LYDIARD OR DANIELS?

Henry,

That was actually Dr. Daniels that you were quoting from my post but I agree 100% too.

Good luck with your training.

To drunkenhyena,

Nobody trains as a fool nowdays:This is 21st century.

Henry

Thanks for your insights. I havent been able to find much infor on treadmill running although I recently found a book entitled: "Treadmill Training for Runners" which is helpful. your unpublished data would be great in the form of a book. The treadmill has been a life saver for me in bad weather (cold and heat) or where I really need a good hill workout or at night, etc. Fortunately, I have access to a good one which is quiet and has some give to it so I can easily run on it. I'm excited about trying that 20K progressive uphill run on a weekly basis. Other workouts that require recovery periods are sort of clumsy in that you have to keep readjusting speed on the treadmill which is a pain. Many runners look down their noses at treadmill running but I've been able to maintain good mileage where I would not have otherwise without one. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. I understand studies to date show few disadvantages to TM running. BTW, I crashed at Boston last April as soon as I hit the hills after 25K. I had done no TM training and no hill training of any kind for many months prior. I learned my lesson. Next April will be different, I hope.

8% downhill!!??? Whooooo!! What a wild ride!!

johnnydajogger -- I don't recommend 8% downhill, but we were doing some research on different grades and we went down to 10% at one point. Work at it gradually (-2 or -3 % at first) and downhill could actually be a great training tool. The benefits of eccentric contractions do a great job of building muscles, but there is always a danger of too much impact -- on a grass downhill would be better than a TM (I assume).

I ditto HRE. In my last post I tried to explain some of my frustrations. What I really enjoy are those who want to give something a "go" and see what they can do. I too am into "There are no limits" with this thing.

I'm in the 4 week hill phase of Lyiard marathon training now and I'm striding downhills with short sprints at the bottom of the hills before I begin the hill bounding. i dont have many hills where I live so I'll have to be inventive.

Many Ultra runners walk uphill and run/stride downhill.

Bill Rodgers recommends that you lean into the downhill with your chest so that you get the sensation that you are about to fall. I've used that technique in races with great success but it takes strong quads to pull it off. If one can really learn and practice downhill running, it makes a big impact on race times.

Kelsall, this is getting very embarrassing, and not just for me. Email me from your place of work.

Dr. Exag. wrote:

>>Dr. Exag = Skuj. Do a search if you doubt.<<

Nope.

I AM a Lydiardite....

I think before I registered the name 'Dr. Exag' Skuj posted as Dr. Exag.

Skuj = many psuedonyms, but not mine!

Somehow, I had it in my head that you were around Pittsburgh. But if you don't have many hills around that mustn't be true.

I also don't have many, but have made do. Good luck.

I used to live in Pittsburgh. Thats where I attended a seminar by Lydiard in about 1978. I asked him if it were possible to be doing too much training on hills. I was worried about injuries because I used to run lots of big hills every day in training. He sort of laughed at that suggestion and told me: "You're a lucky man. In NZ, people drive hours to get to what you have in your own back yard."

I've enthusiastically sought out hills ever since and havent been injured. I dont have many hills where I live now but am making do also. I like that idea of the Kenyan 20K uphill climb; I'm going to continue to simulate it on the treadmill and use it for my 2 hour long run on Sundays. I'm only going at 10 min. miles which is about 1:40 slower than my marathon race pace but its a tough workout because I continually increase the incline every 5 minutes until I get to about 10 degrees which is all I can stand at the moment. I have to be careful not to turn this into an anaerobic run also.

I do think, however, that there is such thing as too much of a good thing.

* Hills are one of the best ways to train and you get lots of benefits from doing it. But, particularly if you're a track runner, you do need to practice to run fast on flat as well. I remember before Montreal, Dick Quax criticised Rod Dixon for running too much hills (though he said he doesn't recall saying it).

* Although Kenyans have been successful doing it (reportedly), I'm not sure if running totally continous uphill is always a good idea either. It's the undulation that is probably the best way to do; to put some stress for a period of time, then take it off (or introduce other stress), and then put that stress again, etc. There always needs to be some sort of a balance.

We were once neighbors, perhaps. I'm originally from Johnstown which is more in the hills than Pittsburgh is.

When I was getting ready for cross country season there in the summers during college, I would drive to a big graveyard that was on top of one of the hills. to this day, I think it was the best training venue I've ever had. There were, well, are, I suppose, it hasn't gone anywhere, a couple of big hills which you could do repeats on. But the whole thing was undulating. I don't think you could run even a quarter of a mile without being at least a little higher or lower than you had been at the start of that stretch.

I always came back to school much fitter than I'd been when I left and when life took me away from there I never made such dramatic improvements in such concentrated spans of times. If I were going to make a complete commitment to getting as fast as I could now, I'd move back there and train in that graveyard even though it did seem as though something had been trying to get out of one of the mausoleums.

I agree. Balance is important. I'm in the middle of the Lydiard marathon program, on the 4-6 week hill section. I'm going to experiment a little and try that continuous uphill 2 hour climb as my long run on Sun and see what happens. the last time I did it, I could only get to 55 min where I was runnning at 10 degrees and about a 9:30 mile pace, before stopping. There are no breaks or recovery, its just contually up until you have to stop. I'll play around with the pace and incline and get the 2 hours in somehow without going anaerobic.

