Lydiard base - aerobic pace

Flow, I am too young to have known Peter Snell from High School days. But I taught at Mt Albert Grammar in the early/mid 80's and there was still a few 'old' guys who were teaching there then who knew and taught Peter when he was there.

I used to look after all the "Records" for School Athletics and Mike Macky was the School record holder for 800m (Still is !!) at 1:57.8. Snell had a crack at it but came up short.\

The record has to be set on "Athletics Sports Day "

As for your other questions.

Without any evidence I would say that w have always had a "distance running" culture in NZ.Harrier Clubs up until recent years were strong "Social groups" that met on a regular basis with the guys training together. Arthur was critical in the ideas of training , particularly in the 50's, 60's and 70's.

But Hey ! You work with the likes of Russ Hoggard, he would have some ideas about why our Distance runners have been so successful. He has been around forever and seen the "us and downs" of NZ Athletics.

To go back to the Harrier clubs. In july I went down to Wellington for a visit and in the process had a run with the Scottish Harrer Club. My estimate that day would be about 100 runners (Foul day too !!). The groups out running contained everything from National reps to over the "over 60's". I ran with that group (as one of the youngsters) and we were out the longest of any group that day and would have covered 10 miles on Wellingtons rugged hills.

How many NZ Harrier Clubs would have done a similar thing that day ???. Probably Dozens.

How many in the US ?? Probably Zero !!!!!

I guess you could say it is a cultural thing !!!

As for the Bowerman question. I feel (this is totally personal) that Bowereman saw the Lydiard success in 1960 and decided to "get some of that Knowledge" and came out here and not only picked up the knowledge but made a good friend. Being somewhat of an entrepeneur he saw he could "sell" jogging to the general public and took those ideas to the US and published a book about it.

I never met Bowereman but I wonder if the 2 guys were not disimilar in their personalities.

Whew ! I must get off to School !!!!

Whoops !!! sorry Team !

i would still be interested in hearing what you know about Snell even if you didn't happen to be at the school during his time. Are you going to be at the meet in Hamilton tomorrow?

in my short time here NZ definitely seems to be dominated by the distance events and looking at a list of previous NZ Olympic medallists this is definitely the case. Looking at the content of other NZ teams this also seems to be true.

Having coached most events now and also having done them i fell in love with MD and specifically the 800m when i started coaching a young 800m runner. In researching distance training to prepare myself for him i came across Lydiard and Cerutty and found two of the gods of athletics coaching. I would have to say that there is only one other coach i have found who i place at a similar level and that is Vitaly Petrov the pole vault coach although the hammer coach Bondarchuk may well also be up there, i just don;t have as much information on him as Petrov.

Transferring what i discovered from Lydiard (and to a lesser degree Cerutty) into the rest of track and field and into the healing arts, i found the missing link that i have probably been searching for over many years now. The aerobic link. Once i discovered this i found one of the two main reasons behind the current and increasing worldwide health epidemic, the connection with Tom Noakes as the most advanced physiologist i know of (although Snell already knew before he was a physiologist), and the connection to spirituality most specifically Buddhism and meditation as a tool of delving into the spritual world.

Needless to say this connection of aerobic development is the greatest find i could imagine, whether the breathing aspect of seated meditation, the Ki/Chi development gained through martial arts training, the increased oxygenation of the body in the healing arts (the alternative ones as they are called) or finally into what i call real MD training and Lydiard's own fundamental discovery.

Kim - why did Lydiard discover this? Do you know what in particular it was about him that caused him to search? You mention personality similarities with Bowerman. What were those similarities? This is where i am presently interested. The rest is a load of eyewash :) when compared to understanding Lydiard's personality idiosyncrasies and what may have been the driving force behind his search into fitness and his ultimate discovery that the real development needed is within the aerobic world.

do you or anyone else have some insights? Nobby maybe?

Peter, you do talk a lot of silly stuff, what are you smoking?

"his ultimate discovery that the real development needed is within the aerobic world."

Lydiard didn't discover anything, he made observations and formed opinions based on his and other people's experiences.

Also, as I have said many times, and as Noakes himself would tell you, it is false to claim, as Lydiard did, that "aerobic development is unlimited"

Ask a runner to ride a bike for an hour as fast as he can and see how far his "aerobic development" gets him. Ask a cyclist to run for 15 minutes. They will both suffer very badly for obvious reasons; the nervous system has to adapt to the demand for a specific task, that's where you will find unlimited development, that's why we continue to improve as runners long after we have developed our aerobic system.

