LYDIARD BASE PHASE - CONTRADICTION

That area of confusion and contradiction is an endless source of fuel for the anti lydiardists and embarrassment for the lydiardists.

This problem arose from coaches of this time, getting themselves confused by exercize physiologists who were giving out a lot of misinformation.

For one thing, we don't even produce 'lactic acid' and for another, there is no 'anaerobic threshold'.

Another sore point is the idea that speed work diminishes endurance and endurance diminishes speed. This is of course a myth. You can do both at the same time.

Lydiard doesn´t use the term "time trial" as most others do. In the base phase it´s more of tempo runs. During the coordination phse they should be run at "7/8 effort".

7/8 effort? What the heck is that supposed to mean?

Lydiard questions are best answered at the Lydiard Foundation website (http://www.lydiardfoundation.org/).

Perhaps Lydiard contradicted himself many times. But I guess the question you are really asking here is if Livingstone contradicted Lydiard. The short answer is no -- you just have to know what a time trial means, in the different phases.

I think in one of the presentations at the Lydiard Foundation, (or maybe here, in the long Lydiard thread), Nobby explains that "time trials" in the conditioning phase are not the same as "time trials" later in the coordination/sharpening phase.

During conditioning, they are more like "tempo runs" and should not be raced or run too fast, avoiding the really high speeds and intensities that could be construed as "anaerobic".

But during the more specific coordination, or sharpening phase, "time trials" are a tool to help fine tune your training. They are more like race simulations, at near race pace, which give you important feedback about your current level of fitness, with respect to endurance and speed. They tell you where you are weak, and how you should change your training to eliminate the weakness.

I think the Lydiard Foundation will concur (they fully endorse the book) that Keith Livingstone's H.I.T. gives a modern interpretation that remains faithful to Lydiard's principles.

Aaah! Another source of confusion. I consider this part of the hazing that separates the chosen few from the uninitiated.Those who know what it means must never risk saying it to the unworthy.

cabana wrote:

7/8 effort? What the heck is that supposed to mean?

Well if he is using the term time trial interchangably with tempo than it makes sense. But generally time trails are run at full effort, this is widely agreed upon.

If Lydiard meant these efforts to be at a threshold effort than why didnt he just say so?

The argument that he used time trail to mean tempo effort does not make sense since he distinguished between these 2 efforts in previous writings.

How could such a blatant contradiction take place?

I am currently being hazed by the Almighty in the form of huge snowfall and incredibly low temperatures. And having lots of fun too. wish you were here.

Lydiard's dichotomy of combining aerobic training and anaerobic training only became confusing after he spoke to physiologists. He used to call it marathon conditioning, and track training. No athlete is confused, until the physiologist speaks.And just because you can do both at the same time, doesn't mean you should. Has anyone shown that one approach is superior, at letting an athlete reach his full potential? Both approaches have been proven by examples (not a very strong method of proof). Has anyone shown a long term downside to periodic phases of 3 months of base training without speedwork? Or are we just replacing old mythology with new mythology?

cabana wrote:

That area of confusion and contradiction is an endless source of fuel for the anti lydiardists and embarrassment for the lydiardists.

This problem arose from coaches of this time, getting themselves confused by exercize physiologists who were giving out a lot of misinformation.

For one thing, we don't even produce 'lactic acid' and for another, there is no 'anaerobic threshold'.

Another sore point is the idea that speed work diminishes endurance and endurance diminishes speed. This is of course a myth. You can do both at the same time.

I have less snow than you -- and low temperatures, but I think your's is still lower. It should warm up this weekend.

TheJerk wrote:

Well if he is using the term time trial interchangably with tempo than it makes sense. But generally time trails are run at full effort, this is widely agreed upon.

Maybe NOW it's widely agreed on, but who's to say it was then?

You asked your question, you got your answer. Now I'm waiting for that guy who doesn't speak English very well to get on here and rag on some minute aspect of Lydiard.

cabana wrote:

7/8 effort? What the heck is that supposed to mean?

Hmmm, lets think this one over. 100% effort would be 8/8, so 7/8 would be 87.5%. We've all heard of doing things at 90% effort instead of 100%, this is pretty close to that. Just because its a strange fraction to use doesn't mean it is a confusing concept.

Well that's one primary reason for reading the book, rather than going straight to the schedules at the end. Schedules are necessarily brief and incomplete descriptions of the workouts. In your Lydiard book, how did Lydiard describe the use of "time trials" in the different phases?

Lydiard wrote his first book in 1960, at a time when people were not talking about "thresholds" and "tempo" training. As he spoke to different "experts" over the course of 50 years, Lydiard tried to modernize his terminology to be more accurate. It can be that what he said in 1960, contradicts what he said in 1978, and what Livingstone said in 2008, simply because time has passed, and the meaning of some of the terms have evolved faster than Lydiard's training.

But there is no "blatant contradiction" here. Once you understand Lydiard's interpretation of "aerobic training" and "anaerobic training", and what is appropriate in the different phases, it is only a small mental extension to temper the meaning of the term "time trial" to the conditions and constraints, and your relative capability in the current phase of training. During base training, presumably you are not able to race competitively. A "time trial" at a tempo pace is not so far from a "near race pace" effort. It's only natural that after weeks of intensive interval training at the track, your "time trials" should be much faster.

It's an exaggeration to conclude a "blatant contradiction".

We have no comprehensively standardized language for much of what we talk about when we talk training and what is standard at any particular time may be replaced with newer terminology at some future time. So it is with many of Lydiard's concepts.

