jroden wrote:
I used to live in Ohio and I think Bob is or was from the Dayton area. he coached a few runners in Columbus where I lived and some were good. His training method was interesting. Even for the marathon runners, he was not a fan of endurance runs, but rather his runners did these multi hour short intervals sessions on grass, often with fairly short intervals followed by standing around. I tried one once and it made me pretty sore. So maybe you go on the grass and run 200's for 90 minutes and walk around for recovery. Not killing it, but like your 5k pace maybe. So when it's all done maybe you ran 10 miles, but all of it was at 5 minute mile pace.
Kind of a different approach, like I say he had some runners that did well, others kind of struggled in races but could beat you up in training.
This came up when Bob was asked if he also used Lydiard style training. His reply: "You weren't supposed to ask that!"
His longest continuous run in training was 3 miles, but he would do 13 miles of intervals. Typical was 25x 400m starting at 60s and working down to 54.x, with 40m walk and 40m jog. He was careful to tell the high schoolers that they would not be ready for a session like that. Under Igloi the LA Track Club held every American record from 800m to 10,000m, and a few world records as well. (And previously under Igloi Hungary held every world record from 800m to 10,000m.) He didn't mention marathon records! Bob did acknowledge that Lydiard training obviously works, with the three others on stage as ample evidence.
Nick Willis also addressed the Lydiard training, saying that his first priority is to reach the start line, so he doesn't do 100-mile weeks, only about 2/3 of that. I did notice that Nick was nodding approvingly at every single word that Barry Magee spoke.
@Art - Good work with the maintenance. Running is not all or nothing, just do the minimum until you get past the rough spot.
@Andrew - Sorry about your brother. Nothing to do now but keep putting one foot in front of the other.