Lydiard Imitations

J.R.:

I read somewhere that Schul had a Sunday 1 hour easy continuous run in his schedule. Was that (as far as you know) when he was with Igloi, or when he was on his own, or never? Thanks.

Sorry Antonio. I can't wait to say a few things, but I will try to keep the responses light and sparse and short. Maybe it will save you later responses when I say what can agree with. Please feel free to respond on your own time scale though.

I agree if you just comment on Lydiard, there is no need to bring in Antonio's training, Renato's training, Igloi's training or any other. But when you want to use words like "inferior", "superior", "outdated", etc., this necessarily invites a comparison to something, by the very nature of the words. Personally, I don't want to make this kind of judgement, so I'm happy to isolate the two discussions.

I don't want to talk about your training -- not here and not now anyway. Besides, I know your training anyway -- Igloi based with shades of Lydiard (sorry, bad joke). Like I said, I appreciate all your past contributions about modern training, even if it took much time and many iterations, and your critiques about Lydiard training, and I think I know by now what you don't like about Lydiard. My main issue is that if you want to criticize Lydiard training, then at least get it right.

Regarding Lydiard's fractional efforts, can you do me a favor? Can you please not confuse "paces" with "efforts"? I know you are a "space-time" guy, and paces follow directly from that, but Lydiard used fractions to describe efforts.

Fractional "paces" are very much defined, by simple mathematics. Pace is defined as a time per distance. If your pace is 4:00 min/km, then 3/4 pace is 3:00 min/km. Most people want 3/4 pace to be slower, so they might actually calculate 3/4 speed, giving them 5:20 min/km.

But Lydiard didn't use fractional paces, and for the 40:00 10K runner, running 10K in 30:00 is not possible in a training, and 53:20 minutes is not interesting. (Imagine 1/4 pace would have the 40:00 10K runner running a 10K in 10:00, or in 2:40:00!)

If you want to say that Lydiard's fractional efforts are too fuzzy and undefined, this is a more valid concern, and you are not alone. (But you are all wrong).

I wonder if the vagueness is intentional, because the tables were too rigid (and maybe too fast), because they were never used by Lydiard anyway, and to account for individual differences, and to promote the philosophy of running by feel and regulating your training by response. You might object to that philosophy too, preferring to calculate paces for each individual athlete each day of his training based on some exact formulas. This is something I can understand, and won't debate with you.

But this illustrates why I think you often get Lydiard wrong:

- It's not fractional paces, but fractional efforts

- The paces for fractional efforts are well defined in a dedicated chapter in his very first book, including tables of efforts for many distances. It doesn't seem to be widely available, so I can understand if you aren't aware of it.

- You want to advise me that something a Lydiard workout could be something like 200m repetitions could be done at 3/4 800m effort. Maybe in non-Lydiard workouts something like 400m at 3K pace would be used, but I've never seen any example mixing fractional efforts for different distances. Here I would need to see proof in a schedule. I think it would be 200m at 3/4 effort, or 800m at 3/4 effort, but never 200m at 3/4 800m effort.

Regarding the "training individualization" subject, let me offer a compromise. Maybe Lydiard saw no reason to train Snell, Davies, and Vasala differently and you object to that. I just read in another thread your description of 400m interval training examples for Mamede, Lopes, Silva, and Pinto, and maybe you expect a much finer resolution for different athletes, even if they may have similar performances, and similar muscle fiber types.

But you want to extrapolate from this one example and conclude that Lydiard never did training individualization ever, for anyone. One single example cannot be generalized like that. When I say that training will be individualized, I mean that training can be individualize in several ways:

- Even in the "generic" phases (aerobic and hills), when all athletes do the same workouts, things like fractional efforts (e.g. 10 miles at 3/4 effort) would specify different paces for all the different athletes.

- Younger athletes might do a scaled down version of the training, with less volume

- Although the early phases may be generic, once you get to the track, the training is individualized by event, and by age and by gender. The 1962 book offers different schedules for different events. The 1978 book breaks that down even further, offering schedules for different age groups and different gender.