When he was writing things like "Run to the Top" or "Running the Lydiard Way" the concept of threshold runs or tempo runs didn't exist. People did those kinds of runs but we'd just asy something like,"I went at a pretty good clip for the last half hour" or some such thing. So there's really no way Arthur could have said that he meant "threshold run" because the term wasn't there.

So he grasped for ways to get his ideas across. No one ever really knew exactly what those fractions of efforts meant. Lorraine Moller once told a story of being at a workshop with Lydiard where he was asked about that and his answer was that at 1/4 effort you were running about a fourth as hard as you could, at 1/2 effort you were running about about half as hard as you could, at 3/4 effort you...well, you get the idea. All those numbers mean is that you're going a bit harder as you move closer to 100% effort.

Let's look at hypothetical time trials at 10,000 meters, though the distance doesn't matter. You could jog a 10,000 meter course and barely break a sweat and time yourself, then do it again in a few days to see if you were any faster while using that gentle effort than you were the previous time. Or you could run the asme course for time but this time at a nearly all out effort, perhaps without a finishing kick and then do it again in a few days to see if you're any faster at this really hard effort level. And you could do the same thing at different intermediate effort levels.

In all cases, you're running time trials. But in the Lydiard system you'd have certain times when you'd be more likely to do one kind of time trial than another. It would have been nice if Arthur had found different terms for each of these sorts of efforts but that really wasn't possible in his day because we didn't have all the terminology then that we have now.

One fo the things Keith tried to do with his book was to put Arthur's system and ideas into frames of reference that today's runners will likely understand.

Lydiard gave tables of efforts (1/4, 1/2, and 3/4), in at least one of his books, over several distances ranging from 220 yards to 6 miles. It would be trivial to also define 7/8 effort from these tables.The fractional efforts were adapted from Gosta Holmer. For Holmer, they were something like 2.5% slower efforts for each quarter, but I think Lydiard hand-tuned them for the books, especially for shorter distances, which slow down more.I gather Lydiard wasn't so concerned about specifying intensities, beyond terms like "comfortably hard". 1/2 effort would be like "half trying". Yet when writing books, people always demand more specificity, so he had to explain different intensities, and produce sample schedules.As we can see now, these efforts at clarity were in vain.

cabana wrote:

7/8 effort? What the heck is that supposed to mean?

craigmac4h wrote:

TheJerk wrote:

Well if he is using the term time trial interchangably with tempo than it makes sense. But generally time trails are run at full effort, this is widely agreed upon.

Maybe NOW it's widely agreed on, but who's to say it was then?

You asked your question, you got your answer. Now I'm waiting for that guy who doesn't speak English very well to get on here and rag on some minute aspect of Lydiard.

Surely it won't be long now...

rekrunner wrote:

I think the Lydiard Foundation will concur (they fully endorse the book) that Keith Livingstone's H.I.T. gives a modern interpretation that remains faithful to Lydiard's principles.

HRE wrote:

One of the things Keith tried to do with his book was to put Arthur's system and ideas into frames of reference that today's runners will likely understand.

Keith tries an impossible task. Lydiard training is simply what Lydiard did and what Lydiard wrote. How does he knows. how do we know, how do i know that Lydiard would agree ? No one knows.

Since Lydiard is dead the revision of Lydiard training, the modern interpretation of Lydiard is something silly and inconsequent. Basically it’s training change, not modern interpretation

Does he talk with Lydiard ? How he knows that Lydiard approved or disapproved some change, some interpretation ?

Lydiard is one coach with training idiosyncrasy. In some training aspects no one really knows what he wanted, and WHY he wanted that training schedule.

May be i’m wrong and a few Lydiard adepts from his Foundation or Keith they Hve access to Lydiard to know his opinion and they still talk with Lydiard today to know what he thinks about every training change. May be they got supernatural talents and they do extra sensorial perception to talk and know the opinion of the deaths.

rekrunner wrote:

But there is no "blatant contradiction" here. Once you understand Lydiard's interpretation of "aerobic training" and "anaerobic training", and what is appropriate in the different phases, it is only a small mental extension to temper the meaning of the term "time trial" to the conditions and constraints, and your relative capability in the current phase of training. During base training, presumably you are not able to race competitively. A "time trial" at a tempo pace is not so far from a "near race pace" effort. It's only natural that after weeks of intensive interval training at the track, your "time trials" should be much faster.

It's an exaggeration to conclude a "blatant contradiction".

Its not an exaggeration at all considering time trials usually connote an intense effort.

Now that I know Lydiard meant it to mean what we know define as a tempo run it is no longer a contradiction.

My question has been answered and I didnt mean to start a huge discusiion re the details of Lydiards training

What we all were waiting for: the lousy English speaker!

A point on the schedules in the back of the Lydiard books. The publisher wanted schedules. He didn't want to put them in, but did, to please the company.

Lydiard was the pioneer. It is really modern language that is messing up the understanding of good training principles. People sweating the minutia and not grasping the holism.

I imagine he must have had to explain what all athletes were doing day-to-day. Imagine how wonderful that would be to have your coach look at you and instead of saying "50 minute tempo today." And that is it - he says: "run a strong effort for 50 minutes, not so you are racing, but that you have a good rhythm and can speak if needed, but would rather not. Try not to lose focus because that will affect your rhythm, remember to move your arms like pistons...don't let your knee lift drop...if your breathing gets high (heart rate) just slightly take the edge off, don't try to run even splits. We know you are capable of X time when rested, so that means you want to FEEL like you are running Y time....go by feel don't look at your watch at markers.....etc etc .....

I think the athlete would have a much greater sense of what the coach is requesting...I do that myself and know that based on feedback the athlete keeps this stuff in mind during the run. It takes a little dramatism to make sure the concept and the details are heard....but...frik...that's the coach's job.