Sorry Peter, Will not be in Hamilton later today. Will be there Sunday for an "Old" atheles Birthday.

Not going over until nat Sec Schools in December.

Will give you questions some thought !!!.

I'm not sure if you're looking for formative experiences or personal attributes.

I think there were three things that got Lydiard on the path he took. One was a five mile run that he took with Jack Dolan, an older member of the Lynndale AC. Arthur thought he was fit because he'd done some running many years earlier nad had played rugby seriously for many years. But Dolan just hammered him and Arthur knew he really wasn't fit as he had no endurance.

That set him on a search for ideas about how he could develop his endurance which lead to a book about athletics training by a guy called F.A.M. Webster. The book was written years before Bannister ran under 4:00 for the mile, but Webster had a comment in the book that must have made quite an impression on Arthur as he repeated it constantly. Webster wrote that loads of people were able to run a quarter mile in 60 seconds but no one could do four of them consecutively so the proble with running a four minute mile had to be lack of endurance rather than speed.

He was also strongly influenced by Zatopek, though the only time I ever heard him say that was on a couple of occasions when we were talking. I never heard him say it in a talk and I don't think I've read anything where he acknowledges Zatopek's influence. While most people were taken by all the 200-400 repeats Zatopek did, Arthur, like Ernst van Aaken thought more about the general volume of running Zatopek did relative to his competitors.

Eventually he put all of that together into a system that was based on doing high volume as a way to develop endurance and then to tend to pace and speed.

If you're asking about personal qualities, I'd think that guys like Nobby, who really doesn't post here anymore, or Glenn McCarthy knew him better than I did, though I knew him passably well.

Basically I'd say he was really strong minded. If he thought he was right about something and that opinion was based on his own experiences and observations he wasn't going to be dissuaded by people telling him their way was better. I think that in a way, the opposition he got from the Kiwi athletic establishment might have been a good thing as it might have intensified his resolve to get it right.

HRE !! great minds think alike !! We must be posting at the same time.

I was going to mention the FAM Webster story BUT I feel the major key to Arthur was Jack Dolan and the story you told.

I knew Jack Dolan. ... not well, but enough to know that he was a very insightful man. He had given up running when I got to know him. I was junior at the time and was struggling with quite a few things with my running .. consistency being the biggest problem. But Jack always took an interest in the Juniors and kept encouraging.

Today ..40 years later I am still running.

I believe Arthur took what Jack had "taught" him then did some research (FAM Webster) and took things from there.

There is more to this but I have to get out the door to meet my athletes !!!!

Looks like I beat you to the punch by 17 minutes.

Do not listen to ANYONE who is telling you to "push it". Aerobic runs are just that. Aerobic. That doesn't mean go slowly but it absolutely does not mean "push it".

Kim and Rich

thanks very much. I had heard about Jack Dolan and that famous 5 mile run and now you twig me to see where i can get more info about Jack. I've also heard about FAM Webster via Arthur and have sought out internet info on him but still await coming across his book. Having said that and now being a part-New Zealander working at a desk opposite Russ Hoggard and Dave Norris i am getting plenty of stories, both good and the occasional controversial bad. Overall i am just trying to connect these stories with interviews, articles and books together to gain further insight into this man called Arthur. Nobby is wonderfully helpful as well but as you know is hesitant to post on letsrun anymore due to certain posters making his life really difficult on here. A great pity.

i feel it is quite possible that Arthur took that original insight from Jack and combined with his own effervescent and inspiring personality and 100 mile a minute mode of talking (streaming you could call it ala Jack Kerouac), worked his magic in convincing many, many people of this fact!!! regarding aerobic development. Wellnow you are up in the next post so wait for it :)

HRE, i'm looking for both formative experiences and insight into the personality. I guess i would like to know how stubborn he really was, how he actually inspired so many people to pursue the distance running path so intensely and for so long. I'd also like to know more about why Herb Elliot, following Cerutty's own inspired path decided not to continue on to Tokyo. I've seen the supoermilers and know what Herb said there but have to wonder, if Arthur's path was not as torturous as Percy's, would Herb have gone on. No doubt a showdown between Herb and Peter over 1500m in Rome would have been one of the greatest battles in the history of the sport.

cheers again

Jon, why do we keep on meeting on this - almost on opposite sides of the fence but not quite.

you seem to be the most vocal letsrun critic of Lydiard and his methods and teaching points but you also seem to be strongly influenced by Lydiard stuff as well.

