My ideas about triathlon come I think from something I read in the "Lore of Running", about energy requirements for the ironman distance, versus the marathon, and a discussion of fat burning and avoiding glycogen depletion.
I don't dismiss his findings for the triathlon, because it obviously worked, but just comment that this kind of aerobic development is more crucial for an 8 hour multi-event, than a two-hour running event.
8 hours is quite different. Not sure how it relates but he was quit successful over the Olympic distance as well.
Wiki: After competing and losing in the Ironman Triathlon Championships six times, Mark Allen emerged victorious in 1989, winning one of the most difficult one-day sporting events in the world.
It would be the first of six Ironman victories for Allen, the last coming in 1995 at age 37, making him the oldest champion ever. He has also excelled at the Olympic distance, winning the sport's inaugural World Championships in 1989 in Avignon, France,[2] by more than a minute. He went undefeated in 10 trips to the Nice International Championships,[3] and from 1988-1990 he put together a winning streak of 20 races.
Over the course of his racing career, which ended in 1996, he maintained a 90% average in top-three finishes. He was named Triathlete of the Year six times by Triathlete magazine, and in 1997 Outside magazine tabbed him The World's Fittest Man. Allen was inducted into the Ironman Triathlon Hall of Fame in 1997.
rekrunner wrote:
Do these guys count?
- Rod Dixon (2:08:59, in New York)
- Dick Quax (2:10:47)
Maybe also Rob de Castella (2:07:51 in Boston)?
HRE wrote:Paul Balinger-2:10 plus
Jeff Julian 2:14
Richard Tayler 2:15
fastest lydiard coached 26.2mi wrote:
Barry Magee - 2:18 marathon
I suppose counting them depends on whether you mean directly coached by Lydiard or coached by someone who followed Lydiard.
No if we use the first definition. Yes if we use the second.
Deek was coached by Pat Clohessy. Pat spent time training with Lydiard and his athletes.He certainly was certainly influenced by Arthur but developed his own training approach. Pat used a template of training which remained largely unchanged throughout the year. To include Deek or for that matter Steve Moneghetti as Lydiard athletes seems a bit ridiculous.
Yes, if I recall, he was naturally gifted at the triathlon, taking 4th in his first attempt, running against the 3 best guys in the world. I think he aleady won some shorter triathlons, but initially struggled with the Ironman distance, being in contention until the last 20K of the marathon, where he was reduced to a crawl. Then he found Maffetone, and the rest was history.
That's why I said "maybe". If anything, "Deek" could be used to argue against the "linear one-thing-at-a-time" periodization, in favor of a complex approach. But I don't think it's all that ridiculous, or even a bit ridiculous. They weren't training using anything like the "modern" approach described here.
mo'pak wrote:
Deek was coached by Pat Clohessy. Pat spent time training with Lydiard and his athletes. He certainly was certainly influenced by Arthur but developed his own training approach. Pat used a template of training which remained largely unchanged throughout the year. To include Deek or for that matter Steve Moneghetti as Lydiard athletes seems a bit ridiculous.
Well, I don't mean anything. But, my question is, are we judging the method or the man? "The method" has produced faster marathons than 2:18 or 2:14, and "The man" has had greater successes in other events. I guess it's just a question of fairness.
HRE wrote:
I suppose counting them depends on whether you mean directly coached by Lydiard or coached by someone who followed Lydiard.
No if we use the first definition. Yes if we use the second.
Gilmour book it´s not Lydiard that wrote it. It´s a Gilmour interpretation of "his own idea" of the Lydiard method.
But i don´t want to be fix on that aspect.
I can comment on the kind of Ron Clarke training that is presented.
As far as i know during that Ron was a runner Lydiard and him they meet and talk only once. Then this is picked from original Ron Clake training and edit on the book as Lydiard training example.
However i got somethig more to say about it. If this is Ron Clarke training that you present as Lydiard typecal, i prefer othere from te same period, like Michel Jazy, Kip Keino or Bob Schul.
From the modern ones i prefer many more to this one that you preseent.
One more point. Most of the times that one Lydiard accepts HIBRID Lydiard as one Lydiard training variant, here comes Deek the coach of Castella. I prefer Carlos Lopes training to Bob Castella one from the sam period, it´s much more rational than the Castella one. From the same period of Castella i prefer what i can name the japanese training from te 80s than Castella one.
If i think in alternatives to the Typical/classic Lydiard, there are many more better training ouit of te Lydiard method than the influenced by Lydiard. I could justify, but this is out of the main subject.
