LYDIARD OR DANIELS?

Same here.

I also think that the Free is more shoe than I'd like, though it's probably one of the best mainstream shoes available. It's also well over my pricing limit.

The problem with those flaired out heel, to me, is that as you land, on your heel or on flat-footed, it just controls your feet to move where the shoe wants it to move, not where your feet want to go. Nike's old American Eagle or Air Edge had such small round heel, cupping my real heel nice and snuggly. I sometimes shave off the flaired out part of shoes to narrow it down. The heel too thick has whole new problem to it...

I do not think Lydiard program was so fantastic. Ex look at Snell 1.44 800m a top endurance runner can do sub 3.50 min with a 1.44 800m while Snell was very bad only did 3.54 Same with most athletes of 100% Lydiard coaced athlete. What I say is,: Lydiard is Ok for endurance but not the best system we have. With Lydiard system you loose to much capacity during summer. A more modern training program will have more all around focus year round. Always speed and endurance volume included. The peaking is not such a dominating factor in a modern trainingprogram. When you not have a continually progression you can not reach your max in the long term.

I think I need someone to translate Bimar's post for me.

Please explain the Classification Tables in "Running to the Top"

test

Then again, John Walker of New Zealand ran a 1:44 800m a 3:32 1500m, and a 3:49 mile. He was trained according to the Lydiard system by Arch Jelly with only minor variation.

I wus banned! Why? Why I wonder?

So anyway - Antonio Cabral - some of you saw his Lydiard comments / critique on the monster thread. Why does he misunderstand? Why does he have his well respected head up his bum on this particular subject? Why did he so forcefully try to make a point about "only the USA cares for Lydiard, ZERO everywhere else" or something like that?

I'm not trying to shyt disturb by bringing this up. It's a very worthy point of discussion regarding Lydiard influence and misunderstandings. (I put Cabral comments about Lydiard on another chatline once, in order to spark some discussion, and I got my ASS KICKED!!!)

So anyway - Antonio Cabral - some of you saw his Lydiard comments / critique on the monster thread. Why does he misunderstand? Why does he have his well respected head up his bum on this particular subject? Why did he so forcefully try to make a point about "only the USA cares for Lydiard, ZERO everywhere else" or something like that?

I'm not trying to shyt disturb by bringing this up. It's a very worthy point of discussion regarding Lydiard influence and misunderstandings. (I put Cabral comments about Lydiard on another chatline once, in order to spark some discussion, and I got my ASS KICKED!!!)

What do you guys think of the same type of thing every week program used by many elites? Not always the exact same workouts every week. But mostly the same format. I understand that Cabral and the Portuguese use a similiar format each week. I know this flies in the face of Lydiard's ideas. But it certainly has worked for some of the best ever. Guys like De Castella, Shorter, and Lopez.

DeCastella's training was a classic example of applying Lydiard's ideas to a schedule where you want to be race ready pretty much all the time. Pat Clohessey trained with Lydiard and when he started coaching found that the running world had changed and athletes didn't want to spend half a year getting ready for a handful of races. So he put all the elements of the system into a week's training.

Antonio and I have exchanged some e-mails and gotten into his ideas about Arthur. He seemed to object to having the year broken into segments where you only do one sort of training in that particular part of the year and he does like interval training, which is done for only a fairly small part of the time in the Lydiard system.

Antonio is very knowledgeable, but he's wrong in saying that only in the USA is Arthur so popular. Arthur is very popular in South Africa. In fact, he was supposed to have done a speaking tour there before his final US tour, but I believe it fell through. Arthur was hugely popular in Japan. Nakamura used to bring his runners to New Zealand for winter training, well it was summer in Nz when they came because "Lydiard is there." When I was in Rotorua, Kim showed me the motel where German runners stayed when they came to NZ to train with Arthur for a while. He was national coach in Finland, Denmark and Venezuala. Check out the old thread where Knut Kvalheim describes the way he trains a woman who's one of the better 5000 runners in the world but whose name escapes me and he acknowledges a Lydiard influence. I've already mentioned that Clohessey used the Lydiard system with the athletes he coached in Australia. I once exchanged a few e-mails with Don MacGregor, the Scotsman who was 7th in the Munich Olympic marathon and he mentioned once training with another Scot who was getting advice from Arthur. So, no, Lydiard is not just popular in the US.

Thanks HRE. Single minded asked an interesting question, the same kinds of questions I've been asking about Lydiard since I was "taken" by Coe / Martin. :)

Would Arthur not object to athetes not wanting to spend the time, and trying to be race fit year round? Surely he would argue that maximum performance comes from his classic model, 1-2 cycles a year, vice watering it down into 52 "little Lydiard cycles" in a year.

