after a solid base 160-250k-20weeks. Maybe I can ask what could Snell, Hallberg, Quax and Foster do right after the conditioning period in all out races to make it simple how much did they improve after the "hard" work started.

Good question but hard to answer in the short time I have (Work beckons !!)

But the key to Arthur's work was LONG TERM development and it took many years of work before the guys you mentioned were at the top. Snell probably the least amount (1:52 to 1;46 in 2 years). But the others you are talking 5 to 8 years consistent training and racing.

Will come back to this later.

Cheers.

To Kim and Favog,

Favog, thanks for your results and comments on the hill phase, they are inspiring. With regard to Kim's above post, it feels good to commit to a longer-term approach (years vs weeks). In reading interviews and lectures given by Arthur, he mentioned the ability to improve for 3 to 5 years (and perhaps beyond) if an athlete starts the system before age 35 (no small coincidence I started my journey a bit before my 34th birthday). It's the first real long-view I've taken with regard to training (feels a little like fatherhood at first). I'm still a few weeks away from the hill phase, but I'm looking forward to experiencing the time trials after once I get there.

I still refer to DRF often, especially when trying to calculate how my aerobic run pacing is going. Speaking of the charts, can anyone comment on the revisions (especially for longer tempo runs) in the new edition?

I'd go with Lydiard. I do not feel the need to explain why.

Kim,

I reply so you don't have to reply to yourself again. One of the harder things in my coaching is to get young athletes to understand that long term does not mean 6 weeks.

Tom

[quote]Kim Stevenson wrote:

But the key to Arthur's work was LONG TERM development and it took many years of work before the guys you mentioned were at the top.

Tom -- and that is a negative side of our education-based system, in which runners get to deal with a great variety of coaches in their early years of sport -- some even having 3 different coaches each year (XC, indoor and outdoor). SO, even runners who stick with it for long term haven't had the advantage of the same coach on a long-term basis

When I asked Lydiard himself what he thought I could run (this was when I was actually competing). This is when he knew what times I was running and my 200m time (basic speed) and all. He was not interested in giving me any specific numbers at all. He simply told me that if I continue a systematic training year after year, I will improve and eventually reach my potential. He did tell me, however, that I should do really well in steeplechase based on my bounding skills!

You cannot give any formula of how many % you will improve your time once you start doing "other" parts of the Lydiard program. Some people react very well with hill training or intervals. Some people need to improve speed (technique) or some people simply need to work on coordination--which, by the way, was my case and when I did, I improved my 3-mile time by nearly 2 minutes. This is mostly because I was doing lots of base work and never did any kind of anaerobic training or coordination. I was very fit and my "speed" came back, well, dramatically.

This is the extreme case but I'd say it's probably fair to say you can expect to see the improvement of your mile time by somewhere around 10 to 15 seconds; 20 to 30 seconds in 5k, etc. I believe Peter Snell was running somewhere around 4:10~4:15 coming off base work and/or hill phase. Again, a lot depend on your background and what kind of training you've been doing and how you react to certain type of training. Also, as Mighty Favog experienced, it's not just hill training or base training; you need to develop ALL the necessary ingredients before you coordinate them; only then you can expect some real improvement.

One other thing I'd like to clarify here: some people take what Lydiard said about "once you stop your aerobic conditioning, your performance level is determined" as "this is it; there's no turning-around." I've read somewhere that someone said, because of this line, say, if your performance shows that you tend to falter in the second half of your race (a sure sign of lack of endurance) that you are SOL (because your base training is already behind you). This is not true. That you tend to slow down at the end reveals that you (1) have developed good speed but need to work on "stamina" (as opposed to "endurance") or (2) need to work on your pace judgment so you won't start out too fast. What Lydiard means is that your base work is done. And this base=aerobic development is what determined your performance level. All the other work; repetitions or speed training or time trials are only the icing on the cake. But you still need that icing on the cake to be complete. That's when times really start to come down. It is not that the time(s) at the end of marathon conditioning is it. Picture this as a foundation for your house. The bigger and stronger it is, the bigger and higher the house you can build. So the kind of house you can build is determined by this base; but you still need to build that house. This is when true art of coaching is revealed. This balancing act, coordination of all the training, the art of peaking is really one of the greatest contributions of Lydiard but it's not really well talked about (and he doesn't really talk much about it either).