Update on 6 Month Lydiard Style Base Training for a 17 Year Old

I agree with all of the above. I'll add this. As 'going faster miles an hour' wrote, focus on running more by running easy. You'll likely find that this isn't so easy in the aggregate. Once you get to where you want to be on volume, stay with it. After several weeks, you'll start to have days where you're feeling surprisingly good. That's when you want to open up a bit and run a "tempo". The feeling you want is strong and in control, hills no problem. You don't want to go as fast as possible; in fact, you want to pull back some from that.

The next day, return to running easy. You may or may not be a little tired. Be patient and consistent, and you'll be knocking those quicker runs out once or twice a week. This will make you stronger, and after another six weeks or so, you'll maybe be seeing your "running easy" pace improve a bit. The key is to let this process happen, and not try to force it, or watch the garmin too much.

The result is that once the season comes around, you may not feel that you have the speed, but you'll be able to do a lot more in workouts than you used to. This will allow you to work on the speed for racing.

RunnerWithoutAnAerobicBase wrote:

If I am understanding you correctly:

As this is my first aerobic base building block, just stick to the easier miles with some unstructured fartleks if I am concerned about my speed. After I go through this cycle I can start to think of how to tinker my base training to yield maximum aerobic benefits.

Not once have we talked about paces which I think is a mistake. "Easier miles" is a nebulous concept. Some runners go too hard. Some runners go too easy. If you study Lydiard enough you'll see that most of his runners ran between 70-80% of their velocity at V02 max. I think you need to establish training paces based on current fitness. Lydiard did not want you to jog and he did not want you to run "threshold" either. Threshold is roughly 88% of V02 max. He pushed for a lot of steady running. Mileage increases as you get fitter.

No, we have not talked about paces. Arthur never did either.

RunnerWithoutAnAerobicBase wrote:

If I am understanding you correctly:

As this is my first aerobic base building block, just stick to the easier miles with some unstructured fartleks if I am concerned about my speed. After I go through this cycle I can start to think of how to tinker my base training to yield maximum aerobic benefits.

Thank you both very much!

Yeah, that's what I would suggest for this first build up. Like hobby coach said, just getting your mileage up for the first time is going to be a good amount of work, so best to focus on that for the time being. Once you start to develop fitness, there will be times when running stronger/faster starts to come naturally.

+1 to HRE and hobby coach

HRE wrote:

No, we have not talked about paces. Arthur never did either.

Arthur would definitely point out if someone was running too fast or too slow. A good example is the advice he gave to Ron Clarke regarding the paces that he was running.

Typically I have been running between an 8:00 and 8:50 pace for my easy runs. I got these paces from the VDOT calculator.

RunnerWithoutAnAerobicBase wrote:

Typically I have been running between an 8:00 and 8:50 pace for my easy runs. I got these paces from the VDOT calculator.

How did you determine your current VDOT? Keep in mind that Daniels E pace overlaps with but is not synonymous with Lydiard's steady-state

parkerjohn wrote:

HRE wrote:

No, we have not talked about paces. Arthur never did either.

Arthur would definitely point out if someone was running too fast or too slow. A good example is the advice he gave to Ron Clarke regarding the paces that he was running.

Arthur never gave any advice to Ron. I discussed that with Ron in some detail once. What Arthur did was explain that as Ron got fitter he ran faster and got better results than his training partners who did not run as fast because Arthur always said you could run faster as you got fitter and that was his preferred approach and he used what Ron did to contrast what two of Ron's training partners, Tony Cook and Trevor Vincent were doing.

It's a good story and useful for making Arthur's point. The trouble is it didn't happen. I not only checked this out with Ron but also with Trevor. Ron trained for his whole career at a horse race track with a sizable group of whom Cook and Vincent were regulars. They'd all begin together at an easy pace, could well have been around 7:00, they rarely checked the pace, and accelerate as the run went on. As the pace quickened guys would fall off and finish on their own. When he started Ron was usually one who fell off but after a couple years no one could stay with him. He was often under 4:50 pace for the late miles in his run. So there were no Cook and Vincent running 7:00 for a run that Ron was running 5:00 for. And while Arthur always said that Cook and Vincent went "nowhere" while Ron set multiple world records, "nowhere" for Cook was 8th in the 10,000 at Tokyo and Vincent actually got the big games gold medal that Ron did not when he won the steeples chase at the 1962 Commonwealth Games.

