I love these training threads so I thought I'd initiate one with a quote I fould in an old Athletics Weekly (I had a subscription shipped over from England in the mid-90s---it is a great magazine.)
Anyway when asked about his training, Aguta said, "I run until I'm tired and then I stop."
Now that my friends is how you train to win a Boston Marathon.
Yeah, right. That's how I got burned out at the age of 16 and quit the sport for 10 years. I was fat when I started jogging again. And I never became much of a runner after that.
You sir, are no Mr. Aguta.
Now let's aaaaall copy Aguta for a couple of weeks until somebody posts what the newest sensation known as Moses al Katari is doing.
If we don't like the look of that, it won't be long before another guy discovers that Syrinjin Buttayeb did only a half mile of 50-meter sprints every day during the four days prior to lowering his PR from 3:45 to 3:28. That will prove once and for all that long, slow running is worthless and wicked-fast speed is where it's at.
Or maybe we can use a couple of sample workouts from the "Five-Speed Scam" and a few more out of "Better Sprinting For Non-Runners", meanwhile reading O. Dunderson's essay on "Lactate Nosedive" so we come up with a 3-mile-per-week mix we can be real comfortable with.
This is reminiscent of a scene from the 1967 version of the movie "Badazzled" (a spoof of Faust) with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Short order cook Stanley Moon (Moore's character) trades his soul to one George Spiggot (Cook's character) - aka Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Prince of Darkness, the Horn-ed One - in exchange for seven wishes in an attempt to land the girl of his fancy. George (the devil that he is) always manages to ruin each of Stanley's fantasies by virtue of some loophole in Stanley's wording of the wish - but he's not really a bad guy; he's just doing his job!
In one of the wishes, Stanley believes that by being a singing idol, he can pull any bird he pleases, so he is transported (through George's invoking of the magic words "Julie Andrews") to a live performance where he is the star. When the fans (including Margaret Spencer, his love interest) rabidly swarm him following his song, a new character who looks exactly like George Spiggot takes the stage and "bedazzles" the crowd with his own performance. Upon its completion, all the fans trample poor Stanley to flock to their new idol.
The fans in that scene are exactly like a majority of the message board posters - looking for the secret du jour (or, more often, the answer they want to hear) every time a new star bursts on the scene. There are even some American runners who engage in "coach hopping", spending a short time on plan A and abandoning it in favor of plan B if too much running is involved or if the "magic" breakthough doesn't occur soon enough for them.
Fickle, fickle, fickle.