Is Jack Daniels useless?

Arbitrary pace prescription is crap. I'm sure Daniels helped a lot of people create a system for organizing their workouts, but his "pace system" is incredibly rigid and limiting and isn't rooted in any physiologic principles.

I actually laughed at this one, so I do hope it was meant to be a joke!

In case it wasn't, I take it you don't know what he is a doctor of?

Human physiology has not changed at all in a few decades. Everything that was true in the 70's is still true today. Kind of like the Bisquick recipe!

Exactly. There's a big difference between "coaching" and a "coaching book." There's is no way to put all elements of coaching into a book, for all people. You can cover 80% of what is needed by 80% of people, in a book. But coaching involves adjusting that extra 20% to individuals, and over time.

Care to explain the physiologic validity of his pace system then?

I am coach of Greater Boston Track Club, wrote the history of the Boston Marathon, ex-produced the Boston Marathon Documentary and worked with Jack Daniels at Nike while he was gathering data for his book. My wife edited the first edition so I read every word at every stage and spend hours talking with Jack about running and the physiology especially as it related to product design which was my Nike job in the early 1980s. We were testing air shoes, strange plastic inserts that never made it, and even carbon fibers that we could not get to work with the foam available at the time. Jack was at the forefront of all this seeking measurements from testing not opinions based on authority or marketing dreams. His objective was to collect data and base decisions upon that and not on wishes, hopes, and anecdotes.

I would make shoe prototypes and Jack would test them on runners to see if greater efficiencies resulted. We did that over and over. Others are doing the same scientific investigations now. If as we all wish, Jack were in his prime, he would write another book based on more decades of research. It would be different. So read his book, read all the others, learn from your experience, and apply that where the intelligence leads you.

I am so much looking forward to Jack's 90th birthday and so much appreciate his intelligence.

I can't speak for others experience, but I was fortunate/lucky enough to coach an Olympic marathoner and Daniels was the "cookbook" for us. As with any coaching manual the secret sauce is always going to be how you apply the information to your situation and athlete. I'm sure Daniels would be the first to admit that. If someone is looking for a step by step robotic approach to training then they will never be successful no matter which program they follow. A book will never be able to know variables that come up during the training process and if someone doesn't have success with a program like Daniels then they simply did not make correct assessments during the process. That's not a weakness of the guide, its a failing of the coach/individual to make appropriate changes.

I could suggest a book to you that address this...

I’m not saying that you should do full 4:00/mile workouts if you’re a 4:30/mile runner. Im saying that there is little place in Daniels’s philosophy to introduce 4:00/mile pace to a 4:30/mile runner because he is so focused on incremental improvement.

That becomes an issue for many runners after a while when they plateau. If they keep doing workouts at their current pace or just slightly faster, they end up running the same race times.

Sean Brosnan agrees with me. You think Aaron Sahlman would have broken 4:00 if, when he was a 4:40 guy, he just kept doing workouts to run 4:30? No. He trained to run the fastest mile he could, and that included running small portions of workouts at sub-4:00 pace even when he was a ways off of it.

Don’t put limits on yourself.

Does Daniels not have F pace in his mile program, along with very fast "strides" when appropriate?

I get what you're saying, but most here are agreeing that you can't follow the formula to the letter for optimal results. This book is a great place to start for people just getting into the game.

Sit and spin aye?!

Jack Daniels has had a bigger influence on training for distance runners than almost any other person in history, and his books/methodology (along with the internet that gave widespread access to them) is one of the primary reasons the depth of distance running talent in this country has exploded so much over the last 20 years. The coaches I had in jr high and high school didn't even know that tempo/threshold time runs weren't supposed to run at an all out effort and that having high schoolers essentially time-trialing 4-8 mile runs multiple times per week in addition to their races was bad training. I think a lot of people take it for granted how much is common knowledge now BECAUSE of Jack Daniels and his "Running Formula."

I have read probably 15-20 different books on training for distance runners, and while there are a variety of good ones out there, I still say to this day if I could only recommend one it would be DRF, especially to the average reader.

Do you mean how he works out paces based on VDOT? If so, that's a weird take as even coaches who don't like the Daniels schedules will generally say that VDOT is a good way to work out appropriate paces for different workouts

I see what you’re saying and agree but the solution is to re-test your athletes. Update their training paces. Threshold training, for example is tricky. You can’t overcompensate with threshold training without losing the training effect being sought.

Shot and a beer or GTFO.

Jack > Jim IMO

Jack's book is an excellent primer and source for the self-coached in particular. But even he says that it is incomplete - one paragraph mentions the use of Heart-rate and lactate analysis, but he says that this is too complicated to include for a generally one-size fits all book, even one broken down into event categories, but he realizes that they ARE important if too unwieldy to be included in this primer. The audience is the average runner/coach and a physiological primer for the more advanced of these people. These methodologies are now more available to the masses, so are included in many elite programs to validate the paces and/or recoveries prescribed.

One source who had an imaginative way to include both Goal Pace and Date Pace was Walt McClure (Steve Prefontaine's HS coach). There is nothing in the way of LT (Tempo) or gradations into Intervals (VO2max) or Reps or Fast Reps. But I think while the information Daniel's provides is very useful, too many people get lost in the numbers and/or terminology. Knowing what works for your athlete, while understanding the what/why and when of training parameters (and responses to racing) is really all that is required, and comes through in McClure's schedules. There are any number of ways to get things done, it mostly comes down to making choices. Daniel's book is great for those who can take the information and individualize it for a given athlete or themselves, even at a more elite level. There are pieces of the training puzzle missing (or the book would have been longer than "War and Peace"), such as short recovery Reps for example, but the experienced coach can figure that out and include these elements for a given athlete.

The paper from which he derived the 20min tempo run was this:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/16983676_Changes_in_onset_of_blood_lactate_accumulation_OBLA_and_muscle_enzymes_after_training_at_OBLA

As I have learned here, runners do not like research because it is easy to poke holes in research (see: Resistance Training Improves Running Performance).

Alan

I have altered my thoughts, 1968 Olympics and J Daniels. I still believe 800m would have been J Ryun's best event BUT even if J Ryun were a lower mil