6 Month Lydiard/Aerobic Base Building Block for a Novice High School Runner

True. But Peter and Arthur worked things out. Peter started working with Arthur again and Davies had a career ending Achilles injury.

HRE wrote:

True. But Peter and Arthur worked things out. Peter started working with Arthur again and Davies had a career ending Achilles injury.

Wasn't the issue less mileage, more emphasis on speedwork?

76chine wrote:

HRE wrote:

True. But Peter and Arthur worked things out. Peter started working with Arthur again and Davies had a career ending Achilles injury.

t like

Wasn't the issue less mileage, more emphasis on speedwork?

What issue? The one that caused the split between Arthur and Peter? I'll assume so and that was a significant bit. Peter began paying more attention to the ideas of a training partner Arthur had matched him with who did not think the later phases of Arthur's program mattered very much as long as you'd done the base. Another thing was that Arthur would go to meets with Peter and predict great performances from Peter who felt that it put too much pressure on him to run those kinds of times. A third thing was that as Peter got more famous he felt that Arthur got too much credit for coaching him, Peter, to those great performances and not enough credit went to himself for the actual running. And Arthur came to feel that Peter did not recognize how much of his, Peter's, success was due to Arthur's coaching. He once told me that the athlete of that eral he admired most was Elliott because "He never forgot that his coach made him the runner he was."

What would have come of John Davies had he not had the bad injury is hard to say. He certainly would have had to deal with the altitude business in Mexico so it seems unlikely he'd have matched Peter's medals count but maybe he'd ultimately been the faster of the two.

Agree that Snell didn't give up on mileage, and Snell thought the high mileage was key to his quick build-up prior to the '64 Olympic games.

However, 1965 didn't go as well and Snell retired after.

Maybe Herb Elliott's story has some parallels, as I read about Cerutty's training and could understand why Elliott quit at 22. Cerutty insisted that Elliott should run 56-57 on the 3rd lap of an elite mile, thereby draining the kick of his competitors. Very hard to do this, and the training was excessive.

Lydiard thought speed could not be significantly increased (he didn't have any idea how to) and therefore stamina must be built up for those not fast enough to be sprinters. He used the 200m PB to determine what events they should run. Then he loaded up the miles, on the assumption that the runners would maintain their natural speed and so that it would be sustained during the race once in the tapering off period.

Isn't it funny how Lydiard style periodization is now more relevant simply because of covid. Since we don't know when many races will resume?

RunnerWithoutAnAerobicBase wrote:

Is it just all slow easy miles or should I also do harder workouts or medium intensity workouts (fartlek, tempo, hills)?

Lydiard was never all slow easy miles. He changed a bit between his various books but in general you had 1-2 hour sessions of 1/2 pace work and another 1 hour at 3/4 effort to go along with the easy running of 1/4. Now those paces were never really well defined but 3/4s would be around marathon pace (i.e. pretty hard aerobic effort) and those 1/2 efforts were also. above an easy run pace. He also tended to have a fartlek day where. you ran some 100s pretty quick.

These days things like the 1/2 pace runs are sort of out of fashion. Most coaches either go faster (HM/MP) or slower.

In "modern notation", a lydiard base would look something like

mon: Easy

Tues: Tempo

Wed: Easy

Thurs: Tempo

Friday: easy

Saturday: long

Sunday: easy with 110s

If you are better off doing your tempos are long (say 8-10 mile runs) at MP pace or shorter faster (4 miles at HM pace or 5x1 mile at HM pace with. 60s rest) is debateable. Both give a pretty strong stimulus to the aerobic system when paired with all that mileage. I think you could make a good argument for alternating. Or replacing the 110s with hill sprints. The exact details aren't worth stressing about. Get in those couple of quality aerobic sessions and then surround them with as. many miles as you can without getting injured.

Arthur Lydiard was fixated on the magic number of 100 miles a week, and the hills wound these 100 miles from despair, in view of the lack of flat terrain in New Zealand. Moreover, he criticized Percy Cerutti (Herbert Elliott's trainer) for using mountain running as a means of training.

Applying Arthur Lydiard's training methods in their purest form outside of New Zealand did not have the effect he had hoped for. Neither in Mexico, nor in Venezuela, nor in Denmark, where Arthur Lydiard worked as a coach, he did not achieve success. And in Finland, the results appeared after his departure, after Percy Cerutti's training methods were added to these methods.

Hills (gradient) is the one of the important key of Lydiard's training method.

From my own little experience, I always had less progress with cardiovascular system and muscle system when training in Spain (flat terrain=0.1-0.4% avg gradient of all my runs) then at my home in Crimea (0.8%-1.2% avg gradient of all my runs) or treadmill (1.8-2.5% gradient).

Same I can tell you when you are training in cycling sport: Mountains are an integral part of any road cyclist's training and the ratio of gradients is different than in running, the gradients are much larger.

If you have your terrain avg gradients are 1.0% and more, you are very lucky ???