Ron and Trevor had tremendous respect for Arthur, I don't know Tony Cook, but neither ever got much advice from Arthur. Later in Ron's career Arthur talked him into adding a session of 150 meter sprints to his training which Ron did briefly but then stopped because he didn't like doing them. Trevor said his contact with Arthur was just to see what Arthur thought of what the group was doing and that Arthur told them they were on the right, oh why, not, the right track.

As to Arthur telling people if they were running too fast or slowly, he'd never get specific about paces. He did sometimes think people were going too fast but he once wrote that "You can never run too slowly. But you can run too fast."

If HRE wants to keep saying that Lydiard never talked about paces and he didn’t think you could run too slow let’s post Arthur’s own words in “Running with Lydiard”

“The top class runners do not jog around in this phase of their preparation but run at speeds from 3.75 minutes to 3.25 minutes a kilometer. There are still some long distance runners who believe they should run no faster than, say, 4.25 minute pace and that to run faster will waste effort and produce poorer results; again, this is not so.”

“After the Saarijarvi race, Clarke asked me why he showed so badly against Davies...we examined his training and found that in 1961, when he joined Cook and Vincent in long-distance training, they ran about 7 minute mile pace. He found he got fitter and fitter from this running until he began running faster...he did the right thing in continuing to push up his running speed..”

parkerjohn wrote:

top class runners

The thing is, we're not talking about the training of elite athletes, we're talking about what makes sense for a young runner attempting their first buildup to higher mileage. For such athletes, Lydiard specifically recommended that they should work on running further before they worried about running faster. I'm paraphrasing the quote that I have in mind, but it's something like, "try to get them interested in seeing how far they can run, rather than how fast."

I am nobody's idea of an elite athlete, but speaking from personal experience, if you start by running easy, it becomes comparatively easy to progressively run more, and once you are running more, it becomes comparatively easy to progress to running faster. That's the approach that I would recommend to the OP.

I too have read that. Let's put the 3:

25.km/7:00

mile pace into context. That was written in the early 60s. In those days hardly anyone ran that slowly. You had people who didn't even consider that you were running if you were moving so slowly. And in one of those quotes he said "Good runners rarely run slower than 7:00 miles." A good runner to Arthur when he wrote that was someone who had at least a very outside shot at winning a national championship. Among a group like that 7:00 pace was very slow. He never said not to run slower than 7:00 pace either, just that good runners almost never did.

And in your quote when he mentions the 4:25/km pace he does not say you can't get good results from running that pace. He's telling you that you should not think you need to limit yourself to nothing faster.

In the conversation with Clarke after the Saarjavi race you would see that Arthur again is approving of Ron training at progressively faster paces as that became possible. Again, when he used Cook and Vincent as examples of how not to do things he's incorrectly describing what those guys did. And if you put all of that quote in your post you'll get to the point where he tells Ron that the issue is Ron never trying to come to a peak when his, Arthur's guys, always did. This was the conversation where Arthur suggested doing something like those hard 150 meter repeats in his training.

In several conversations with Arthur all he ever told me about pace was to enjoy myself. In four workshops he did that I went to he never mentioned anything about pace on your distance runs other than to make sure you weren't running too hard, weren't racing your training,and to run at a pace which left you "pleasantly tired" at the end. When he and I talked about my oldest son's emerging distance running career he told me "See if you can get him interested in how far he can run rather than how fast." And this is what I think the OP needs to do now, not worry about how fast and concentrate on how much.

That sounds good. My main focus will be on total miles and I will run at a comfortable pace. Then in my next aerobic base building block I can worry about thresholds, fartleks, etc.

For young runners like the OP or beginners in general, just trying to run more miles can lead to poor mechanics. What they need is to make running a consistent part of their routine but you can do that by going for a morning jog and then your steady run in the evening. Over time as you get more fit, the mileage will increase on its own because your steady-state improves. Remember that Lydiard’s steady state is a comfortable/tireless pace and you’re not shuffling. So maybe this kid should be running 7:30-8:15 pace instead of 8:00-8:50 right now. How would you even know without asking him what kind of shape he’s in right now? If he’s already looking at a VDOT calculator then we should provide some context for what those paces mean in relation to Lydiard training. I don’t think completely avoiding the subject of pace will help a young runner especially.

If he's already looking at a VDOT calculator you may be right. But it would be better to get him to stop looking at a VDOT calculator.

A youngster is very much doing the right thing by trying to increase endurance by increasing mileage. The runs simply have to be comfortably easy, they don't need pace numbers attached.

HRE wrote:

If he's already looking at a VDOT calculator you may be right. But it would be better to get him to stop looking at a VDOT calculator.

