That's exactly right. See, I do get where you're coming from here. I really do. I've seen plenty of people blather to support an agenda-related stance that frankly has very little (or even counterproductive) practical use. I just don't get the need for the original "football hooligan reacting to a questionable call" impersonation. When the subject has come up (quite infrequently, mind you), the prevailing view among the people I've chatted with - people who were long-time serious runners first and exercise scientists second - is (and I quote one of them) "For mitochondrial development, intensity is preferable to duration." If it's bullshitology, so be it. I'm just relaying what I've learned from others I have no reason to doubt. Don't. Shoot. The. Messenger.
Bullshitology, BTW, is pronounced with a medium stress on the first syllable and a heavier stress on the third.
But I see where you're coming from. People suggest practical applications for fizzyology at the expense of the basics all the time. In the end, mitochondria have no bearing on why someone would do 10 x 400 as opposed to 20 x 400. For the record, as much as this thread smacks of an article straight out of Peak Performance, I did not mention any principle for the purpose of application. I never advocated selecting one workout over the other because of anything to do with mitochondria.
There are barmy types who stubbornly harp on some isolated finding in a decades-old or obscure study (regardless of its truth or falsehood) to justify some laughable, cockamamie training concept that's already been put under real-world trial time and again and has rightly been rejected. For example, Richard Gibbens likes to cite this same 1982 Dudley report in his "Power Running" manifesto. Not to single him out for ridicule, but he's posted as Richard_ on this forum in the past, so he's fair game. Guys like that not only can't see the forest for the trees; they incessantly try to nurture the only birch tree in the forest and don't notice that rest of the forest is comprised of Douglas-firs.
But I'm not cut from that mold. As I said, at the end of the day, I believe we're on the same team. I'm not using fizzyocrap with the intent of advocating anything here, and I take as dim a view of that nonsense as anyone ever has, because 1) a theoretical approach doesn't work in the real world and 2) it wouldn't qualify as the primary justification for doing something even if it did work.
The bottom line is that we do workouts to improve our race results. Are we getting fitter and faster and are we moving up the pecking order? I previously mentioned the notion of doing workouts with the right timing. The concept of "now is the right time" for including a workout is quite important. Even if it's executed to perfection, if it's included at a very inappropriate time, something might not turn out as well as it could. Everybody pretty much knows what kind of pace, how many reps, and how much recovery between reps make for good guidelines to follow for these individual workouts. Hence, in threads about workouts, you'll get the same responses from many people concerning pace, rest intervals and number of reps. What is very hard to communicate is how to formulate the overall game plan, since that depends on too many things - age, experience, the type of athlete someone is (fiber composition, etc. do play a role in this), psychological makeup (this might include something like whether a guy is a workout king or steps it up to a different level on race day), what kind of workouts were done during the last 12, 8, 4, 2 weeks, susceptibility to injury, and so on. People who rely on "scientific training" aren't going to grasp any of this.
Up until about a decade ago, I was as gung ho about that prospect as anyone has ever been about any subject. Unfortunately, the spirit of the sport that was so prevalent in the 1970s was missing among the vast majority of would-be runners. I came to realize that it was unhealthy to "want it more than the athletes." Other runners from the 1970s and early 1980s shared the frustration and suggested I should give up on the USA and move to Mexico, where the runners of the time were committed in both thought and in action. This idea that it's bad for the sanity to want it more than your runners is a notion that I've also heard Jack Daniels and Mick Byrne express (perhaps with different words).
In some ways, guiding somebody along a career trail can be rewarding. Even after 100 journeys, it never gets old to say, "Another 50 yards ahead, you should be coming to a gnarly old oak tree. You can either go left there or can go straight ahead. Going left takes longer and some people find it a little less scenic, but it's not as rocky. It's up to you, but based on how you handled that rocky patch a few miles ago and the fact that you like to take your time and not care about the view, I think going left will work out better for you."
But my thoughts on what a runner's long-term goals should be have generally been much more demanding and far-reaching than the willingness I've seen in these runners. Additionally, no one ever knows how far along that trail they will get during their career, and I see far fewer runners now who will do it for the enjoyment of the journey itself; rather, they seem entitled to the guarantee they will reach a specific destination. Alas, this is too frustrating to deal with for a perfectionist and a purist runner like I am. It's downright unhealthy, in fact.
So we can agree about one thing - let's start over and forget about mitochondria. Look where it's gotten us.