LYDIARD OR DANIELS?

Nobby, Not sure about that one but I witnessed Jack and another guy Dave Heine (2:25 Marathoner., 4:05 miler) do the same thing over 70k (Around 35k each) and still finished 2nd against Teams of 5. And yes ! I was in one of the Teams of 5. I was just 17 and ran my 8k in 29:30 (First time I broke 6 min miles for 5 miles).

That relay no longer exists. TRAFFIC !!!!!!.

HRE:

Just got off the phone with Rod. John has 1500 PR of 3:43.2 and, as you know a member of NZ world XC team several times including the winning team in 75 (was it?). Has been NZXC champ but Rod couldn't remember if he ever been NZ champion on track. Interestingly, he has won Christchurch marathon and Canberra marathon (those US readers who don't know where Canberra is, it's in Australia). His best marathon time is somewhere around 2:16 and that was run not too far off from his hey days on track. He also went on to the masters championships in 85~86, around that time and won both 1500 (under 4-minute) and 5000 (under 15-minute). So yes, he was one heck of a runner.

What I admire about Rod is that he really stressed his brother's sacrificing his own running career to help Rod...even today. It was John who recognized his younger brother had perhaps better talent internationally and, he said, because it was very tough for NZ to send too many runners to Olympics and it was either they could race each other and kill themselves before the Big Games; or they could help each other and send one (with better talent) and do really well for the Dixons. Finally, Rod said that even though John was not quite recognized well, he should be at the ranks of Arch Jelley for how much he contributed to coaching. I told him that HRE started this conversation first from John Dixon the coach and we wondered his athletic career; so he was happy to hear that!

Nobby,

Nice going. You should have asked Rod about his understanding of those 50/60s and lactic acid build up. I think he used to do a session of those for two miles pretty regularly.

HRE:

Honestly, I don't see any point of asking him that. Even if he (or Dick Quax or Lorraine Moller or Dick Brown or whoever) tells me some secret about that particular workout in the micro-cellular level that I didn't know about; I don't think that would change too much of MY understanding of that workout because I know what it does to me.

PS

Did Rod mention if John ever coached anyone besides Rod?

HRE:

Yes he did and he even said John coaches probably as many people as Arch Jelley did (the number I have NO clue of but I do know it's more than one). Rod has a lot of admoration for John for his coaching ability.

Another interesting point Rod explained to me was that John was a type of a guy (or a coach) who did it all himself first. And particularly because they were brothers, he would climb a tree and tell Rod, "Now I could do it so you could too." He was a coach by doing. One of my favorite stories is Percy Cerutty going on a track the day before Elliot's race and run a mile as hard as he could. Being an old man, he couldn't run that fast but coming back, huffing and puffing, told Elliot, "You may run a mile faster tomorrow but sure as hell you can NOT run as hard as I just did!" Is this story in his biography, "Why Die?"?

I am surprised at Rod saying John Coached as many athletes as Arch.

In the 80's Arch would have had 10 to 15 athletes on the go including Walker. All were National Class or above.

I guess John Dixon was doing a lot of Coaching at his Club in Nelson and possibly still does.

It may have been mentioned already. But what is Rod dixon up to these days? My dad rekons he was living up north of Auckland the last time he heard, but was unsure what he was doing. Cause It'd be awesome to meet the guy, especially after meeting Dick Quax earlier on this year (Who by the way was a great, inspirational kind of guy).

[quote]Nobby wrote:

I really honestly thought Noguchi would win Athens Olympic marathon (Jonas, remember I called you the day before the race?). It is because of the course, type of training she was doing . . .

__________

Nobby -- I'm curious. What type of training did Noguchi (and Takahashi, for that matter) do? I'm guessing it is similar to the Japanese men with lots of long and LONGer runs with some long speedwork every 10 days or so. But the Japanese (women in particular) have been so successful, I thought it worth asking. I know the Japanese have used Lydiard approaches often, but do they incorporate a specific hill phase?

Rod works for Devine Racing in the US, living in Los Angels. He put together training manual for Las Vegas marathon and Los Angels marathon (did a pretty good job, I might add). I also heard he got some land in north of Auckland where you can actually get some training camp...

Quaxie is really a super nice guy; I really like him a lot. I brought him to some high school and college in MN a couple of years ago; his stories were just first class. He really cares for the sport and young athletes. If you visit him now, you can get him and Lorraine Moller at the same time for she's visiting him. They will be attending the luncheon for Jack Lovelock/John Davies Foundation function in Auckland.

No, other than Seko, they don't really do any specific hill training ("Ah, how dare you say Japanese follow Lydiard method," I can already hear some people saying...). I have a footage of Seko doing "spot-on" Lydiard steep hill running exercise and I'm contacting him for a permission to use it for the hill training video (it's coming...!).