[quote]Nobby wrote:

I do think, however, that there is such thing as too much of a good thing.

* Hills are one of the best ways to train and you get lots of benefits from doing it. But, particularly if you're a track runner, you do need to practice to run fast on flat as well. I remember before Montreal, Dick Quax criticised Rod Dixon for running too much hills (though he said he doesn't recall saying it).

quote]

When I was in college I did a month of 2/3 mi hill reps....but did not do the sprints at the bottom. My speed never did sharpen up like it should have in the following 2 months (track racing season). It took me years to figure out that because I was only doing the hill reps and jogging back, with no sprints, my legs got "muscle bound" so to speak. This is my theory. Nobby have you heard of any similar experiences?

(I did the hills every other day, running 8 to 12 miles at various efforts on the alternate days and a long run on Sunday's).

I would want Lydiard if I were a man, and Daniels if I were a woman.

While there are notable exceptions in both directions, men and women have different physiology and gain maximal benefit from different emphases in their training.

Daniels is a tremendous coach of men (and cleaned my clock regularly with his Cortland men), but the fact is that he has not coached men to the same level as he has coached women.

Lydiard did work with some women (of course, not as many were running back in the day), but his workouts drew on NZ athletes who tended to be physically strong through a childhood of a variety of sports. I might actually use Daniels's system with a guy who had not developed strength/joint integrity during his younger years; but if a guy was structurally sound, I bet he'd benefit more from Lydiard.

Men and women have different needs and respond differently to a given training routine. I'm constantly amazed that, in the 21st century, people still think there's "a" way to train males and females alike.

By the way (don't know if someone mentioned it earlier), Lydiard's first book was, I believe, Run to the Top.

you ARE old. old fashioned that is.

i don't think the sport should be genderized in the manner that you speak of. i won't even get into the venus and mars stuff...

I got a chance to run Fluorspar Hill (the one written about so many times in various articles) during a trip to Kenya earlier this year. It is exactly 21km from start to finish (my friend measured it on his Garmin) and climbs from 4,000 feet elevation at the beginning to approx 9,000 feet at the end. The run starts at the base of the Great Rift Valley, ends at the top, and is 100% uphill (not one time do you run downhill or on flat ground). The unpaved road turns dozens of times and is strewn with rocks which makes the footing pretty uneven. The only vehicles we saw on there were mining trucks. Paul Tergat supposedly holds the course record at around 1 hour 20 min; my friend and I ran it nonstop and at a hard effort and finished in 1 hour 35 min. I was completely dead afterwards and felt like I'd been hit by a train when I woke up the next morning. Personally, I wouldn't want to do a run like Fluorspar too often because of the lengthy recovery. It took a lot out of me and absolutely destroyed my quads but was definitely an unforgetable experience!

Wow! I definately wont be doing that kind of simulation. I went back and researched that hill in "train Hard, Win Easy" and found that Tanui actually ran that hill twice a week while Rono, Keino, Heussain and Sang ran it once a week. They see to run it in about 90 mins.

EEJ. What a great "running" experience. That makes Waiatarua seem like a bump in the road !

Braavo:

That's interesting... But I guess it could happen. After weeks and weeks of long relatively slow running, what hill training would do is to bring "power and flexibility" in your strides. Your mechanics should improve; you should have more "push" in your take-off; you're bringing your knees up higher so your stride length should naturally improve... All these should add up and it is not uncommon to see someone start to run regular training runs almost full minute per mile faster. But I guess if you already have all those elements developed, and if you do uphill running regularly enough; you may get to the point where you just don't improve any more.

With our "demo" DVD for "Hill Training--the Lydiard Way", we tried to explain techniques of some of Lydiard's hill exercises. There was a talk that we should go ahead and sell this DVD to generate some cash flow. I was the first one to object to that. The one we are working on right now; a fully scale hill training video (okay, sorry for the commercial!), we try to explain just exactly what Lydiard was doing. It is, as some of you already know, a circuit of approximately 2-mile. There's an uphill section; then after recovery jog on the top, there's a downhill striding; then, as you mentioned, wind-sprints at the bottom of the hill. It is a whole package of different exercises to prepare your body for more race-specific training that follows. It is quite amazingly well-thought-out balanced training regime. Concentrating on only uphill section; however benefitial it might be, is like concentrating only on long runs. Then the program will become not-balanced.

What Dick Quax meant, and if he did say that about Rod, I'd assume this is what he meant, is that; even though hill training is of great benefit, it is still not "running fast on track". The exercise CAN be that event-specific. I know of some Japanese coaches who prefer step running instead of uphill running because "if the surface is angled, then the timing of the landing may get a bit off". Now I wouldn't go that far, and there IS a benefit to landing on the angled surface. But, as Lydiard always said and this is what his coordination phase would do, you need to develop each elements and then you need to coordinate the whole thing. Just because you have good aerobic capacity, developed good anaerobic capacity and speed, that still does not mean you can race well. It is a fine art of blending all the elements together. Same thing; you may have good knee lift, back-leg extention, ankle flexibility and all; but you still need to transfer all those into the task of "running fast".