Is it true Lydiard used to make his runners run long to get into shape quickly?

xcr,

Interesting. There is a GIANT thread buried here somewhere called Lydiard vs Daniels or who would you rather have coach you Lydiard or Daniels....use search...there is tonnes of fighting, but about 50% of it is brilliant.

I can't remember if Daniels weighed in, but if you see, 'jtupper' as a pseudonym, that's Daniels - there are several other excellent contributors.

Now if you think you are doing Lydiard with 5 or 6, 90 minute runs and one long run, well he moved to alternating time spent through the week, during the aerobic phase. So it wouldn't look like: 90, 90, 90, 90, 90, 90, 150, but rather something to the effect:

miles (which later changed to a time based sched):

M - 10

T - 15

W - 10 - fartlek

T - 18

F - 10

S - 10

S - 22

With the varying distances, you could vary the efforts and have some, what he referred to as 3/4 effort runs - which is very strong - AT pace. Fartlek, was fartlek, not timed or measured.

You only add doubles when this can be completed within the comfort-zone to be able to add more....however, easy supplemental jogging around for a 20 - 30 min was encouraged and not counted as training mileage.

Lydiard followers, do you have any examples of doing these long runs that helped "bring someone back"? That is, what were they running before, then after they did these long runs, what did they run after within the next 2 weeks (or whenever their race was)?

I have heard of several and will start digging for examples, tomorrow however, I know that I read where Peter Snell's long runs, when he was racing a lot were 'slower and restorative'.

Also, if you read, Healthy Intelligent training by Keith Livingstone, there are some more examples there too.

I was a major contributor to the huge Lydiard/Daniels thread. I am a bit hesitant these days to jump on here as we end up with all sorts of "anti" and "anonymous" people. But here goes.

I was one who ran long to "knock" myself into shape.

I can recall having to start a Track season one time feeling I was not quite there and also quite unconfident in my Fitness.

I knew that once I got 2 or 3 ; 20 plus mile runs under my belt I would be right. So that is exactly what I did. Not 2 or in a row but over a 2 week period I made sure I covered those runs.

Once I did that my confidence returned and I felt on track again.

Call it psychological if you like, But I always felt once my long runs came right or were going well then everything else fell into place.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

xcr wrote:

HRE wrote:

Yes. It really helped. Barry told me it brought him right back.

Also, What is the physiology behind this?

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Concentration improves. You can hold a smooth efficient stride for longer. This also helps you recover faster too.

Thanks again Wetcoast. I have ordered Kieth Livingston's book and have read quite a few excerpts on line. I went over 10 years with very little running, and started 20 min runs in early July I can now run 90 min comfortably, but will not start vary the pace until October, at which time I will start varying distance(time) and pace.

BTW I am by no means knocking J Daniels or taking a position in the Daniels/Lydiard debate. I have a lot of success in the Daniels program.

I will look up the Daniels v. Lydiard thread you mentioned

I really hate wading into physiological discussions because I've never found it helpful and never learned much about it.

But in Arthur's way of understanding things you did extended steady runs to develop your cardiovascular system and improve oxygen uptake which was the basis for all subsequent training.

However, those extended, comfortable runs didn't maximize your muscles' ability to maintain a hard pace so you did intervals, time trials, and races to maximize your neuro-muscular fitness. But Arthur thought that fitness came at a cost, i.e. doing that harder sort of running for too long a time eroded your cardiovascular fitness. So when he saw a runner going "stale" after a long bout of racing and interval work he thought you could rebuild some of that cardiovascular capacity by having a short, intense period of doing the sort of work that developed the cardiovascular system.

I have no idea if he's describing accurately what's going on physiologically. I know that the people here who study that sort of thing will say that Lydiard's knowledge of physiology is out of date and incomplete. To me that doesn't matter as long as the results were good.

HRE: I would be interested to know what would Arthur have recommended for the athlete who is tired after a sustained period of higher mileage as opposed to the runner who has been racing heavily. Thanks.

The other thing I wonder is if you can "race" yourself into shape. That is, just do time trials like Lydiard and run a good race. Like run 3000 meters hard, rather than doing an interval workout like 6x800 etc.

just my opinion. I think Mr Lydiard prescribed that dose to counter the staleness, because he could diagnose a runner pretty fast just looking, and asking a few questions. Every case/runner is different. He'd have a well of wisdom for your malady. Hence the seeming discrepency in his prescription.

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The other thing I wonder is if you can "race" yourself into shape. That is, just do time trials like Lydiard and run a good race. Like run 3000 meters hard, rather than doing an interval workout like 6x800 etc.

I bet that if you really got a kick out of racing, that would work great. Some people like to race 'em up and race weekly, and don't seem to mind running relatively "poorly" so long as they get to run the effort in in the context of training period (ex- some dude training for 2:35 in the marathon prefers running local 10ks in 36ish minutes instead of doing solo tempos at marathon pace). Other people seem to prefer waiting it out and only racing when they're really ready to rock. I'm not saying one is better, but I will say you probably lean one way naturally, and you should go with your own flow.

A combo of both could work. Time trials get you used to what discomfort you'll feel in races, and interval work helps you cover a larger distance. I did know someone who only did time trials and mileage and some hills who improved and ran some good times.

I'd actually like examples of this helping...

Most likely he'd recommend beginning your hill phase and then moving through the rest of the schedule. But it really would depend on circumstance. One of the advantages of having a coach who knows not only training but who knows YOU is that such a coach (who could be you if you're self coached) is the ability to distiguish between tiredness which is a normal part of serious training (Brendan Foster's line about a runner being someone who goes to bed at night feeling tired and who wakes up in the morning feeling even more so comes to mind) and tiredness that's really the result of overdoing things for much too long.

In the first case he'd probably just tell you to hang in there. But if he thought you needed rest or a break he'd assign that though for Arthur resting could involve a considerable amount of jogging. He was a fan of very, very, easy running rather than inactivity as a restorative. Ernst van Aaken had a simiar outlook.

And yes, Arthur firmly believed that you could "race yourself fit." That was a quote from a conversation he and I had in 1977, though he believed you'd get better results working through the hill and interval phases. It's essentially what the Aussies who adopted his method in the early to mid 60s (Ron Clarke, Trevor Vincent, Tony Cook and others in that group) did. They rarely did any sort of repetition work but raced pretty much weekly and sometimes mroe in Clarke's case. It was a part of how I got my last run of PRs in 1978-79.

In Lydiards runners case, was it that they did not run well at a race because they were stale? So he had them jog a lot and come back and they ran PRs or whatever it was?

At times. A recurring theme in both Snell's and Halberg's autobiographies is having comparatively poor races at the end of their racing seasons and knowing that they needed to do some "conditioning," i.e. mileage, to recover thei lost fitness. But certainly there are other times when they'd have bad races. Snell was done in by apricots a couple of times.

I knew a coach who told me they had a runner run 60+ seconds off of what they were capable in a 5k and just a very poor race. The coach swore by Lydiard and how the runner ran a lot of miles the next few days, did some hills, and then came back to run close to 2 minutes faster than they had at the previous race 2 weeks ago. That seems a rather drastic improvement, can running long really help that much?

Obviously it can. That doesn't mean it always will.