- Lydiard's "do what you feel" approach to interval training would also be individualized, each athlete doing what should best make him fatigued from a high volume of intensity. This may mean one athlete does 8x800 meters with walking recovery, while another does 15x400 meters with jogging recovery, to accomplish the same training target.

- Depending on how time trials in the coordination phase are done, it may suggest working on over-distance or under-distance time trials in the following weeks.

So it is for all these reasons, that I say even starting from the same schedule, for the same kinds of athletes, there are many opportunities for the actual training to change dynamically. This follows directly from the advice, guidelines and principles that can be found in the books.

But now one final comment about your Snell, Davies, and Vasala example. You say it's the last 6 weeks, which surely must be final coordination training, and taper. In the coordination phase, all the main training elements are developed (endurance, strength, speed), and the main goal is to bring these elements together under race conditions. The main training tool is the time trials -- actual races/time-trials at the race distance, and over-distance and under-distance races/time-trials. I wouldn't expect many individualized changes in the other workouts, which really just provide some maintenance of all the training elements, unless some weakness gets identified in a time trial.

SlowFatMaster,

Livingstone avoided the issue. He has tables, but mostly VDOT tables from Jack Daniels. He goes into some detail how to use the tables to get the right kinds of efforts. In another part of the book, for the "aerobic" phase, he talks about the efforts, giving some verbal description of what the efforts corresponded too, and also a chart with some mappings to percentage of heartrate max. Maybe this combination is a better approach, or similar to everyone else's approach that needs to somehow assign a pace or effort to the workouts.

In my own training, I also avoided the issue (as I didn't always have the tables before), measuring my desired efforts with heartrate, or getting paces for interval training from something like McMillan's calculator (if they didn't already come prespecified in a plan).

But I never found interpreting the Lydiard efforts to be much of an issue. I never had any doubts about how to control any workout.

Regarding the boundary to which paces are aerobic/anaerobic, I follow the lead of Jack Daniel's who suggests it's somewhere around 3-5K pace. (Actually his formulas workout out to be 11 minute race pace -- no one has an 11 minute 5K pace yet). So I would call 1500m pace or faster anaerobic, and 3K pace or slower aerobic.

I know there has been some evolution in how aerobic/anaerobic percentages have changed, with runs being much more aerobic than previously realized. I never took much notice, because somehow we already knew ideal paces to achieve different kinds of benefits, and the training itself is also consequently more aerobic than was previously thought, so it kind of evens out.

But I think, when discussing anaerobic training in a Lydiard thread, looking at the percentages of metabolism of energy production is a completely wrong way to look at it. Anaerobic training is something that accumulates over the course of the workout. Lydiard measured anaerobic training by how much your arterial blood pH lowered. For example, how much it lowered in your earlobe, and not your leg muscles. The goal here isn't to activate anaerobic metabolism, but the goal is to expose your body to high levels of lactate, and acidosis, so that it is stimulated to build buffers against fatigue. You learn to run faster when your body starts becoming exhausted.

So there are 100 ways to achieve that goal. Since lactate accumulation starts at something more like highly aerobic 1 hour race pace, you might only do reps with an aerobic 5K pace, and still get a good "anaerobic" workout. It's this kind of statement which looks at aerobic and anaerobic in different ways, that leads to lots of confusion, and looks contradictory. You might also chose to do reps at "anaerobic" 800m pace or faster, but if they are too fast, you risk not being able to get enough volume to get a good "anaerobic" workout.

So, I don't think about these things in terms of percentage of metabolism. Maybe here, since I don't measure blood lactate or pH, dare I say it, I think I prefer closer Antonio's approach, and fixing some kind of recommended pace, number of reps, and ensuring at least equal distance or double time recovery.

I didn't ever see the ping-pong ball guy post an answer. There are some known ways to get optimal stacking (with A, B, and C layers if you investigate it) giving the same density, but most problems usually talk about the packing density, over an infinite volume, without any clipping. Although any alternate arrangement of the A, B, and C layers gives the same "infinite volume" packing density, I found that the clipping caused by the big sphere makes a difference depending how you stack the layers. I wrote a program to try many different possibilities, and count the balls. I think I have the best answer (I don't think I posted as "rekrunner" though, but something like "math major").

