Peter Snell Interview and his thoughts on Lydiard training

I wasn't talking about electricity, but about your assumption that "... steady state must be present before...". You wrote:

"If we apply this to the steady long running (DC) and the breaking up of this steadiness into off and on components - repetitions/intervals/even fartlek (AC), we can assume that the steady state must be present before the alternating state can be developed."

If you want to simply stay within Lydiard recommendations, then it's true that the long run is an important part of building your base, as well as maintaining this base in later phases, and that interval training comes only in later phases.

But if you read many of these Lydiard threads, you will find Lydiard critics who say that interval training can build your base better than long runs. This is what I was getting at -- whatever DC can build, AC can build it too. That is where your "electrical energy" model would break down.

I think we don't need an electrical analogy to understand Lydiard and/or training. I also think it will be hard to say something new about Lydiard training that we can't find in Lydiard threads from the past few years.

I realise much has been said before on Lydiard i am just trying to put my own perspective into this endless debate.

If we look at it purely energetically, with electricity as the image, then i do see the steady state in running as a steady state of energy production. By doing it more you increase your capacity for continuous energy production. I personally want this well developed before i start developing the ability to turn on and off. I thought i had found something which works and maybe it still does. Your explanation that DC can be built from AC throws that into confusion. So i offered a potential explanation along the lines of the difficulty required to create DC out of AC compared to the relative ease of having DC to start with. ie mess around endlessly with variants of repetitions versus simply learning to run for longer.

Still, this thread is amazing and i've been reading it as thoroughly as i can. So many elements are presented and i want to summarize them into some form. But first i have to start with the little pieces of gold scattered around this thread. So the next post will be a little collation of them from one particular poster.

As we age our ability to run a 7 pace deteriorates regardless of how hard we train. In my 30's I could run a 7 pace easily for all my runs. I trained around 70 mpw.

In my late 60's it is tough to run one mile in 7 minutes. If I age grade 7 minutes to my present age, it's around 9:30.

The only way I can run a seven pace these days is to break it up into 400's. then I can run 1:45's but that's not as easy as it used to be. But I can do 10-12 of them at that pace with a 200 jog-walk as recovery.

The answer has to lie somewhere in between 7 minutes and 9:30. Maybe it's 8-8:30. The top guys that I know in my age group (65-69) train at around that pace. But of course recovery becomes a big issue. They can't do it every day. They need easy days in between or days totally off.

I ran that line of thinking past Peter and he held to the idea that you need the 7:00 (or so) pace to activate the fast twitch fibers. Otherwise, he said, you need to do intervals.

"A runner can’t train slow like an ultra marathoner as they rely on fat as a fuel."

Now how does gerry lindgren fit into the equation? 200-350 mpw and a 13:40 5k. he couldn't have run the 200-350 faster than 7:30-8min pace, and in fact he said he did run a portion over 8 pace. So how does this fit in? Are high schoolers different? meaning because they are so untrainned, whatever they do, they will get faster?

63 year old running 7 minute pace as his easy day:

http://www.runnersworld.com/masters-profiles/nolan-shaheed-continues-break-records?page=single

All accounts are that Lindgren was running well under 7:30 for a lot of his miles, but with as much running as he did he probably ran a lot of it slower too.

There are lots of ways to skin a cat. Last summer I was talking with a guy who's run in three Olympic Marathons and he said that he'd met international class guys who did all sorts of different things in training and got great results so he finds it hard to believe there is only one way to get fit.

Certainly high school runners will improve almost regardless of how they're training as long as what they do is reasonable. Physical maturity will bring improvements.

fool, Paul Ballinger and heaps others ran under 2:18, Ballinger did 2:10:15, do your research genius.

The length of these letters indicate a lack of understanding of the "Lydiard Method."

It's comforting to me that NO ONE really knows what Lydiard did! I think Lydiard was a thinking coach and adapted training to the runner. He may have had some ideas that formed his basic philosophy. But he knew that running was more than just physiology.

J.R. wrote:Michael Phelps, for example, does no long swims at all.

Actually that is not correct. I have listened to a few talks that Bob Bowman (his coach) and Phelps swam as far as 10 kilometers straight. Not often, but Bowman limed not only the aerobic aspect but also he neurological adaptation of taking thousands of excellent strokes over the course of the swim.

what a thread.

at the end of the day, i'm not seeing too many golds in the 800m with the long run as a significant factor.

snell had a lousy mile time also,

arch jelley of nz did take lydiard to the next level, simplified it, and got the 349 mile, but no 800 miracles, not even close.

lydiard overall is not great middle distance training in itself, but i have to say the aerobic phase is great, i'd use that more as the build up.

the hybrid lydiard system of walker and scott, which rubbed off everwhere, was based on the hard one hour ish run, where they kicked ass in segments, a kind of fartlek, and the adaptation from this kind of running is nothing like a 22 miler at a slower pace.

basically you don't need the long run, but if it doesn't kill your legs, your body adapts to storing energy for running, more than so called aerobic adaptation.

later on the body's extra energy for running is available in the more quality stages of training.

in theory, the long run, as an adaptation for an energy resovior, can be substituted for an iron man cross training day, of 2 plus hours breathing and moving the body on a bike, swim, etc.

finally, guys that can run 21 seconds 200m don't want to be doing 22 milers ever. no mr. lydiard.

You have to subtract one or more seconds to Shell's times because they were ran on either a cinder of grass track. So that 800m he ran would easily be sub 1:42 and that mile time easily sub 3:50 .

at the end of the day, the problem with lydiard is that the athlete spends too much time learning how to run at non race pace, and the form suffers, and the muscular development moves to slow twitch, and the 22 second 200m speed is lost, and you are not competitive on the last lap, and the podium becomes a thing of the past.

back in the day, you only had a couple of guys to worry about and they were trained badly as well,

that made a lydiard stand out as a genius, mind you, he is still probably the best all time, just not the be all and end all, when you take all the developments into consideration.

the takeaway in lydiard, the breakthrough is the concept of building up energy available for training through LSD.

and developing aerobic ability of a person with very good speed.

the advance moving forward is, finding the optimal amount of work - specifically, but no more.

and hitting it again as soon, but not sooner as the organism has adapted.

and then you have the periodization, where you can use the lydiard model, the pyramid, where you cut the volume and up the intensity, peaking at race season, and the champs. and they you have to build up again.

and of course you need to customize for the athlete.

longjack wrote:

at the end of the day, the problem with lydiard is that the athlete spends too much time learning how to run at non race pace, and the form suffers, and the muscular development moves to slow twitch, and the 22 second 200m speed is lost, and you are not competitive on the last lap, and the podium becomes a thing of the past.

WTH? If you read John Walker's book he suggests that Snell should have gone better than 1:44 in the pre synthetic track era. He was in credibly fast.