can anyone give me a lydiard training plan for this xc season?

mon-fri 5 easy miles every morning

mon: 3 miles warmup (preferably to a park), 6 x interval miles; 3 miles warmdown.

tues: 10 miles comfortable (but not jogging) pace

wed: 10 miles hard. 70% effort

thurs: 12 miles comfortable pace

Fri: 4-6 mile easy (day before your meet)

sat: race am....6 miles easy in the pm

sun: 14 miles easy to comfortable

mon: start the cycle again. later in the season you can substitute interval 800s for miles and lesson the mileage some, the week of big meets. (i ran a 24:14 8k my senior year on this training cycle). mileage matters.

does this include summer to?

Without knowing what sort of background you have and what sort of volume and pace you can handle it would be best to avoid giving you a plan. Anyone who is knowledgeable about the Lydiard approach would avoid tossing out a general schedule. If you want that there are many places where sample Lydiard schedules are printed. Assuming you're preparing for cross country you'd want to spend the summer doing base work, but again, you'd want to tailor the schedule to waht you're capable of doing.

HRE: I know this has been done to death with regards Lydiard and base work but I'd be interested to see what you define as a summer base work program (following Lydiard guidelines) for high school cross country runners. I know the volume and pace would vary based on ability, but what would be some general guidelines that would follow a Lydiard-style approach for say a 12 week summer program? I've checked out the Summer of Malmo program already. Is it a Lydiard style approach? Thanks.

I think Summer of malmo is an excellent way to use your summer. It's not at all inconsistent with Arthur's ideas of how you'd use the time. The base phase is meant to develop your aerobic fitness and malmo explains his plan as a time to focus on improving your aerobic fitness.

There are some slight differences which are easily reconciled. Lydiard always liked a long run each week. Malmo doesn't mention one but he doesn't say not to do one and I've seen programs Lydiard wrote with "long" runs as short as 60-75 minutes, though these are fairly exceptional programs.

Lydiard may not have approved the once a week interval session that malmo recommends BUT that's mostly because he wouldn't trust a group of high school or college runners to keep the session easy. He'd have been afraid they'd end up racing the sessions. But that's a problem with the athletes, not with the program.

Don't lance.

Got it. Thanks. One more thing: I know I could simply look this up but would Lydiard advocate tempo runs of say 4-5 miles (one per week) for high school runners as part of their summer base work? Thanks again.

Generally they would. Usually you'd do something like that as part of your shorter runs. It was not unusual for Lydiard's guys to do a ten mile run where they'd run the five miles "out" in 30 minutes or so and come back in 25-27. The term "tempo run" didn't exist then but they did it. They might have done it more than once a week if they were feeling "toey," to use their term for feeling good and wanting to "go."

The thing about Lydiard training in the base phase is that you generally ran more to feel than to plan so if it was Friday and you were feeling good with 3-4 miles left in your run you wouldn't worry about picking up the pace even if you'd already done that 26-28 minute 5 miles yesterday or the day before.

On the other hand, if you were putting in a lot of time on your feet at a summer job which wore you out, the weather was humid and hot and you were feeling pretty fried you wouldn't want to force yourself to do that tempo run. You'd just cover the distance and wait out the extra work hours and weather.

On the other other hand, sometimes when you're dragging you'll feel better going a little harder. So you could start a tempo run but you'd give yourself permission to scrap it if you were still dragging 10-15 minutes into it.

hey look my times are 10:16 2 mile and 4:45 mile 16:40 5k. im just desperte for some training im always uderacheiving and need just a traning plan and heard lydiard was the best. please help me. i got a horrible coach who doesnt care. i just need hep please!!!!

Yes, seek advice ---- but stop blaming your coach.

1) Run everyday without over training.

2) Race once a week.

3) You will improve --- only question is by how much.

Avoid what I did: during college I overdid the attempt to run high mileage --- due to the heat in New Jersey all I accomplished was to get very rundown --- and the fact that I worked 30 hours a week didn't help.

If I could do it over again I would try to run 6-7 miles a day without letting the heat destroy me --- and go back to school excited about the upcoming xc season. Nothing beats being a student athlete with a coach, several teammates and comfortable weather to train in.