For example you use the 'train don't strain' phrase that originated with Arthur. For another you advocate the weekly long run. In fact i've seen you post that you at times do the long run up to 3 hours. For someone centered around the 5000m this would seem too long to most outside the Lydiard approach. I'm sure there are other similarites which don't come to mind right now. Would you be honest enough to share them i wonder?

Now for something we agree on, at least conceptually. Technique or form or mechanics or as science would attempt to categorise it, motor learning or skill acquistion. I do wonder if you are familiar with these two fields of knowledge within physical education. Both are really quite well developed and can be found in most major texts on phys ed and even have their own specialised texts. But i'm not so interested in them anymore as i'm too busy trying to change the techniques of runners, jumpers and throwers of all ages and abilities. It is in the practise that i continue to learn now.

As you probably know i was a decathlete who did ok and made it to the international level. You might also have read my words talking about my Ukrainian coach. So you might determine from this that i am heavily interested in technique/form/mechanics. What is also not new to you is that i see running as a technical event. In fact i see it as the primary technical event. Without the run being developed towards correctness it is very difficult to get someone to jump, hurdle or even throw more correctly.

In agreement with you (and i'm hesitant to agree with you because you might turn it to your advantage :) )technique is unlimited. I know this because i am on this path myself. I continue to develop my own technical abilities and even though i am far ahead of when i was an athlete, now know i am as far from perfection as i ever was. And I know perfection is infinite. It is something not possible to reach. It is an ideal, not a practical reality.

In this same idealistic way the potential aerobic condition is infinite. Now i don't know this as certainly as i know technical development is unlimited because i haven't explored it as deeply yet. But i do know that nothing is finite and everything infinite and to reach perfection means to reach the infinite. Humans cannot do this.

So i ask you

How do you know the aerobic condition is limited? Have you actually reached the end? Have you become super-human and reached the infinite. Have you become god?

If you, Kim, Ray and others could be so kind as to continue and just ignore the dingbats - I mean we can read around the dingbats, no problem - that would be greatly appreciated.

I love reading this stuff.

VO2Max is the besti indicator or aerobic capacity that we have. We tend to peak in our oxygen uptake in our early twenties but continue to develop in other areas that you have mentioned.

My aerobic fitness doesn't really vary all year round, but my performances do vary for other reasons.

There are so many myths about aerobic conditioning, such as the idea that Africans do vast amounts of running when they are young and this gives them a head start. But look at Tirunesh Dibaba, she didn't run to school and took up competitive running rather late but look what she has achieved. Her technical ability is what makes her so awesome.

If athletes wrongly believe that they need to improve their aerobic conditioning, then how can they be training properly?

Lydiard wrongly tried to describe his ideas in terms of aerobic/anaerobic conditioning, but all this does is confuse people more rather than enlightening them. Trying to describe training in pysiological terms is a mistake that so many coaches make, because all they do is confuse themselves and the athletes.

If Lydiardists could get together an write a book about Arthur's methods without using any physiological terminology, it would be one heck of a good read, don't you think?

Arthur was a very intelligent and curious man. And like many inteligent people, he did not tolerate fools very well. He was also very generous until the point where he thought he was being taken advantage of.

I think that because of that curiosity, Arthur wasn't content to accept the common training methods of the time and looked further afield. Lots of people get onto the board here and say that Lydiard didn't invent anything and in a sense they're right. There were people running high mileages, though they were few and mostly limited to marathoners. There were people running intervals and there were even people who tailored their workouts to particular stages of the season. The only thing Arthur includes in his system that I can't recall seeing anyone else doing was hill bounding and springing and I wouldn't be surprised to find someone doing something similar.

All he did was explore what was there and tinker with it.

All he "invented" was a particular way of organizing what was already there and of having marathon runners and track runners do similar training at certain times.

