Clarfiying Van Aaken

From "The Runner's Handbook" by Bob Glover & Jack Shepherd:

"Dr. Ernst van Aaken told the New York Runner's Club at his 1976 lecture that beer is an important food. As a liquid, he told the thirsty runners, it ranks in importance only after water and definitely before milk. Beer, consumed in moderate amounts, supplies many essential vitamins and yeast. Dr. van Aaken suggested that runners should drink one beer for every 6 miles."

Has anyone heard anything like this before?

Manfred Steffny was pretty positive about beer drinking after a marathon. Lots of B vitamins.

Dr. Thomas J. Bassler, who is also science fiction author T. J. Bass, has said exactly that since the early 1970s. In his book "The Whole Life Diet" he states "'Moderate' beer drinking is associated with 50 percent protection against heart attacks" per the "Annals of Internal Medicine" (1974) and the "New England Journal of Medicine" (1977). Tom often drank beer in his races. I told him that is why he never got below three hours for a marathon. I do not think that beer during a race adds to ones performance. I did find that defizzed coke did.

Beer. Another similarity between van Aaken and Lydiard.

By the way, that new book by Manfred Steffney has 10 weeks of his brother Herbert's training prior to his 2:11 marathon.

Is the book available in English? Can you post a link where I could purchase it online? Thanks.

"Everybody's got to believe in something.

I believe I'll have another beer." - W. C. Fields

The book is not available in English. I believe you can get the German version from Amazon.

Chuckster wrote:

I only did the 5x Mon and Tues, but I'm trying to do it again this week on Mon and Fri, basically in place of my easy days. Yesterday I ran about 25 miles for my long run and I'm kind of hurting, but now that I've run twice my legs feel a lot better, oddly enough.

Chuckster,

How goes the training? Have you continued to add runner of the future type days? Races coming up? How's it going??

More generally, to others who might be interested:

Nobby's website devoted to promulgating the philosophy and recommendations of the great coach Arthur Lydiard inspired me to attempt to find others interested in doing something similar for my favorite coach EvA. I'm interested in sharing training among those following EvA's philosophy, and, indeed, specific recommendations on training. In particular, I'd like to see to what extent people who follow this philosophy faithfully while acknowledging it as their inspiration ( I believe that probably there are many many runners who do train as if EvA were their coach but who don't think about it in those terms). I especially want to do this sooner rather than later while so many who have direct knowledge of EvA's approach - vladimir and HRE I'm thinking of you, in particular, here - are still I hope interested in posting about it.

A little about my motivation:

I've been suffering through a bout of achilles tendinitis and I'm very pressed at work right now, but I was inspired by the threads - including this one - about van Aaken to start tomorrow by slowly running to help speed the healing of my injury and to get me back into racing shape, such as it might be. Reading EvA's book many many (many....) years ago changed my running and my race performances dramatically for the better.

Thanks in advance for any interest.

Humbly,

Link

I'm still doing the "runner of the future" type days 2x a week for 2 weeks and then I take the third week easy. I've hit mileage in the 140s four times now. The funny thing is that I've never run a week in the 130s, I skipped it somehow. I didn't realize I went that high until I added it up at the end of the week.

I ran Gettysburg 5K yesterday and was only about 4 seconds off of my PR, so luckily the mileage doesn't seem to have hurt me.

I've decided to do Ultras now and am trying to get into a 50K next Saturday but I'm currently on the waitlist.

Also I've been doing long runs on Sunday but instead of doing it all at once, I break it up depending on when/where I have time to run, it more fun that way.

Link - try doing dynamic stretches before you run and static stretches after, it may help.

Dynamic stretches that are good for the ankles are:

Ankling (this is going to be hard to explain) - you keep your legs straight and bound along on your toes, the only thing that touches the ground is your toes and as you bound off the ground you point your toes up as high as you can, and then back down as you bound off the ground again. Your feet should stay under your hips the entire time and not go out to the side or out in front of you.

Knee grab: grab you knee and pull it up to your chest, and as you pull it up, do a calf raise on the other leg, and you just alternate legs and you walk around.

Usually do each one about 20 meters out and then turn around and come back. I do other drills as well but these are the two for the ankles.

Van Aaken had a session he had injured runners do. He'd send them to a track and have them jog around on the grass inside the track for 350 meters and walk for 50 meters. He'd have people do that for an hour or two. He never thought rest was the answer. But he did have a medical treatment he gave. He called it a "Tubingen Bomb" and it was some sort of anti-inflammatory drug not available in the US combined with vitamin B-12, I think. You might try that session and a load of anti-inflammatory stuff.

There is a website about EvA. I think his family put it up. I can dig out the link later on. It's in German.

Well I do not often get back to check the computer, but I always try to locate this thread. My last two weeks have been very good (training wise). I have been able to get out around three times a day (normally 60-90 minutes at a time). The pace is very slow (probably around 5.5-6 pace), but got in 24 workouts two weeks ago and 28 this past week. I did bomb on the final day so this week I will pare back. Race wise I will have to see -- I am not that much interested in racing (perhaps because I am not where I feel I can be competitive). I also am always interested in hearing any success stories (regardless of where there training is based). I did enjoy the writing's from ??? about training (can not remember the name, but it was Phase I (or something like that) and was very basic of going slow and building up during the summer. I think it helps to run with others. I run most of my runs with other individuals who are a little faster than I am. Being that we are going slow and only for a little over an hour it is nice. My long runs (only up to 4:35, but will try to build it up to 6:00). I have increased to once every two weeks on pavement (95% of the rest of my runs are on dirt, trails, grass, etc). When I am on the roads I do hold solid to taking a 5:00 walk every 30:00. As for the beer aspect, I never got into drinking under EVA. As I remember he never made a big deal out of anything other than easy volumne training. He did advocate fasting and I do not remember seeing much in the line of junk food.

Are you on a work hiatus Vlad?

Sounds like you went through two hell weeks in a row.

That's the link to van Aaken's website. It is in German.

What you called hell- I would call heaven. I wish I had the time, ability and "permission" to run 30 hours a week. The nice weather really helps.