Further to my description of anaerobic training, I wanted to add a comment about including intervals in the "aerobic" phase. It seems to me that if you did something like 10x400 at 10K pace, the combination of volume and intensity is low enough, that it doesn't really constitute the kind of accumulated "anaerobic" training, since we don't have a high accumulation of lactate and lowering of blood pH.

So what I mean to say, is that this kind of workout, where 10K pace is faster than an AT/LT pace (and could be considered "anaerobic"), in my opinion, could easily be included in an aerobic phase. I'm not rewriting Lydiard, but just saying that I can see why this kind of aerobic intervals can be done safely during an aerobic phase.

rekrunner wrote:

Was Igloi or Bob Schul in Rome in 1960? Were any Igloi trained athletes in Rome in 1960? Did Igloi compete, or coach anyone between 1956 and 1961?

From memory, I believe Igloi and some of his athletes had to flee their country due to war, then he started coaching in California. I would need to look up the specifics.

You want to equate specificity to interval training, which is unfair. They are not interchangeable. Interval training can be specific, but interval training is not always specific, and specific training is not always intervals. A continuous time trial at race pace and distance is more event specific than any interval training can be.

Interval or repetition training by nature is specific. Of course any training can be screwed up but that's not the purpose of it. In general, Igloi's training had FAR more specificity than the training of Lydiard. I disagree that a time trial is more specific than a race.

SlowFatMaster wrote:

J.R.:

I read somewhere that Schul had a Sunday 1 hour easy continuous run in his schedule. Was that (as far as you know) when he was with Igloi, or when he was on his own, or never? Thanks.

I have that info somewhere, but Bob Schul is the best one to ask. He was also an excellent coach, helping people to improve significantly, after they had been through other programs. Here is a thread on Igloi.

Here's another Bob Schul posting:

"we would learn the proper tempo for a race"

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=2716803&page=9

More comments by Bob Schul (2011):

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=3942843&page=1

Igloi was in the US by the 1960 Olympics. He coached Max Truex who was 6th, I believe, in the 10,000 in Rome which was the best ever finish by a US runner in the Olympics at that distance up to that time.

I also think that one or two of his Hungarian athletes were in Rome but they were not the runners they'd been when he was working with them. I'll dig around a bit and see if I can find anything more specific but for all practical purposes the Soviet invasion in 1956 put an end to the Igloi era in Europe and one of the great questions is what would have happened if he'd stayed and built on what he'd already done there.

One of the guys he coached in the US was Orville Atkins. Orville has sent me some samples of what he did with Igloi and it was all done by effort, ("fresh," "good swing," etc.), rather than by specific paces.

Two of Igloi's "big names" were in Rome. Roszyglovi (however that's supposed to be spelled) got bronze in the 1500 and Iharos was 10th at 5,000. But Igloi would not have been able to coach them for years as he wasn't in Hungary and hadn't been for four years.

things have gone a bit crazy - 2 new pages

J.R. wrote:Well see there, joke or not, Lydiard people think he invented the sun and the moon.

Did Lydiard invent Gosta Holmer too, who came before Lydiard?? Maybe he also invented Gersler, and Paavo Nurmi.

You missed earlier in this thread where we talked about this. I don't think you had appeared at that point.

Basically, the assertion i put forward was that Lydiard found/discovered some things not previously highlighted for everyone to see. He did not invent anything, he just found what was already there. Same for anyone who 'invents' anything. They are not inventors they are founders. This was generally agreed with.

What was found is the question of the debate.

I think Lydiard took some ideas from Holmer.