I believe Cabral (and Coe / Martin) are afraid that not doing "speedwork" for a long period means that you lose something, which is hard to regain in a later phase.

It's interesting to note that "long intervals" does not really have a place in Lydiards methods. Bomber and others touched on this, but I wonder if we could explore it some more. Did any of the famous Lydiardites ever do something like km or Mile repeats? (Apologies if I asked this before. So many chatlines, so little memory.) :)

Sorry to bring this back, but I just gotta ask, so feel free to ignore if this topic has just been beaten into submission.

Many have said the free is good, perhaps especially good for transitioning to more minimal shoes, or if one is doing well just staying with it. Do you guys agree that the free is good in the sense of being a good transition shoe and if successful a standard trainer?

Thanks

GS

Ok. If you go back to those golden days of yesteryear, i.e. the early to mid 60s when Arthur was guiding all those guys to all those medals and world records, it was uncommon to find people doing long intervals, to the best of my memory. It would be great if Orville Atkins was following this and could comment, but I can't recall that many people in those days did things like mile repeats. In college in the early 70s, I think we occasionally did a 1320 (1200) interval session and might have done the odd mile at the apex of a ladder session. But overwhelmngly, we did 220s, 440s, 660s and 880s. Zatopek, Schade, Kuts, Schul? Lots of short to mid length stuff, but very little in the line of long intervals. All of which is a long way of saying that I don't believe that Arthur had his early guys doing much or anything in the line of long intervals. It just wasn't done then. The idea of intervals then was to approach or exceed race pace and that was much more likely to happen if you were doing 220s or 440s than miles. The sort of benefit you'd get from long intervals was the sort of thing that Arthur got for you with steady, up tempo runs.

But if you look at later books, you see that he does assign sessions like 3x1500 or 3xmile. Now, in those e-mails with Antonio, he sort of showed a preference for doing that sort of work (the Lydiard up tempo run) by doing longer intervals. He probably has his reasons for that. We sort of agreed that you could do it either way and he liked to put the success of Portugese runners up as evidence for his preference. Personally, I've always thought that coaches like to have athletes do intervals whenever possible because they can observe and control an interval session whereas sending guys out for a run through the roads or trails requires some trust that the athletes will do what they're supposed to and do it right. Maybe the reason Arthur didn't share this preference was because he actually ran with his athletes and could see what they were doing on those steady runs.

Hey ghost racers,

I'll give this a shot cause this is a great thread with great discussion. Ordinarily I stay away from the shoe "debates" as they get pretty sophomoric pretty quickly, but here I go! In fact, to preclude potential arguments on a fantastic thread, I'll say that I am not advocating one way or the other on "minimalism", but rather just telling it as it's happened to me.

Sooo...

It's been a learning process, definitely, but in my own experience transferring to Nike Zoom Waffles and Reebok Circas (there were some others, but I've settled into liking these the best) the Frees were not a good transition. I do think they're nice comfy shoes, but the biggest fault of them, and I do find it to be a big one, is the raised heel as Nobby mentioned above. It's nothing like barefoot running! I went cold turkey, starting one day at 10 minutes a day for several weeks, adding a bit more here and there.

I could probably write so much more, but I tend to ramble, so I'll leave it at that for now...if you have more specific questions or anything I can send you an e-mail.

Thank you HRE. Fantastic!

mikeinboston, you sure are up late! :)

I just got back from celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving.

Here is my log entry for August 8, 1960--8 x 1 mile with 880 jog--5:17 down to 4:57.6

We would start as a group with 16 year old Bruce Kidd with us. He would take off after 3 laps and we would carry on at the same pace.

On Sept 13, 1960 we ran 6 x 1 mile plus over hills

During the winter we ran on an 11 1/2 lap to the mile indoor track. We would repeat 11 lappers and even did 14 lappers.

All this was the building phase. Bruce Kidd got faster and faster and then at age 18 he upset Olympic Champion Murray Halberg and ran 13:43.8 and 13:17 for three!

Arthur was quoted as stating that the biggest mistake runners make was that of running anaerobically during the base building phase. He also stated that one should work on their speed year round.

Speed and anaerobic work were very different concepts to Arthur. I think that he thought that anaerobic work would pull the PH level down to a point that it would interfere with the aerobic adaptation. Speed work, on the other hand, would be short enough with longer rest periods that would not tend to lower the PH levels.

The hill work that his runners did on their famous 22 milers seems like a form of speed work to me.