About what is the commercial and business reason to keep on Lydiard, you may ask it the Lydiard ones, don´t ask me, i´m not the right man to answer you how is done and wehat the profit.
If you really want to know why don´t you ask to mr. Keshall, or mr. MacMillan or a few the Lydiardists the Lydiard Foundation. If they want, they will answer to your question better than i can do. I just comment about factual motivations and acts.
Of course they got the right to do what they do, but i also can comment about what are facts. It´s was done, is done, i can comment on facts.
rekrunner wrote:
That's why I said "maybe". If anything, "Deek" could be used to argue against the "linear one-thing-at-a-time" periodization, in favor of a complex approach. But I don't think it's all that ridiculous, or even a bit ridiculous. They weren't training using anything like the "modern" approach described here.
[quote]mo'pak wrote:
Deek was coached by Pat Clohessy. Pat spent time training with Lydiard and his athletes. He certainly was certainly influenced by Arthur but developed his own training approach. Pat used a template of training which remained largely unchanged throughout the year. To include Deek or for that matter Steve Moneghetti as Lydiard athletes seems a bit ridiculous.
The "Clohessy method" should be considered seperate from Lydiard. Clohessy gives plenty of credit to Lydiard as an influence and inspiration but his approach was significantly different to Lydiard's.
Nic Bideau was running around with Chris Wardlaw's group back in my day so I guess we can count him as a "Clohessy" coach.
What is the "modern" approach you refer to?
Looking at the training used by Mottram, St.Lawrence, Gregson, Bermingham, Risely, Benita Willis, Abdi etc. it is not so different to the stuff Clohessy and Wardlaw were doing in the late 70s,80s and through the 90s.
MOPAK
I agree, Clohessy training is different to Lydiard
lydiard had an influence though for sure.
his complex method evolved when he tried to create a training program to capture the interest of school kids as he thought the lydiard approach would be hard to sell to the kids
he thought it worked ok so he stuck with it
Bideau's is more lydiard like than clohessy
the complex method is only successful with marathon runners
what sort of training did he give simon doyle
It's a good thing, because your assumption couldn't be more wrong. Lydiard didn't author any book by himself. Garth Gilmour was co-author to every book that Lydiard wrote. It was Gilmour's description of Lydiard's interpretation of his own ideas confirmed personally by Lydiard in an iterative and cooperative process. He not only co-wrote the books, but was also trained by Lydiard directly, before working on the first book.You do yourself an injustice by pretending to be an expert on Lydiard, yet repeatedly exposing some basic misunderstandings.But I don't want to discuss Lydiard with you.Can you name some of these "better alternatives" to typical/classic Lydiard?
Antonio Cabral wrote:
Gilmour book it´s not Lydiard that wrote it. It´s a Gilmour interpretation of "his own idea" of the Lydiard method.
But i don´t want to be fix on that aspect.
From a Brian Lenton interview with Clo.
"Q.Are there any specific areas in which you differ from Arthur Lydiard on his conditioning methods?
PC. In the essentials I am a great supporter of Lydiard He has so much to offer in the vital areas of long running, relaxation and a balanced training program.I have moved away from Arthur by adapting my own methods to the situations that I was in.
Rob's training is a good example. At Xavier Colege we have a long cross country season and I was dealing with adolescents from fourteen to eighteen. We needed short term goals. There was no way you could sell the hundreds of boys I was working with a Lydiard type periodisation program.
...Because of the excellent results at schoolboy level with this approach, I applied the same principles to athletes out of school. Most of the year we train in a similar manner and regular racing takes the boredom out of training in the short term.
This movement away from Lydiard's periodisation is a significant deviation.Prior to a big race though, the last month or more of training is planned very precisely and carefully."
I don't know that much about the differences between Clohessey and Lydiard, besides they used a "complex" approach but kept some "Lydiard influence", whatever that was, so I won't really insist on it any further.To the extent I'm allowed to still call it Lydiard, I would consider Nic Bideau, and Mottram (and I guess all the other names you mention) implementing a modern interpretation of Lydiard.But the "modern approach" I refer to is not this "modern Lydiard". If you read the whole thread (don't blame you if you didn't), it's the one that Antonio and Renato describe in their posts. There are not discrete universal Lydiard phases (Antonio calls it linear periodization), like aerobic, hill, anaerobic, coordination, racing, but rather training is determined by race event and pace, characterized by "general", then "special", then "specific" periods, incorporating general, special, and specific paces, using concepts like progressivity, extensivity, and intensivity, combined in a certain way to work towards developing and supporting race pace for race distance. A Lydiard approach, with the "classic linear periodization" doesn't incorporate this kind of racing specificity until the time trials in the coordination phase. None of this talk of linear periodization makes sense, if you are using "complex" approach like "Clohessey/Deek" was, with training and racing most of the year.
mo'pak wrote:
The "Clohessy method" should be considered seperate from Lydiard. Clohessy gives plenty of credit to Lydiard as an influence and inspiration but his approach was significantly different to Lydiard's.