I don’t agree that it’s necessarily better to stop looking at calculators. It’s possible to live in a world where effort, pace, heart rate, and other metrics harmoniously co-exist if you listen to your body. I’m a strong Lydiard advocate and could be a purist about it as well and say that it’s all just noise but Lydiard and the documentation his runners left behind is in and of itself the data we need to formulate training paces based on someone’s current fitness level. That’s essentially what Keith Livingstone did when he wrote Healthy Intelligent Training but he focusing more on heart rate. That’s also what Nobby does through Running Wizard. His training plans contain paces that one can use as a reference guide.

What's happened is that so many of today's runners have grown up in a world where there's a pace they're told they're supposed to be at while walking from the chair where they put on their running shoes to the door and for every step afterward and were constantly asking questions about what their paces are supposed to be. And they were always asking about heart rates,thresholds,etc, things that Arthur never really paid attention to. His ideas are often just too different for a lot of today's runners.

Keith's book was an attempt to put Arthur's ideas into a language they could understand and I think it does that very well. But I'm not sure how Arthur would feel about the book. And I mean literally that I don't know. He might have approved. But, and I'm not sure how well I can convey this, I can see that he wouldn't be keen on it because it can set runners up to strive to run at particular paces rather than allowing themselves to, or not to. But again, I'm not certain.

Running Wizard was a way to make a specific Lydiard like program available to runners who want to use one but don't have access to a coach who is oriented that way. It's computer generated and I can't think of a way a computer could put "enjoy yourself" into a pace or distance for someone to use. I've never asked Nobby about how he thinks Arthur would have felt about a computerized version of his training. He trusted Nobby enough to will his, Arthur's, intellectual property to him but Running Wizard came along several years after he died so it was not Arthur's idea. I do know that Nobby is always available for people who bought RW if they need to make some sort of adjustment.

When my kids decided to go out for their first season of high school cross country I told them to run for 30-35 minutes each day in the month before practices began. That was all. I knew they'd they'd find a pace that was easy enough that they could do it day after day. I also knew that they had ambitions to be good and would not poke along a lot slower than was necessary.I knew this because that's how I started and how every other runner I knew did. None of us went out for our early runs after checking charts or looking to cover a mile in X number of minutes. The pace found us.

And it was enjoyable. I cannot imagine a run being really enjoyable if I'm constantly checking a watch to adjust my pace to get it "right." I often didn't even wear one. I'd check the wall clock before leaving and on coming back. Lots of us did that and I went from not being able to run a single mile at better than 6:00 pace to once managing it for a marathon. The biggest factor in doing that was doing a LOT of running and the biggest factor in doing that was that the runs were mostly enjoyable. So I always tell people I'm advising to make their runs as enjoyable as they can.

I imagine there are people who really enjoy knowing how fast they're running for every minute so maybe that's what they should do but I think that's actually can be limiting at times, it's the very kind of thing Arthur was referring to when he said the thing about runners who incorrectly think that if they run faster than 4:25/km they'll get poor results. In years of advice I got first from Arthur and later from Barry Magee I was never told to run at any kind of pace and I was never asked about what paces I was running. So if I'm in a discussion with someone wanting to use Arthur's method, Arthur's, not someone else's interpretation of it, I'm going to try to steer them clear of trying to maintain any specific pace in their training.

Great stuff, HRE. Personally, Lydiard’s emphasis on training by feel and enjoying your training is something that I’ve found to be one of the most helpful parts of his approach. I find it interesting that this is something that Canova has also talked about, in a quote that sheds light on an underappreciated aspect of his own approach:

“Personally, I never met a scientist that was good coach, because they want to use athlete in function of training, not training in function of the athletes. Don’t forget that the most important problem to solve is to make easy what is difficult, and for this goal we need to be very simple, natural in our approach, bringing our athletes to train more without too much pressure from hard workouts. That’s the reason because too much hard training is a mistake, because athletics become a continuous examination, no more a pleasure. You can train hard preserving the ability of enjoying training, instead too many times athletes think that training is a must, and lose their nervous energies in fighting in training. Many runners leave good result in practice but have little energy for good result in races. Under this point of view, we have much to learn from African runners. When we are able to learn from them, we can teach our runners not to train too hard and have gas in the tank for races. I teach my runners that gas must be in the tank for you to drive the car. If the athlete is always taking gas from the tank then he will be on empty soon and not be able to run fast when it is the time to do so. That is why my training puts gas in the tank and progression is important. Yes, it is true that at the end of season my athletes use gas with ‘el medio’ workouts and other hard tempo tests. But it is after the gas tank is full that we can even start to think about this type of training.”

Thanks. That's a great quote.