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

Interesting discussion. I just wanted to add my experience with long runs. I've found that easy long runs (20+) seem to reset my body regardless of how I feel going into it. ie if I come into the weekend feeling tired/stale I can bet that after my long run I'll be tired but ready to start the week's workouts. The long slow distance seems to get enough blood into my legs to clear them out and insure recovery or maybe it just opens up all the vasculature in the legs. I don't know. But I don't think it has anything to do with improving aerobic fitness. The benefit couldn't be consolidated that quickly. When I feel tired I can almost rely on a long run to "reset the clock". When I read about Lydiard suggesting long runs to his stale runners, this didn't surprise me at all.

Barry Magee was advised by Lydiard to do this. Magee was a natural marathoner who could handle 250km training weeks and coped with 60km training runs. Arthur didn't suggest this to some young 2.00 800m runner. As said by someone else it was a prescription for one particular athlete, a very excepional one, an Olympic marathon medallist.

Now I would point out, I (very much a hack plodder) sometimes ran back to back long runs. Sometimes I'd do 2hr plus on wed and 2hr plus sat and sun. Doing this would give me a quick boost of fitness levels, usually feel I was super strong by the next weekend. I couldn't do it week in week out but I know I had some better races in subsequent weeks after such a week.

For a super tough international marathon type who was flat from high intensity, such running would lift the overall fitness level without the stress. These were long, relaxed, scenic runs in a beautiful part of the world. A change of mindset. A change of physiological demands.
Muscles that were tired and aching from fast intense work were put under a very different type of stress. Hormonal variations from the high stress of racing have a chance to balance up.

For some college runner the prescription might be just do some easy 60-90 minute runs in the forest or whatever.

Mopak:

All due respect, Arthur had prescribed this quite a few times with several of his runners. Magee wasn't so much of a mega-mile kind of a guy either--not like Julian. He had told me that, even though he might get up to 120+ miles during conditioning, he'll cut back and probably year's average would more like be 80MPW.

Plus it's not just 2-hour "jog" that'll work. It's got to have some effort into it. There was this young American miler when Dick Quax was coaching Athletics West; he was so close to breaking 4-minute but kept on coming short. After several tries, he got "stale". Quax called Arthur and asked him what to do. Arthur told him to give him a 15-miler at a "strong effort". He did just that and a few weeks later, he broke 4-minutes.

I tried 3 X 2-hour a couple of times myself. One time, when I went back to Japan after my visit in NZ; I had this 18-mile very hilly course and I did the first one in something like 2:09, second one was the toughest and took me about 2:12 but in the third one, I was flying in about 2:05. Of course, unless you had built up a decent condition before-hand for this to work.

I was in Flagstaff with Yoko Shibui last summer. I would go run with her coach, young Watanabe. For the first time, I had a hell of a time keeping up with him (he is 10-years younger than me with marathon PR of 2:20) but I tried to keep up with him, laboring, breathing hard... After about the third run, he asked me if I'm doing okay. "I need this to 'knock myself in shape'..." I replied. They went back to Japan for 2 weeks and me back to MN. Three weeks later, I went back to Flagstaff. This time around, I had no problem keeping up with Nabe and, during this one particular run over the rugged trail, we had a thunderstorm and we had to run through mud and stream. I ended up leaving him behind in this 1:40 run (I was a better mud runner). We went to Berlin together and we ran about 1:30 every day while in Berlin, going around the park near the finish (that gate). On this particular run, about 200m from the end of the park, I looked at him with a grin and I started to sprint. He was too quick for me and caught me in the last 30m but he just could not believe, only 4 weeks earlier, I had a hell of a time keeping up with him on a 40-minute run.

If you have any more legitimate questioin about Lydiard, come visit www.lydiardfoundation.org forum. We go straight to the source--if you're wondering if Snell really did "Lydiard" before his WRs, we go directly to Snell. Wet Coast also started Arthur Lydiard Legacy facebook and there's a great discussion on interval training going on.

Sorry if this issue has been addressed on other threads (some of those are so long that I don't know where to look in them) but I have heard that Lydiard used to have his runners "race themselves" into shape by doing time trials often. In fact, a typical week could just consist of long runs, time trials, and sometimes hills. Is this true? Was there marked progress by racing oneself into shape?

There was a phase where you'd begin doing "preliminary" races, i.e., races that weren't "goal" races but were used to sharpen for the ones that were goals.
There's also what you might call the "Ron Clarke" approach. Clarke did little training other than base work at a very solid approach but raced frequently and regularly.

If Lydiard's whole thesis was aerobic conditioning allows success during racing it's make sense that if someone had gotten away from their base during the end of the year (when most training was either aerobic or of lower aerobic intensity), a quick return (a few longer, strong aerobic runs) would restore the balance.

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HRE wrote:

The effect of those runs is not mythology. I have, as I said, no idea about whether the runs were effective because they developed the cardiovascular system, the ability to concentrate, or just created loads of good karma that played out in subsequent races.
I have as much reason to accept Arthur's explanation as yours if not more given each of your accomplishments in the sport. I repeated the "dogma," as you call it, because someone asked about the reasoning behind doing those runs so I gace them Arthur's. That may be reinforcing dogma in your view but it's also explaining part of history which was my intention.

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A friend with a doctorate in exercise physiology who's read this thread e-mailed and told me that 2-3 consecutive long runs would create supercompensation in the muscles. I'm not sure how doing those runs around trees affects anything. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
As happens so often in discussions with you, it's difficult because your semantics make it difficult to distinguish between types of running. Hard interval sessions and races, whether they count as aerobic running or anaerobic running, produce different efdfects than long steady runs do and I've seen many runners go "stale" after extended bouts of this kind of running and I've seen many come right again after getting away from that type of running and doing steady extended runs.
Yes, it seems like a change in stmulus is a good way to describe what's happening in such cases.

Bringing back an old thread with a question.
If my legs have been consistently tired/heavy for over a year, causing performances and PRs to feel like death, would the long run everyday solution work for me?

I have done blood work (all normal), massage, complete rest and everything doctors prescribed to me...

I was doing 90 to 100 per week when my body "overtrained" or so it seems.

True. Masters champion Pete Magill wrote about this recently in a RT article titled: "Counterintuitive training strategies". Olympians Rod Dixon and Lorraine Moller used Lydiard's approach to remedy periods of sluggishness.