And where did I disagree with that? Yes, every individual needs to have their training adapted to them. But they all need to do a decent amount of volume, whatever that may mean for them. Snell struggled to get to 100 mpw and didn't do it all that often. But he did it for ten weeks in perparation for Tokyo. Others could do ore and did.
And for those fond of citing Hadd's thread, I'll remind you that on his original thread he said that if you were training serious;y and not gettingt he results you think you should the problem is that you're either not training enough or that you're not training slowly enough. I've exchanged some e-mails with John and at one point he said all he does is stuff that he's adapted from Lydiard.
One fo the current Japanese coaches, I'd have to dig up the name, decided at the start of his career to divide his runenrs into two groups. One group did a lot of "quality" interval work. The other group just ran 20-30 km perday. The first group improved for a short time and stagnated. The second group improved for a much longer time and by a much greater margin.
The trouble we get into in terms of developing distance runners is that we want immediate results so we get fixated on what produces results most quickly. The we decide that must be what works. We don't want to spend years waiting for something to work. Remember all the people here who said that Ryan Hall was about as good as he'd get because he'd run too many miles in high school? We don't want to outwork people anymore. We want to outclever them. So we get bogged down in all this pseudo-scientifc stuff and convine opurselves that it's better than what we used to do.
Well, if it is, where are the results?
Sure, you need to figure out who's going to thrive on 140 mile weeks and who's going to fall apart at that level. But who is succeeding at the international level without doing a lot of running? And how does that number compare with the number of those who are succeeding by doing lots of running?
we'll have the occasional success no matter what we do. We're big enough that the law of averages will drop the odd distance medal on us no matter what. But we aren't going to produce lots of successful international runners until we start thinking about outworking people and forget about being clever.