Lydiard.....emperors clothes?

"If you can't, you may be in the wrong game. "

Nobby...........

You just trashed Jack Daniel's way of training....This thread was civil until this post. Am I just lost in translation or are you saying that if I follow paced paced training (i.e. Daniel's) then I ought to quit running....

WTF??!?!??!

"Am I just lost in translation or are you saying that if I follow paced paced training (i.e. Daniel's) then I ought to quit running...."

Yes, you are lost in translation: You are in the wrong game if you must take anyone's training plan, Lydiard, Daniels, or Nobby, without thinking and adapting it to yourself and your circumstances. Do all your research, listen, learn what others have done, then think, and only after thinking can you start to train.

(There is no formula, not even this one because we all know people who put themselves at a disadvantage when they try thinking.)

Tom

I was at a program last summer that Jack Daniels gave. After explaining during the program that the formulas and schedules in his books were "averages" developed from his voluminous testing data accumulated over the years, Coach Daniels went on to give some examples of how he adapted the training for the characteristics of individual runners that he had directly coached.

pisano wrote:

Nobby...........

You just trashed Jack Daniel's way of training....This thread was civil until this post. Am I just lost in translation or are you saying that if I follow paced paced training (i.e. Daniel's) then I ought to quit running....

WTF??!?!??!

I don't think it's Nobby's intention at all to "trash" Daniels' way of training; if you go through the long thread about Lydiard vs Daniels, you'll get Nobby's views on the matter.

Previously you said you were more into the "numbers" approach than the "feel" approach; is so, go with Daniels, who spells EVERYTHING out rather precisely.

An aside to Nobby... congrats on the Boulder event!

runmad wrote:

An aside to Nobby... congrats on the Boulder event!

Were you there?

pisano wrote:

"If you can't, you may be in the wrong game. "

You just trashed Jack Daniel's way of training....This thread was civil until this post. Am I just lost in translation or are you saying that if I follow paced paced training (i.e. Daniel's) then I ought to quit running....

Pisano: If you're really interested in trying the Lydiard way of endurance buildup..... Put your watch, or clock in the mailbox (or in my case the garage). You can run 5 or 6 different courses each week. The crux of Lydiard is in the "marathon training" period. Wearing a watch and eyeballing it every mile makes it take longer.

Most times, if one feels unusually good on a given day, they will still start out at a conservative pace. If they feel real good at 1/2 or 1/4th to go, they may pick it up conservatively, so as to be sure they got the easy, moderate, or hard effort in for the run... You really don't have a problem with "blasting" to hard with the effort based runs. This is another reason why it works. Conversely, if you're having a "down" day and don't realize it, you won't "trash" your body with effort based "marathon training", compared to "eyeballing" the watch all the way through the run and ending up pushing yourself to hard on the "down" day... Lydiard works best, especially in the endurance build up aspect for runners...

As far as I am concerned, the Marathon Training chapter in the Lydiard books is where 90% of the key info is. Go back and read it every once in awhile. I do. I met Arthur in 1984. Very vibrant personality. Very patient with dozens of questions after he had spoken for 30 minutes or so. This even though you know he was asked the same questions every week.

wondering wrote:

runmad wrote:

An aside to Nobby... congrats on the Boulder event!

Were you there?

Unfortunately, no... but if he ever does one here in Japan...

runmad wrote:

Unfortunately, no....

oh

Braavo Furgi wrote:

As far as I am concerned, the Marathon Training chapter in the Lydiard books is where 90% of the key info is. Go back and read it every once in awhile. I do. I met Arthur in 1984. Very vibrant personality. Very patient with dozens of questions after he had spoken for 30 minutes or so. This even though you know he was asked the same questions every week.

Peter Snell told me that he did a lot of his training with a little known Lydiard athlete called Don MacFarquhar who went on to become a successful coach. MacFarquhar told Snell that the "conditioning" phase (basework) was the key to making the Lydiard system work and that once you'd done it properly you really sisn't need to spend a lot of time or thought on anaerobic work.

Was Lydiard the first coach to come up with tempo running? As I understand the definition of tempo running according to Daniels, you run for 25-35 mins at a pace that is 10-15 secs per mile slower than your current 10k race pace. The purpose of this workout, to oversimplify, is to raise your anaerobic threshold. I've also found that a tempo run every 10 days or so during the base building phase keeps your legs from adapting too much to slow running.

Some people would call any hard run of less than an hour a "tempo run." But I don't think anyone could do 10-15 secs/mile slower than 10k race pace for 50 mins in a workout.

And if Lydiard was not the first to advocate "tempo running" was it Daniels? And if it was not Lydiard who was the first, when did Lydiard start advocating tempo running?

Remember that "tempo running" is just a term for something people always did. All Arthur ever did was experiment on himself using various training methods and then organizing them into different ways.

What Arthur did was have his runners alternate longer, easyish runs with shorter, faster ones. If you want to call those shorter runs "tempo runs" you can. Arthur never did. He just had people do them. He wasn't the first.

The first person that I can think of who was associated witht he term itself is Jack Daniels. But again, people had been doing similar things in the past. Barry Magee used to do runs where he'd go "out" for thirty minutes and then come back in 26-28. Today that 26-28 minute segement would likely be called a tempo run. But Barry never used that term.

