I heard Bill Rodgers say that in so many words.
Viren "cheated".
I was in a group that was having him as a guest speaker a few years ago. I for one was very surprised to hear BR say that.
I remember turning to one of my friends whose eyebrows shot up at the comment.
"Did he just say 'cheated'?" I asked.
"Yes. Wow." was my friend's reply
This is like running 24/7....where is there time to have a job or a life for that matter....nope can't do it.
Are you sure some of this isn't embelishing just for the sake of bravado?????
KFB
It would be better, for example, to state that Viren ran 70% of his mileage slowly, 15% of his mileage at moderate speeds, and 15% of his mileage (during the sping or summer) at fast speeds (race pace or faster).
All this talk about 70% aerobic, 30% anerobic is non-sense from a physiological perpcective; not accurate.
Tinman
bumpy mc'bump
It looks as if I'm several years late coming to this very informative post. I just want to add the following quote from Running with the Legends (p177) referring to when Viren and a teammate went to Kenya to lay the foundation for the 1972 Olympics:
"All they did was run, eat, sleep, and run some more to get ready for Munich. A typical day included a morning run of 1-1 1/2 hour, then breakfast and a nap, followed by another run in the middle of the day, then more eating and sleeping before an evening run. Viren followed this Spartan regime for three months, running as much as 200 miles a week..."
I was also amazed at the extremely low heart rates reported during some runs, i.e. 96 BPM during a 25K run, 84 BPM during 12K, 90 BPM for 17K, 84 BPM for 15K, etc. The rest of the reported heart rates were between 122 and 180. I wonder what Viren's resting and max. HR was?
Viren's resting HR was 32 and his max was 200+
Sources: The LV,Olympic Champion book and Kenny Moore's 1977 Sports Illustrated article.
Viren's performance increase rate is very questionable. I've read reports that during high altitude training pints of his blood would be taken and stored. Then sometime prior to the Olympic race he got a blood transfusion of his enhanced stored blood. It was apparently not illegal back then but certainly would give a good reason how he could increase his level of performances so swiftly. Of course it isn't injecting any kind of performance enhancing drugs. It is his own blood. The swiftness of his rise in performance level raises a huge red flag. It was noted by some athletes at the time that knew the Finns were doing this.
BGMidkiff wrote:
Viren's performance increase rate is very questionable. I've read reports that during high altitude training pints of his blood would be taken and stored. Then sometime prior to the Olympic race he got a blood transfusion of his enhanced stored blood. It was apparently not illegal back then but certainly would give a good reason how he could increase his level of performances so swiftly. Of course it isn't injecting any kind of performance enhancing drugs. It is his own blood. The swiftness of his rise in performance level raises a huge red flag. It was noted by some athletes at the time that knew the Finns were doing this.
What about Viren frolicking through the forest on wood chip trails doing gentle fartlek?