I didn't say a time trial was more specific than a race -- maybe you meant intervals?I'm not sure interval training is specific by nature, but I won't argue that point beyond commenting, if it's supposed to be, a lot of people (like US high school coaches) don't know that.The critical difference between intervals and racing is that races are not usually broken up into multiple repeats with recovery intervals. The continuous distance at race pace is the main point of the story about Halberg, even if his interval trained competitors also trained with specificity.Keep in mind the initial comment (sorry, that was really from another thread a long time ago) was that Lydiard ignored specificity, which is true during aerobic base training phase, but not in the final coordination phase before racing. The story about Halberg famously illustrated how specificity (race distance time trials) was a key feature for Lydiard that distinguished his program from other training programs at the time.

J.R. wrote:

Interval or repetition training by nature is specific. Of course any training can be screwed up but that's not the purpose of it. In general, Igloi's training had FAR more specificity than the training of Lydiard. I disagree that a time trial is more specific than a race.

Yeah my fault for the 2 pages, but things were already crazy.The idea of expressing training in terms of fractional efforts comes from Holmer, as well as fartlek.

gypsy wrote:

things have gone a bit crazy - 2 new pages

...

I think Lydiard took some ideas from Holmer.

This thread is great!

However, ultimately I feel that the argument about the relative merits of the various methodologies is rather pointless. People keep referring to principles. At the most basic level what all athletes should be trying to do is to increase the distance over which they can maintain any given speed, or increasing the speed they can maintain over a given distance. All other things being equal, doing either of these should lead to improved performance. In order to achieve these goals, you need to stress the body sufficiently to create an overload, and then recover so that adaptation can occur. These are the key principles of training - what the various 'camps' are arguing about is the best way of keeping this progression going.

Antonio is therefore dead right - its a simple matter of space and time. The winner of the race is the athlete who gets from A to B quickest. I believe he is correct to focus on progression in the way he describes. Talk of aerobic and anaerobic etc is all a red herring in my opinion. What you should be thinking about is improving the ability of the muscles to produce force (so you can run quicker) and to continue doing so for longer (so you can do so for longer). However, although in principle I agree with Antonio's methods, I also believe that as soon as you start introducing the stopwatch to control efforts rigidly then the process becomes potentially 'dangerous' in that athletes are liable to run faster than they perhaps should on any given day and therefore run the risk of getting extremely fatigued and ultimately overtrained. Alternatively, they could be running slower than they hoped or expected and therefore become disallusioned because they dont think they are running as well as they should be. So, my questions to Antonio are - how do you decide on the appropriate paces for an athlete to train on any given day? Secondly - do you not think that on some occasions (or perhaps with some particular athletes) it might be better to forget using the watch to control a session and let the athlete train according to their own feelings of 'effort'? (We've discussed this previously via email and I think we agreed to disagree to a certain extent - a good discussion though!).

With regards to the Lydiard 'camp' - I agree that this looks a very attractive method of training for certain athletes. I also agree that provided you do it properly (i.e. flexibly according to individual reactions) it is a very 'safe' method of treaining in that you are less likely to overdo the intensity side of things. I've read the previous Jack Foster threads on this site and I think they provide a tremendous example of a way in which you can safely enjoy the sport for a long period of time whilst producing some very impressive performances. For the vast majority of athletes I would suggest that they would do very well to follow a similar philosophy and that this will get them very close to their potential. However, I would also suggest that eventually it will become very difficult to continue producing progressive overload with this method. So my question to this 'camp' relates to how do you continue to structure the progression once ceiling levels of volume are achieved (especially within the later phases of the year)? There are various comments in some of the Lydiard books about 'studying your reactions' or 'progressively increasing the tempo' throughout the track training phase, but these all seem a little bit too vague for my liking. I could also see that potentially you could actually progress according to these guidelines but in a manner that becomes less specific to the demands of the event as you get closer to it if you simply get faster and faster as the phase progresses.

I could play devils advocate and suggest that perhaps the 'ideal' may be to do the Lydiard base phase (to gain the underpinning physiological adaptations in a safe manner)and then stick Antonio's specific training on top of it (in order to 'learn' how to use your new improved physiology)- then everyone would be in agreement!

Good debate guys

Thanks, rekrunner. Very clear.

