Sorry Antonio. I can't wait to say a few things, but I will try to keep the responses light and sparse and short. Maybe it will save you later responses when I say what can agree with. Please feel free to respond on your own time scale though.
I agree if you just comment on Lydiard, there is no need to bring in Antonio's training, Renato's training, Igloi's training or any other. But when you want to use words like "inferior", "superior", "outdated", etc., this necessarily invites a comparison to something, by the very nature of the words. Personally, I don't want to make this kind of judgement, so I'm happy to isolate the two discussions.
I don't want to talk about your training -- not here and not now anyway. Besides, I know your training anyway -- Igloi based with shades of Lydiard (sorry, bad joke). Like I said, I appreciate all your past contributions about modern training, even if it took much time and many iterations, and your critiques about Lydiard training, and I think I know by now what you don't like about Lydiard. My main issue is that if you want to criticize Lydiard training, then at least get it right.
Regarding Lydiard's fractional efforts, can you do me a favor? Can you please not confuse "paces" with "efforts"? I know you are a "space-time" guy, and paces follow directly from that, but Lydiard used fractions to describe efforts.
Fractional "paces" are very much defined, by simple mathematics. Pace is defined as a time per distance. If your pace is 4:00 min/km, then 3/4 pace is 3:00 min/km. Most people want 3/4 pace to be slower, so they might actually calculate 3/4 speed, giving them 5:20 min/km.
But Lydiard didn't use fractional paces, and for the 40:00 10K runner, running 10K in 30:00 is not possible in a training, and 53:20 minutes is not interesting. (Imagine 1/4 pace would have the 40:00 10K runner running a 10K in 10:00, or in 2:40:00!)
If you want to say that Lydiard's fractional efforts are too fuzzy and undefined, this is a more valid concern, and you are not alone. (But you are all wrong).
I wonder if the vagueness is intentional, because the tables were too rigid (and maybe too fast), because they were never used by Lydiard anyway, and to account for individual differences, and to promote the philosophy of running by feel and regulating your training by response. You might object to that philosophy too, preferring to calculate paces for each individual athlete each day of his training based on some exact formulas. This is something I can understand, and won't debate with you.
But this illustrates why I think you often get Lydiard wrong:
- It's not fractional paces, but fractional efforts
- The paces for fractional efforts are well defined in a dedicated chapter in his very first book, including tables of efforts for many distances. It doesn't seem to be widely available, so I can understand if you aren't aware of it.
- You want to advise me that something a Lydiard workout could be something like 200m repetitions could be done at 3/4 800m effort. Maybe in non-Lydiard workouts something like 400m at 3K pace would be used, but I've never seen any example mixing fractional efforts for different distances. Here I would need to see proof in a schedule. I think it would be 200m at 3/4 effort, or 800m at 3/4 effort, but never 200m at 3/4 800m effort.
Regarding the "training individualization" subject, let me offer a compromise. Maybe Lydiard saw no reason to train Snell, Davies, and Vasala differently and you object to that. I just read in another thread your description of 400m interval training examples for Mamede, Lopes, Silva, and Pinto, and maybe you expect a much finer resolution for different athletes, even if they may have similar performances, and similar muscle fiber types.
But you want to extrapolate from this one example and conclude that Lydiard never did training individualization ever, for anyone. One single example cannot be generalized like that. When I say that training will be individualized, I mean that training can be individualize in several ways:
- Even in the "generic" phases (aerobic and hills), when all athletes do the same workouts, things like fractional efforts (e.g. 10 miles at 3/4 effort) would specify different paces for all the different athletes.
- Younger athletes might do a scaled down version of the training, with less volume
- Although the early phases may be generic, once you get to the track, the training is individualized by event, and by age and by gender. The 1962 book offers different schedules for different events. The 1978 book breaks that down even further, offering schedules for different age groups and different gender.
- Lydiard's "do what you feel" approach to interval training would also be individualized, each athlete doing what should best make him fatigued from a high volume of intensity. This may mean one athlete does 8x800 meters with walking recovery, while another does 15x400 meters with jogging recovery, to accomplish the same training target.
- Depending on how time trials in the coordination phase are done, it may suggest working on over-distance or under-distance time trials in the following weeks.
So it is for all these reasons, that I say even starting from the same schedule, for the same kinds of athletes, there are many opportunities for the actual training to change dynamically. This follows directly from the advice, guidelines and principles that can be found in the books.
But now one final comment about your Snell, Davies, and Vasala example. You say it's the last 6 weeks, which surely must be final coordination training, and taper. In the coordination phase, all the main training elements are developed (endurance, strength, speed), and the main goal is to bring these elements together under race conditions. The main training tool is the time trials -- actual races/time-trials at the race distance, and over-distance and under-distance races/time-trials. I wouldn't expect many individualized changes in the other workouts, which really just provide some maintenance of all the training elements, unless some weakness gets identified in a time trial.