RunnerWithoutAnAerobicBase wrote:
Sorry for the triple post:
If Lydiard is the best way however, my training will look like this until my milage peaks:
6-7 days a week of pretty easy running with steady breathing but good form.
Strength work
Strides
Next base cycle:
Same thing as above,
but with some threshold and hill training in the mix (Ingebrigtsen styled).
A few years ago I was talking with Lee Troop who has run in three Olympics and we got to talking a wee bit about how to train. He said he'd met dozens of Olympians and they all had done different things to get there which meant, as far as he could tell, that you can succeed in different ways. Tom Donnelly at Haverford has had tremendous success with kids who were just decent high school runners and with Marcus O'Sullivan. When we got to talking about training he said, "There are no secrets."
Arthur was about as successful as a coach could be and really revolutionized training not just for national and world class runners but perhaps even more for "average" runners, what the Brits call "club runners" and for health runners. But there isn't anything magical about his approach or anyone else's. There are certain bases a good program will cover, you need to do a good amount of running, that's the beginnings of everything (after "Enjoyment; the First Step"). At some point you want to add some faster stuff, stuff that mimics your races to some degree and it doesn't hurt to have some sort of resistance work, generally hills, in the mix. The trick is to balance these elements and not overdo or underdo one or more of them. Arthur would talk about not wanting to eat a cake that was overcooked or undercooked.
There is, as Troop said, more than one way to go about this. Lydiard's stuff is a wonderful way. You can use it as he did, without attention to specific paces, heart rates, thresholds, and so on or you can read something like Keith Livingstone's book and use the specific numbers to do something Lydiard-like. You use other approaches too. Any good program is going to have you running more as time goes by and then finding ways to add race like elements in proper balance. Summer of Malmo, you'll find it here with a search, is an excellent pre season approach as well.
To me, the best approach is the one you will use most consistently. If knowing you should be running between x minutes per mile and y minutes per mile on your distance runs is what feels best to you, you probably should. If doing that feels artificially restrictive and takes some joy out of running you should simply run whatever pace feels best. Because high school runners generally run a lot of races in season and often have coaches who want them to do interval sessions as well during the season I think it's best to use pre seasons, time away from coaches, to do as much aerobic work as possible which will build up a reserve of fitness that will allow them to survive the hard in season running as well as possible. If you've got hilly courses to run you don't need to worry much about losing speed and if you do worry some striding will work well.
Shortly before he died, Peter Snell wrote that how fast you can race is determined by the amount of race paced training you can do and the amount of race paced training you can do is determined by the amount of aerobic training you've done. The more the better.