Arthur was doing what he called "Effort" runs in the 1950's, publishing his "Tables of Effort" in 1962.

Without getting all controversial I believe that he was probably the first. However, he had various levels of effort (possibly the controversial part and hardest to get your head around)

EG : If your 3 mile best was 15 minutes then he had your 3/4 effort at 15:30, 1/2 effort at 16mins,1/4 effort at 16:20.

Note these efforts were not "3/4" pace but an 'effort' or if you wanted to break it down a 'pace' to run at.

The idea was they were to be a 'steady' effort similar to what many of you now know as a "Tempo run" (I like those terms)

My own experience goes back over 35 years ago when I ran my first "effort' runs or "Timetrials" as they were also known with Bill Baillie. He decided we would do our 5k runs in 16:30 (I forget his reasoning). We ran them on a grass track at a very even pace and Bill would control that pace all the way.If you picked up the pace you were scolded if you started to lag you were encouraged. After 2 or 3 of these Time trails you found it was easy to maintain an even pace.

Some years later I would do the same thing as a student in the USA. I would run 6 mile 1/4 "efforts" in 36 minutes then work my way down to 35 minutes. All very "comfortable" but "working". That year I ran 4 miles in 19:20.

Once again as I have said on numerous occasions. What Arthur wrote down on paper was purely a guide. It was never intended to be the 'scripture' you were to run each workout by. You find or your Coach helps by finding what suits you.

Hope that explains the concept somewhat. Nobby, Glenn, HRE you may want to comment here.

Can I ask for some clarification on something here?

The volume of hard running in the printed versions of the Lydiard schedules seems a lot greater than anything Daniels or later authors recommend.

The example you give above of a 1/4 effort 3 miler in 16:20 if your 3 mile best was 15:00 seems relatively quick. It roughly corresponds to Daniels' tempo pace (about 10 mile-half marathon pace). Yet Daniels recommends that you cap your weekly volume at tempo pace to [IIRC] well under 20% of total mileage.

malmo on other threads repeats that tempo runs faster than [what we now call] marathon pace are too quick to do regularly.

Is there something I'm missing here? Or am I just not aerobically developed enough to contemplate tempo runs every day?

Jack Daniels might have been the first person to identify the specific workout of running hard enough to reach your anaerobic threshold and keep it there for 25-35 minutes. Any period of time outside the 25-35 minute range was not as effective.

He described the effort involved as being hard but not so hard that you tie. This is a very precise type of workout that achieves a specific training effect. I agree that "tempo running" is just a name; but by defining this type of workout and explaining why it works, Daniels made people aware of its value. Simply running 5k at 3/4 effort is not a tempo run.

As far as running "easy" for 30 minutes and then hard for 25 minutes, that's really not a tempo run either. You're probably not going to be doing a very effective tempo run, since 30 mins isn't all that easy if 25 mins is a little slower than 10k race pace.

Maybe Jack Daniels can weigh in here. But my impression from what I've read of some of his articles is that a tempo run as I've defined it achieves something that virtually no other type of running can. The lone exception is "cruise intervals." Cruise intervals involve the same speed as tempo runs, but you're typically running a series of 800 or 1200 meter intervals.

I'm just wondering if this precise type of training was ever a part of Lydiard's toolbox.

I guess the job title known as "coaching" wouldn't have any merit under your system. ;)

Seriously, lots of great coaching talent on this thread but the more I read on Lydiard the more I realize that I'm better off where I am. Can't talk anything away from him, but it's just not my system. I'm sure I had the opportunity to run in one of his clubs back in the day things would be different.

Pisano: It might be worth an experiment for you to try to follow some Lydiard type training for a while and then compare the results. Your body is the best laboratory.

"many runners have difficulty in seeing beyond what they are doing at the moment, and, if what they are doing seems to be producing minimal results, they either begin forcing themselves or lose interest. If you can accept that the slow progression is the only way, you will not have this problem."

~Lydiard

To answer your last question, nothing that I ever did with Arthur or Barry has ever been especially precise. The closest to that sort of precision would have been time trials which don't seem to fit your criteria. As you can read in Kim's post, Bill Baillie was pretty precise with how to do those time trials.

I do see a bit of contradicition in your post when on one hand you say that "tempo run" is just a term and on the other hand you then look at things like the time trials or the fast 26 minutes after an easy 30 and say that those things aren't tempo runs. Well, if tempo runs is only a name, a tempo run can be anything that you give that name to. I imagine you're saying that the tempo run as currently described isn't like either of the other two things and that may be. I can tell you that Arthur never really knew what tempo runs were, as currently used, and didn't care to. He was very satisfied that he'd worked out all anyone needed to do to run as well as possible.

My statement that tempo running is just a name has nothing to do with my main points, which are that:

1) The type of training outlined by Jack Daniels that is referred to as "tempo running" is just long enough and intense enough to produce lactic acid for a critical period that raises one's anaerobic threshold.

2) I see no evidence that Lydiard ever caught on to this important training technique.

But if Lydiard was confident that he'd identified all the training principles necessary to reach one's potential, that may explain why he never caught on.