Once he was sure he'd gotten a system that worked the generosity and intolerance for fools seems to have come into play. In those years, there were coaches who were secretive about their methods for fear that someone would use them and beat his own athletes. Arthur wrote "Run to the Top" almost immediately after the 1960 Olympics and immediately began giving talks. I don't think it was in his nature to be secretive. Some of that was the generosity and I think some of it was that he wanted to be acknowledged for being better at something than pretty much anyone else has. He never got big headed. But that doesn't mean he didn't have a healthy ego.

All of this immediately drew out the critics. I can't think of any coach aside from Cerutty who drew as much skepticism as Lydiard did in his time and as Lydiard became the better known of the two he became the more criticized, as far as I can tell. Some of that undoubtedly was related to his openness. It's hard to criticize something you know little about. Lydiard was always willing to answer uestions and deal with criticism. But at some point he'd decide that there were people who simply wanted to argue and had no real interest in hearing his responses. So he'd stop arguing, point to his record and ask the critic if they could top that. He always said time was his most precious commodity and he wasn't going to waste it on people who weren't sincere. If you were sincere he'd talk with you all day.

Moving to Elliott, recall that Cerutty always emphasized the mental and emotional side of competition and Elliott seems to have been very much of the same opinion. In a long interview with Brian Lenton, he explained that his success had been built upon his mental approach to competition and that after Rome he simply didn't have the burning desire to continue competing that he'd had before. Lenton came back with a question about what people would have seen if they'd "seen the best of (Elliott.)"

The question obviously alludes to the fact that Elliott was so young when he retired that he must have had more untapped physical potential. Elliott's answer was that people had indeed "seen the best" of him because mentally and emotionally he was past his peak when he quit. He mentioned that he did begin training for the '62 Commonwealth Games and a match with Snell but discovered almost immediately that he just didn't have the drive for it that he knew he needed and gave up.

Cerutty's explanation was that his (Elliott's) sex drive got the best of him.

Rich has done a good job here.

I feel when he started out trying to "get fit" he was surrounded by Clubmates who were the same. Lynndale was a big club in those days so there was plenty of athletes to work with.

Many of the original "Arthur's boys" did not make national Represenatative status but man could they move !!

One thing I noticed when I first went to Lynndale as an 18 year old was the casualness of what the distance of the run that day was going to be . What ever it was deemed to be, it was run...such was the level of fitness of the guys.

So these guys had built up this huge "Aerobic" base over many years.

I talked to one of my "old" athletes the other day who said that a group of the "originals" still meet at the Lynndale club rooms every Tuesday and Thursday morning and head out for a run and in many cases a walk. These guys are nearer 80 than 70 now.

These are the guys that Arthur "experimented" on. They are still going .. albeit slowly !!!

As has been said in a lot of literature .. Arthur said it took until 1957 or sio for him to get his recipe right. But some of these guys had been running in excess of 10 years even then.

Here is part of one of my previous posts regarding Jack Dolan.

40 years ago this month I wandered down to the Lynndale club in Auckland. The first 2 people who greeted me were Bruce harrison and Jack Dolan. Bruce was an original "Arthur's Boy". He took me on my first run with the guys (I've never stopped since)and if you look at the dedication in Arthur's "Run to the Top" it was to Jack Dolan.

Jack was a student of the Sport and remained that way intil he passed away. He fired Arthur up with his knowledge. All Arthur did was take that flame and make it burn brighter.

As I have said before here. I too would not be running if it was not for Jack Dolan.

Oh Yes ! I once asked Bill Baillie who did he and the others look up to as the "heroes of running and the training involved " when he was young. Quick Answer : Emil Zatopek. Arthur too, studied the what and how Zatopek trained and in 1965 a big group of the guys stayed in Czechoslovakia to spend time with the great man.

Arthur could be dogmatic but if he saw value in something he ran with it.

Finally: Arthur is still the only guy I know of who, if was asked by a 150kg man to help him run a marathon, would accept him into the fold as much as he would an International athlete. Only proviso ... Do the work !!!!.. Don't waste my time !.

Rich and Kim you are both saying the things i have been waiting to hear, the openness of Arthur, the generosity, the unwillingness to hide anything and unfortunately that which comes with all that openness, the critics and those who argue for the sake of arguing. I feel more and more empathy with Arthur as i continue moving through my own coaching life.