Noguchi is a bit differnt from other main stream Japanese marathon runner--she runs less ("only" about 800~1000km a month). She seems to like more shorter, faster intervals (400~1000m) and does weights. His coach, Mr. Fujita, was renowned middle distance coach in the 70s and 80s and interesting thing is that he didn't change Noguchi's running style which is different from traditional Japanese shuffling style. I have quite a file of her training from various Japanese magazines but I have not had time to study yet. I'll let you know better later. Meanwhile, Breandan Reilly, who knows about Japanese training better than anybody (including Japanese) wrote an article about Noguchi for Running Times. Someone help me out with its site???

Glenn

Read your story. I ran with Mike in Eugene. Tallented runner, but like you say, injuryproblems stopped him.

Are you still in contact with Mike? If so say hello to him.

KnutK

Spider:

You got me curious too so I went over the articles about Noguchi's training. I guess I had some misinformation. I swear I thought I saw somewhere that she does not run as much as other Japanese marathon runners (somehow "800km a month" stuck to my memory...).

Two of the article (out of three) were written by coach Hirose who handled day-to-day coaching of Noguchi before Athens and 2:19 at Berlin. He says that she trained 900~1200km a month before Athens. One phrase he kept repeating was "Stamina = how much you have trained". I have heard a very similar phase like "Miles make champions."

Though she didn't do any particular type of hill exercise but what she did, and this I've seen many other Japanese runners do, was did lots of hilly course running as base building phase mainly in preparation for Athens course. Japanese use a term "building legs" or "strengtheing legs" for this period, pretty much equal to the Lydiard's marathon conditioning phase. They believe a big part of preparation to marathon depends on conditioning legs. This I found very similart to Lydiard's claim of "capillarization" of working muscles as well as hill training phase.

There are two other comments I found interesting: One was "speed in marathon depends on stamina (or endurance). If you can run a half marathon in 1:50 but can't complete the marathon under 4 hours, that's because you lack stamina, not speed." Another comment was "You need to perform certain amount of speed training and you need to develop adequate stamina in order to perform adequate amount of apeed training. And you need to have certain type of training as transition." As I mentioned in Kenyan's 800m training, I could not help but feel the very similarity to the Lydiard system.

By the way, when I asked Ms. Noguchi if she's heard of Arthur Lydiard, she said no. She didn't know who the heck Lydiard was. I commented eariler that I feel Lydiard is WAAAAAAY under-rated in this country. People always talk about it but never practice it. It is complete opposite in Japan. They don't know who the heck Arthur Lydiard is, but all they do is the Lydiardism. I will bet $1000, however, her coach, Mr. Fujita, knows who Lydiard is. When I got together with Ms. Hayakari, a 10th place finisher in women's steeplechase in Helsinki (9:40), she didn't know who Lydiard was either. I gave her the autographed picture of Lydiard. She sent me an e-mail later, saying her coach could NOT believe it's the actual autographed picture of Lydiard himself and took it from her and framed it.

Nobby, I envy you: is there anyone in the running world you don't know or haven't met ( . . . well, in fairness, runners as a group seem pretty easy-going and generous with their time: look at all the swell runners I've met as a middle-aged plodder, but I digress).

Thanks for the clarification on training. I am not surprised that younger runners haven't heard of Arthur; it seems the prerogative of excellent young athletes to be an athlete, rather than a student of the sport and history. How many young baseballers don't know who Lou Gehrig or Willy Mays or Koufax were. I am glad her coach framed the picture. I still have the Lydiard (and Snell) pictures you gave me ( . . . thanks).

I know Takahashi is back running the marathon this weekend. Does anyone know what Noguchi's next race is?

Spider:

I kinda made it a but confusing at the end of the last post. Mr. Fujita is the overall team coach of the corporate team Noguchi runs for. I guess I generalized it too much; I shouldn't have said that most people don't know Lydiard in Japan. As I mentioned ealier, there have been quite a few articles written about Lydiardism in various running magazines in Japan. Translation of "Running with Lydiard" is still quite highly regarded as the Bible of running training in Japan. There was an article about a young coach at Waseda University where Seko graduated from. He was holding two books as his Bible; one was Seko's autobiography (he ran for Seko at S&B) and another one was "Running with Lydiard". But at least Noguchi and Hayakari didn't know Lydiard!

Tokyo women's marathon has just started. I intend to follow the Japanese news site... (rubbinb it in!)

NOBBY,

Somewere in this forum you mention a video of arthor's "hill bounding/hill sprinting workouts. Anyway possible I can get my hands on it? No matter how much I read about it I don't know if I'm doing it right. If I could just see it performed maybe? I just don't want to get hurt and I will for sure if I'm doing it wrong.

Thanks

In Running the Lydiard Way on several schedules he has 10 x 100m 2-3 times a week during the hill phase. That seems like a sharpening workout. Isn't it pretty much the same as sprint float sharpeners? Isn't it too soon to be doing that kind of work? I'm just confused.

Remember that Arthur said that you should work on your speed throughout the year. He was against doing anaerobic work too soon. But he never considered a session of 100s, done with sufficient recovery, an anaerobic workout. I've always seen him prescribe the 100s as "fast, relaxed, striding." That's a bit different than the 50 meter things which were done as sprints or sharpeners.