Who has Jack Daniels Coached?

That's funny. When's the last time you even got someone to State?

There's a lot of room for judgement in individulization in DRF. It doesn't tell you exactly how many miles to run, exactly how much to cut back (for peaking), etc. That's left up to the actual coach. I use it & have had a lot of success.

I didn't say he "made" anybody, you did. I will say that there are plenty of up and coming great runners due to the research he has performed and actually shares in his books, symposiums, workshops, camps, etc.....so that more of today's high school runners are being coached by somebody with some knowledge about training due to reading the book or attending one of the above. The future will tell how many great runners were influenced by J.D.

"That's funny. When's the last time you even got someone to State?

There's a lot of room for judgement in individulization in DRF. It doesn't tell you exactly how many miles to run, exactly how much to cut back (for peaking), etc. That's left up to the actual coach. I use it & have had a lot of success."

I didn't say that you couldn't have any success with Jack Daniel's system. I said the teams in Missouri that use it that I know haven't had much success at peaking at the right time. I am sure that it could be used successfully if it was used intelligently. But the (over)emphasis on interval work in the Daniels system lends itself to early peaking, especially for athletes with an inadequate aerobic base, which is just about every high school runner in the US.

I have had 5 all-state runners in the last 3 years, plus several other state qualifiers. We do a pretty good job of peaking at the right time.

Sean Nunn

Raytown MO

you are a high school coach?and you are criticizing jack daniels publicallywow dude, that takes some balls

The only problem I see with the Jack Daniels program is most people follow it off of a piece of paper or the book. Of course this is easier to write a training program this way when it is based from a physiological and science point of view. If you do this and this and this followed by this, then science says you should react in this way and perform like this. Unfortunately, this is not the way it works and is by no means the way to coach or train runners. I believe there are a lot of very good things with what Jack Daniels does and any coach should use some of it. Jack does a good job of explaining why certain workouts are good and what they do for the different systems.

When training distance runners I believe a coach should map out the four seasons (xc, indoor, outdoor, and summer)with a general plan of workouts. BUT, the key is to be flexible and to adjust these on a weekly and sometimes daily basis depending on the weather, how the athlete is feeling, as well as if they are healthy. This does not happen always and the runners that I see that follow his plans tend to try and follow them to a T no matter how they are feeling. So maybe there is a 20 miler scheduled for Sunday and a 12 mile tempo on Monday followed by continuous 200's on Wednesday. I am not sure this is the best for everyone bc science says so. Then they get injured and they are crunching to try and get their miles in for the week.

I would suggest using Jack Daniels Running Formula to teach one's self a little bit of the physiological side of why you do the things you do in training. Study the workouts and progression and then formulate your own workouts and training plan that fits these into what kind of runner you are. A male with natural footspeed and who is good aerobically may not have to run 100-130 miles a week and do 12 mile tempo runs to run a fast marathon just bc thats what Jack says. This same runner might be able to run a faster marathon off of 80 mile weeks and doing workouts lasting less than 45:00. Just some ideas and no bashing on Jack. He is a great guy and knows his stuff! You can't just hand his book to anyone and expect them to be a great coach just based on the material inside!~

Not to encourage the usual bullshit and petty sniping, but I have a related question. Obviously Daniels influence extends widely, but can someone tell me (with certainty, preferably) which of the more successful elite clubs use a system that's close to Daniels'? I'm thinking Hansons, etc, and maybe some of the top NCAA teams.

Jack has been freely sharing his wit and wisdom with American and world runners since the mid-1960s. It's hard to imagine anyone who has added more to our understanding of runners' physiology, and from there, the most appropriate ways to train runners. I think basically every coach cops some part of Jack's system, whether it's 10 percent or 90 percent. Beyond that, he's beloved by all who know him. He's sharing and caring. What more can you ask for?

Sean Nunn wrote:

I didn't say that you couldn't have any success with Jack Daniel's system. I said the teams in Missouri that use it that I know haven't had much success at peaking at the right time. I am sure that it could be used successfully if it was used intelligently. But the (over)emphasis on interval work in the Daniels system lends itself to early peaking, especially for athletes with an inadequate aerobic base, which is just about every high school runner in the US.

I have had 5 all-state runners in the last 3 years, plus several other state qualifiers. We do a pretty good job of peaking at the right time.

Sean Nunn

Raytown MO

I see it in exactly the opposite way. We use the principles in the DRF to help us create our yearly training program, and we are very good about peacking at the right time because we DON'T do a lot of intervals. If anything, DRF encourages you to run more tempo and pace reps and fewer intervals--or at least our take on it does that.

Sorry: "peaking".

Wish there were an "edit" function on this forum.

Broken link wrote:

Daniels didn't take Lisa Martin from 400h to marathon, nor did he make Ken Martin or Joannie Benoit.

That's a bit of a strawman. Any coach who says that he "made" a world-class athlete would be taking too much credit. From what I know, I think it's fair to say that he was Ken Martin's coach during his best marathoning period. To the extent that Joannie was coached by anyone, I think that it was primarily Bob Sevene. I don't really know about Lisa.

