Lydiard Imitations

Antonio thank you for responding. I am a former coach who now writes professionally about running.

I have been a runner for 45 years and have read as much as possible about Lydiard during some of each of those years. Never have I seen anything about Lydiard, running, and meditation!

That was funny!!

I really do not think that anyone has any idea what Lydiard actually did. Besides I'm sure that he individualized like everyone else. Too many people say he had his runners do 20 x 200. I never saw that, did you see that?

Then you have this Gilmore guy to further confuse things. Gilmore has no clue in terms of what Lydiard did on a daily basis. He might know that Lydiard wanted to concentrate on the Aerobic system.

That's all, I'm done.

Jed Clampett wrote:

Lydiard also individualized training. He was not so foolish as to have someone run 10 miles in 60 minutes if it was becoming too easy for him.

Why would anyone think that way?

Coaches should just admit that they are basically copying Lydiard.

WTF was the purpose of this meaningless post?

I was responding to someone who said Lydiard was just an LSD coach. In reality his runners did speed development all year long.

What many people still do not realize is that 20 x 200 or longer is hard anaerobic training in most cases.

Training for speed in strides, 10 x 100 or shorter, dynamic running drills, plyometrics, hills, and that sort of stuff. Once you get beyond 80 meters it is basically speed endurance, unless you break it up as in 'strides.'

Get yourself educated, read about Lydiard Training. I wish I had!!!

You are not Bob Schul. I have a magazine article with Bob Schul commenting on what he did in training. They always did 6 mile runs, and often every day.

10 miles in 53 minutes may have been slow on certain course to some of Lydiard's runners. Also they may have had the time wrong. I have heard some pretty slow runners say they ran a 10 miler in 60 minutes. (One of those guys could barely run a mile in six minutes, how the heck could he do it for 10 miles?)

Keep in mind that if should be based on effort, not time. If I feel lousy, running a 3:30 22 miler may be just fine, even if I am Peter Snell. Then on other days he may run it in 2:30. That's reality.

But I think he wanted them to run at a training pace. He did not want LSD at 7 minutes per mile every day if they could run faster. That would be foolish.

Bump

Lydiard is both the best and worst thing to happen to distance running.

He started a revolution by using truckloads of aerobic volume and hill running to turn a handful of colleagues into elite champions.

However, as it led to a sea change of high volume running, people overlooked that within a decade all of his great runners had fallen off the map and none since had risen to take his place from Lydiard's camp.

A legion of scientific research since has found that the law of diminishing returns on high volume training usually kicks in well below the high volumes everyone has since learned to run to win today, and that a lot of runners are needlessly burning themselves out on very high training volume.

But no one cares. Lydiard's belief system (like a lot of running beliefs) has become a religion in distance running, that no one will question.

There may be a legion of scientific research showing that the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in well below the high volumes everyone has since learned to run but there's a legion of race results showing that most of the people winning and placing well in major competitions are doing those high volumes. Diminishing returns are still returns.

Nah. Not really. But good luck reinventing the wheel.