I was fortunate to have an very un-Soviet Soviet coach. One thing he used to say which comes to mind right now is 'there are no secrets'. Another related thing that comes to mind is when Anatoly Bondarchuk, coach of the unsurpassed Yury Sedykh, visited Australia and ran a seminar at our gymnasium. Efim was the translator. I was doing my normal Friday evening training session with the squad at the time. At the end of it, as was Efim's want, he related one thing to me from the seminar, the most important thing, something maybe specific to me. He said Bondarchuk turned to him late in the seminar and said this 'what is the obsession with the little finger, who cares what the little finger is doing if the rest of the body is also doing the wrong thing.'

Of course i see this going on with much of the distance world now as i see it in the technical event world. Who cares about the specifics of this session or that session when the fundamentals are not even properly understood. I thank Arthur as i thank my own coach for pointing me to these fundamentals and for continuing to reinforce them against what is my nature - over complication. Thanks also to you guys for doing the same.

So where else can this go - how can we define this best aerobic pace more clearly so more distance runners can understand how to tune into it?

You COULD use a heart monitor. Arthur didn't like them and wanted people to feel their way. But I think that's harder for many people now than it used to be. The trick with the monitor, as I see it, is to think in very general ranges rather than in small specific ranges. E.g. I once recall that after much questioning, Arthur sort of said that he considered 150 beats per minute as a sort of dividing line between areobic and anaerobic running. Now that's sort of silly in a way. What's really going on a 151 that isn't at 149, and of course he steered well clear of the business of different people having different maximum rates.

But if you wanted to "do Lydiard" and also use a monitor you could figure out a very broad range for yourself where you aren't getting into oxygen debt and hang around that set of numbers but allowing yourself the freedom to go over or under it if that feels right. In this model the person, not the monitor, makes the final decision about what the rate should be.

Or you simply could use Arthur's method of setting a schedule and running easily enough that you're able to do each day's run as planned and without needing frequent rest days, short days, or extremely slow days. If you need those things fairly frequently you're probably running too fast.

But what if you're running too slowly? I think this is where people have trouble figuring Lydiard out. There is no such thing. He once worte that "you can never run too slowly, but you can run too fast." How does that reconcile with his comments about his system not being one of long, slow distance?

You do that by not becoming wed to a particular pace. In most cases, as the years roll on and you're training slowly and you get fitter, slow becomes less slow. So you spend a year running at about 8:00 per mile and you make some real improvement. Great. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that it was the eight minute miles that lead to those results because what really got you the results were hundreds of hours of running at that effort level and as you get fitter you'll likely find that the same effort will yield faster paces. Go with that.

From this point of view, the first half of the original question on this thread, "I'm a 15:00 five km runner..." is sort of irrelevant. You'd run at a comfortable pace, whatever that is. If you had two friends, one of whom was a 13:30 five km guy and the other a 17:00 five km guy and all of you were comfortable at roughly the same pace, you could all do your distance runs together.

Many moons ago, Hodgie-san wrote on a thread here, "Concentrate on the distance and let the pace find you." Might be the best piece of advice I've seen in a long time.

Ray? Did you mean me?If so, I'm flattered, but I'm kinda finished answering the question.I would love to share some personal anecdotes about my many encounters with Lydiard, but ... I learned about him too late.I don't ever stop because of dingbats -- on the contrary sometimes I go too far because of dingbats. But I'm all for free speech, even for the dingbats.

Wet Coast wrote:

If you, Kim, Ray and others could be so kind as to continue and just ignore the dingbats - I mean we can read around the dingbats, no problem - that would be greatly appreciated.

I love reading this stuff.

Encouraged to continue, I have to let this out.I've given this question some thought, and the "obsession" goes far beyond mere success.A poor cobbler with no degree, who played rugby, with no aspirations for running, let alone training others, managed to flip the running world upside down (down under?) by turning a handful of club runners into Olympic champions. What a story!Love him or hate him, Arthur was undeniably an interesting character, in a stubborn, ornery, no-nonsense, yet loyal and generous kind of way. Arthur discarded the mainstream methods of the time, and against all odds, was rewarded with success at the highest level, forever changing the way the world trained.Who in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco can match that? Who else since 1960 is remotely as interesting? Surely others have been more successful since, but ho-hum, wake me up when you're finished.

islydiard wrote:

What's with the obsession with Arthur Lydiard in this forum?

Go to Kenya, Ethiopia and Morocco and ask who Arthur Lydiard was....