Nic Bideau was running around with Chris Wardlaw's group back in my day so I guess we can count him as a "Clohessy" coach.
What is the "modern" approach you refer to?
Looking at the training used by Mottram, St.Lawrence, Gregson, Bermingham, Risely, Benita Willis, Abdi etc. it is not so different to the stuff Clohessy and Wardlaw were doing in the late 70s,80s and through the 90s.
my go wrote:
MOPAK
I agree, Clohessy training is different to Lydiard
lydiard had an influence though for sure.
his complex method evolved when he tried to create a training program to capture the interest of school kids as he thought the lydiard approach would be hard to sell to the kids
he thought it worked ok so he stuck with it
Bideau's is more lydiard like than clohessy
the complex method is only successful with marathon runners
what sort of training did he give simon doyle
I remember Clo saying he changed Doyle's work to lower intensity at some point. He had him doing 5 min reps in the forest with Shaun Creighton one day a week instead of hard fast trackwork. He also did long runs of 20-25kms a couple of times a week.
Thanks for that clarification. I have an understanding of Renato's methods but can't seem to ever get a grip on Antonio's methods or ideas, perhaps it is lost in translation. Does he use similar methods to Renato?
Lydiard also came to recognize what Clohessey did; that more and more people in the sport were not interested in coming to two peaks a year and being in less than optimal shape the rest of the time. He had high school and university coaches in the US who were interested in what he did but whose athletes raced for nine months out of the year. As road racing became more popular he found that most people simply wanted to race well once or twice a month at whatever road race they were doing.
So he created a different sort of program for these people. It's in his later books as the "Race Week/non-Race Week Schedule" and it incorporates the elements of his original schedules, long runs, intervals, time trials, striding, and races. into a two week cycle.
I've mentioned this schedule's existence here many times on these threads as have Kim and Nobby. No one ever seems to take notice. In the 80s there was a guy called Paul Cummings who ran the 10,000 at the "84 Olympics for the US and was a prolific road racer. In a training profile in Runner's World he said that he used the Lydiard method but found that it didn't work for him to get too far away from any sort of training for too long so he incorporated each element into a single week. He'd run massive miles, up to 40 a day in three runs, in the first three days, I think it was three days, then do hills and intervals later in the week.
In the late 70s Lydiard suggested to me, because I responded poorly to repetition work, that I "race (myself) fit," essentially doing nothing but distance work and using early races as sharpeners.
Few, if any, of these variants, which HE created, seem to have penetrated the consciousness of many who study training methodology. For most people, those "Run to the Top" schedules seem to have cast "Lydiard Training" into stone. I've always considered myself a "Lydiard guy" to a significant extent but I have never only once come close to doing the complete schedule that people associate with Lydiard and even that was shortened because I was getting slower as we went through the interval phase.
should read, "but I have EVER only once..."
Aaah. That's the big question. Antonio's methods are a closely guarded secret. When he speaks of modern methodology, it sounds similar to Renato, but Antonio has made it clear that his method is not Renato's, but his own.For my intents and purposes, for these kinds of discussions, I assume it is basically the same in principle as Renato's, even if perhaps he has personalized it with his own secret changes.
mo'pak wrote:
Thanks for that clarification. I have an understanding of Renato's methods but can't seem to ever get a grip on Antonio's methods or ideas, perhaps it is lost in translation. Does he use similar methods to Renato?
HRE,
I've also mentioned these race week/non-race week and continuation of racing schedules a couple times. While it's true it doesn't suffer from the "linear periodization" criticism, and achieves many of the same goals as a "modern approach", it's still not the same, lacking periods and modulation, and the only progression being the steady improvement of race times. But practically speaking, I think most coach/athletes would customize the schedules to match their racing seasons.
Again, you can modify "race Week/non-Race Week" to fit your needs. It's a lower miles approach at times than the original schedule so you could toss in a full base phase or a hill phase and then shift to RW/non-RW. Or you can add a session of 200s during basework, like Baillie often did or some fartlek as Lydiard advised It's not so much about following a schedule as about understanding the concepts and applying them as you need to, which is NO different than using any other approach.