Glad to see it's not just me who feels all these Lydiard threads get invaded by a few people (namely Antonio and SM whatever) and get trashed. It's interesting to me though that I have not yet seen any of Lydiardites, HRE or Wetcoast or Kim, coming on other threads like Coe thread or Alan Webb thread or Canova thread or whatever and bad-mouthing "other" training. It's always Antonio and SM show up uninvited and twist the thread to THEIR training. It is nothing but very irritating at best.
In fact, actually I'm not sure if they are 2 different people-both SM and Antonio don't seem to understand English too well. Of course, SM doesn't seem to totally "kill" English like Antonio, but his "debate" is like that of a 5th grader. Seriously, Snell not having coached any Olympian matters? Then how about Coe? How many Olympian has Seb Coe coached? None. So let's drop this "fast finish" none-sense too. By the way, there IS a difference between "he WAS a physiologist" and "he BECAME a physiologist"; one is "condition" and the other is "action". And to expect anybody to understand that he meant the same sort of shows that his comprehension development is very low...or he's a non-English speaking person.
For OP, it would be advisable, if you DO want to start the Lydiard way of training, to read a bit more about Lydiard training. I believe "Running with Lydiard" is still available and it talks about how you should start running long and short...hard and easy combination until you are comfortable running an hour a day continuously with one long run a week upward of 2 hours. Lydiard wouldn't even recommend trying 100 miles a week before you do that. I saw Nobby saying somewhere recently that Lydiard told him to run at "whatever the pace you feel happy with." That sounds about right to me. If you want to run faster, that would be fine but, if it's beyond your capability, you won't be too happy about it the next day.
I also found it interesting that I saw a thread about Ryan Hall blaming (or whatever the real situation might be) Canova for at least one of his injuries. It's cool to talk about what coach Canova does with Kenyans and call that a modern training. But even coach Canova himself had been saying that Kenyans he works with are "super human" with "turbo engine" who wouldn't get any benefits from EPO and other performance enhancing drugs. So why are we even comparing that kind of training with a 27-minute 5k beginner? Even Ryan Hall gets injured doing this "modern traiing". I guess it's not for us mortals.... I remember Antonio saying something to the effect of he wouldn't even coach someone who hadn't reached his or her potential in 5k or 10k. And I remember Greg McMillan saying something about what brings you to that potential (so you can handle those super-human effort in training) is Lydiard training. In other words, build the foundation. So let's leave those super-human Canova training to those super-humans. OP, stick with Lydiard and build a solid foundation before you look side way and start flirting with super effort training. Without the foundation, you'll be lucky to end up injured. Antonio can't even prescribe a program to get you there. He only deals with someone who's "already there".