Maybe I can help here. I did coach Ken and Lisa for a number of years, but who is to say who their coaches were. Is it your first coach as a youngster, or your last coach just before retirement? Tom Heinonen coached Lisa in college at Oregon and Ken was on the Oregon team with Dellinger. I helped them after college. As for Joanie, she was my lab assistant for one year when we worked for Nike in Exeter, NH. We talked about training a fair bit, but she pretty much took care of herself. She then moved to BU and Sev was her coach for years. By the way, Sev has done a great job with many athletes, and I am indebted to him for what I learned from him. Others I learned from include Gags, Vin, and Larry Snyder (I spent a year in Peru coaching with Larry, who had retired from Ohio State and once told me his coaching career was made because when he first started coaching he was blessed with a pretty great runner named Jesse Owens). Oh yeah, I coached Penny Werthner to two Olympic Games in the 1500 for Canada, and I never considered myself to have "coached" Jim Ryun. He was a subject in some of my research and even ran a couple world records during one of the studies he participated in. Bob Timmons was Jim's coach and Timmy and I have always been good friends, initially because we both were swim coaches (his Kansas team and my Oklahoma City age-group team, both were respective State Champions, and he beat us handily when we went against each other). I have always figured what Timmy had Jim doing was exactly the right thing for Jim, even though some of the workouts look pretty demanding and ovrewhelming (for many runners). Whom do I currently coach? Who knows, but I sure do have fun doing it. Maybe the greatest improvement I have seen in a runner I coached was to take a 2:39 high-school girl, through 4 years of college and 1 post-collegiate year and watch her win the 10k in 33:01 at Penn Relays (beating the DI collegiate record holder in the race). Could be her high-school coach was really most instrumental in her commitment to running.

Jtupper is the classiest man. I commend you, sir.

Famous high school track coach Fast Eddie Stickles.

Coaching is not something that happens in a book or on a piece of paper. Coaching is not putting together a training schedule. Coaching is what happens on the track, cross country field or road.

Show me one major training "breakthrough" in the last 40-50 years and I'll show you a runner who did it (maybe by some other name) in the past.

If a runner has been doing "x" training in the past and then switches to training "y" and improves greatly is it because of training "y" or a combination of all the training the runner has done over the years. Would training "z" also produce great results? The human body adapts to a stimilus and that same stimilus becomes easier and less adaptation occurs. Change the stimilus and adaptation increases. So what if you did a 4 mile run every week at 10 mile race pace? You did this for a year and your improvement stops. So change it up, maybe run this 4 mile run at a 1/2 marathon pace, maybe run it at marathon pace, hell...maybe run it even faster. What I'm saying is that you can't be tied down to predescribed notions of training no matter who they come from. The body will adapt and need change. You could follow coach a for 2-4 years, coach b or 2-4 years and then coach c for another 2-4 years and be more successful than if you adhered to the coaching of one person over that time. In the same vein you could follow a highly intense interval program for 2-4 years, then switch to a schedule full of hard steady runs and fewer intervals, then switch back to the intervals and so on and so forth. Train, learn, change, repeat.

Alan

jtupper wrote:

Bob Timmons was Jim's coach and Timmy and I have always been good friends, initially because we both were swim coaches (his Kansas team and my Oklahoma City age-group team, both were respective State Champions, and he beat us handily when we went against each other). I have always figured what Timmy had Jim doing was exactly the right thing for Jim, even though some of the workouts look pretty demanding and ovrewhelming (for many runners).

Then why did Ryun perform so erratically after he ran the mile in 3:51.1 in 1967, when he was only 20 years old?

He dropped out of the 800 meter run in the 1968 trials, despite being the world record holder in that event. He dropped out of the three-mile run in the NCAA championships in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1969. He lost two NCAA mile championships in 1969 to Marty Liquori. In 1971 at the Coke meet at the Crystal Palace, he ran 4:09 for the mile, finishing last behind Dave Bedford. (You cannot attribute the London meltdown to allergies.)

Throughout the 1971 and 1972 seasons, Jim Ryun's performances were appallingly erratic. He would run 3:57 for the mile one week and 4:10 for the mile the following week. Why would Jim Ryun be unbeatable at 19 and 20 years of age and then be so fragile at 24 and 25 years of age? Until that mystery is resolved, I don't see how you can plausibly say that "what Timmy had Jim doing was exactly the right thing for Jim."

Jim took a year off of running during that time, gained 25 pounds, got married, had first daughter and I admit that I do not know much about what his training was in those years. I did test him quite a few times (resulted in a publication documenting his return to fitness after that long break), and I can assure you he was as fit going into Munich as he was in 1968, but we shall never know what the results may have been in those 72 Games.

finally maybe someone has shut Living in the Past upjtupper - thanks for posting on this site... I really appreciated your book and felt I learned a great deal from it, certainly I feel my running has improved -even though others might notice - when you move from back to mid-back of the pack there isn't too many that notice :-)

jtupper wrote:

Jim took a year off of running during that time, gained 25 pounds, got married, had first daughter and I admit that I do not know much about what his training was in those years. I did test him quite a few times (resulted in a publication documenting his return to fitness after that long break), and I can assure you he was as fit going into Munich as he was in 1968, but we shall never know what the results may have been in those 72 Games.

The issue is whether Timmons overtrained Ryun in the early years. And it's still unresolved. As Jack says, we'll never know the results of the '72 Olympic 1,500 meters final had Ryun not been tripped by Billy Fordjour of Ghana. We do know that Ryun finished fourth in the 800 meters in the '72 trials and that Pekka Vassala had the fastest 800 meters time of the year. Jack says that Ryun was as fit going into Munich as he was going into Mexico City. Would the 1968 Ryun have beaten the 1966-1967 Ryun? He was certainly performing better in 1966 and 1967.

Actually, Dave Wottle had the fastest time of the year in the 800 meters in 1972. Pekka Vasala had the fastest 800 meters in the 1500 meters field.