In the giant thread on page 38 about 75% of the way down the page, starting with "Now I'm in my Hotel in Doha..." Renato talks about a couple of particular workouts for Longo and the blood lactate and cortisol associated with each:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=458338&page=37

[Can someone explain why page 38 is linked by a link that ends in "page37"?]

Here is an excerpt:

The classic type of intermittent that we use, for example, with some specialist of 800m (like Italian Andrea Longo) is 4 sets of 10x150m in 21.0 recovery 30.0, with 5/6 min among sets. The speed (about 14.0 every 100m) is about 92/93 % of the speed of the race (1:44.0 is 13.0 every 100m, so 1 sec is 7% of the time), and this fact is very good under biomechanical point of view. If you take blood at the end of every set, for checking the lactate level, you can see a very low level (may be about 7-9 mmol), SO THIS TRAINING HAS AN AEROBIC EFFECT. With Longo, for example, if we go for 6 km at 3:20 (with very low relation under biomechanical point of view : 20.0 is a speed of 18 km/h, 13.0 of 27.7, so the percentage is 65%), at the end we find a higher level of lactate (may be 12-13 mmol).

What do you think of this training and Renato's description of 7-9 mmol of lactate as "very low"? Would 6k at 3:20/k be in the realm of a Lydiard time trial?

Renfree wrote:

However, ultimately I feel that the argument about the relative merits of the various methodologies is rather pointless.

Thank's Renfree for a measured, sensible contribution.

Taking the above point .... & harking back to the example that Kim Stevenson gave (the 20 x 400m session) ....what we are all overlooking is that whatever methodology is used, the influence of a good coach is paramount.

A less than perfect methodology in the hands of an insightful, intelligent, creative, caring, and knowledgable coach is far better than the "best" methodology in the hands of a fool.

A less than perfect methodology in the hands of an insightful, intelligent, creative, caring, and knowledgable coach is far better than the "best" methodology in the hands of a fool.[/quote]

Agreed! As long as the content of the training adheres to the basic principles, I very much believe that 'how' you do things are more important than 'what' you actually do

J.R. wrote:

Interval or repetition training by nature is specific.

Once more you need correcting ....

Specificity is about being specific (as close to) race pace AND race distance.

For a 5K runner running (let's say) 15-30ish pace (75 secs. per lap) .....

* An Interval session of 10 x 400m @ 66secs per lap (90 seconds recovery) is NOT specific (each effort is too fast & too short, despite incomplete recovery)

* A Repetition session of 3-4 x 1600m @ 75 secs per lap(full recovery) is MORE specific (longer efforts @ race pace)

* A 5K Time Trial @ 75 secs per lap is the MOST specific (as it is @ race pace & @ race distance)

Well I'm no specialist in measuring blood lactate, nor interval training for that matter, nor about Longo, so anything I say is taking a risk.

Knowing what I know about Renato's approach, and how his idea of AEROBIC EFFECT can change depending on the specialist, I'm not surprised to see him say 7-9 mmol is low (even though I might find website links which say > 4 mmol is ANAEROBIC training), and this kind of workout provides the AEROBIC support for an 800m runner that Renato is looking for. To be a good ANAEROBIC training, the reps would need to be longer (e.g. 400m-800m), with longer recoveries (equal distance or double time). Then I'm guessing we would see values much higher than 12-13 mmol (I don't know, 16-20 mmol?). So what seems sure is that 150m reps are not a good ANAEROBIC workout because the reps are too short, as are the recoveries.

I'm surprised though that a 20:00 run at 3:20 pace produces 12-13 mmol for Longo. 3:20 pace should be something like an EASY run for 20 minutes, for an athlete who can do 1:44 for 800m, assuming he has the endurance (resistance?), and is trained for that kind of pace. So I guess Longo is not this endurance type 800m runner, and maybe Renato thinks training him to be more effective at 3:20 pace would cost him his 800m performance.

A 6K Lydiard time trial, for this class of runner should be something more like 2:50 pace, or 17:00 versus 20:00 for the 6K.