Question on 80s Brit Milers: Hard Training Everyday w/ Different Energy Systems

coach d wrote:

Keep in mind what Woldemar Kostre schedules are:

long intervals at 10K pace

shorter intervals at 3K pace

1 day sprints in spikes

long tempo (15 miles for Bekele apparently)

This is done every week.

And then Bekele apparently also goes for 30 miles in the forest at 5:40 pace.

Some of the posters above are simply a bunch of wimps.

Let us know when you've done six months of this.

coaching shorts wrote:

coach d wrote:

Keep in mind what Woldemar Kostre schedules are:

long intervals at 10K pace

shorter intervals at 3K pace

1 day sprints in spikes

long tempo (15 miles for Bekele apparently)

This is done every week.

And then Bekele apparently also goes for 30 miles in the forest at 5:40 pace.

Some of the posters above are simply a bunch of wimps.

Let us know when you've done six months of this.

Since this thread is about milers, for 800/1500 people, the schedule we use (not counting easy days and strength/plyos) is basically this:

Mon: 1600-1200-800-600-400 breakdown

Tue: easy or pool

Wed: 6X1000

Thu: easy

Fri: sprints

Sat: 60 min long run

Like most other college coaches (and Alberto and Jerry), I'm not going to give much detail. But this is base training and the original concept came from Renato, who mentioned the modern emphasis on aerobic power in 800 training, but also that a weekly long run of around 50 minutes or so was important for maintaining lactic threshold in 800 runners. The Monday and Wednesday workouts are from El Guerrouj's training but also similar to what Krummenacker did to win world indoors. We originally used this for 800 specialists only, but we realized that Krummenacker was also the only (before Webb) 3:31/1:43 guy, so we adjusted thing slightly (adding sprints) to use the same schedule for both 800 and 1500.

Coach D: Do you feel that steady runs over 10 miles are unnecessary for 1500m runners?

The training was hard, no doubt about that. It had to be.

The nature of the middle distances call for every energy system to be working at a high, high level.

The ability to handle the workload without breaking down is something that not many individuals have.

To get to the point where such workouts like:

10 miles in 50-53 minutes

15 miles in 90 minutes

3x10x100m hill sprints

are moderate/recovery days and not actual hard days takes years and years.

The top athletes have incredibly strong hips, core and legs as well as nearly perfect form.

Those that didn't are the ones you don't hear about, as they got injured or burnt out...despite their "potential".

Even Coe wasn't immune...his comments about being tired all the time show even he couldn't handle it....Ovett had some injury issues too, as did Cram. Even Lyiarites got injured...SNell got stress fractures, for example. No one is bulletproof.

El G was doped to the gills and even he said he overtrained for Sydney 2000.

Most elite athletes are walking a fairly fine line between injury and top performance.

Peer Mediator wrote:

[quote]Speller Outer wrote:

Unfortunately, it was the former not the latter who Coe-wrote a book that was read like a religious text by every coach in the late 80's and 90's.

[quote]lol lol lol lol wrote:

And the Coe text was used by many of the great milers that came after him; Aouita, Morceli, EL G, etc.

.

Those are the N African dopers, you forgot the Spanish dopers. It is a fine protocol for those tanked up on roids,reinfusions, EPO and HGH.

You need to add a bit more detail to give this context . 6x1k@5k pace or 3kpace?

the 1600 cutdown; what pace what rest.

sprints?

There are 1000 ways to overtrain, and every one of them is usually successful.

enthusiasm4it wrote:

Most places cite the 800 as about 65/35 AEROBIC/ANAEROBIC and the mile about 70/30, but 800/1500m races (and workouts) tend to cause a very high lactic acid buildup due to length of time versus clearance rate.

I find it hard to believe that the 800 is 65% aerobic, and the 1500/mile is 70% aerobic - only 5% more.

With the 800 it depends on the person and the speed they're running. A sit-kick 800 is more anaerobic than aerobic, for example. Are you talking about all out 800s at max?

I still think that once you get under 2 minutes for an 800, the anaerobic element heads over 50%.

According to "Energy System Interaction and Relative Contribution During Maximal Exercise" by Dr Paul B. Gastin, maximal exercise bouts of 120 seconds are 63% aerobic and 37% anaerobic, 4 minute bouts are 79% aerobic, those while 75 second bouts are about the 50/50 crossover point where both systems contribute equally.

So yeah, the difference would be greater than I had initially stated, but that would still make the 800 race primarily aerobic.

Nothing very novel here. Once a has achieved a certain level of fitness that athlete mos certainly DOES NOT NEED to follow every hard day's training with a day or two of easy work. As Ron clarke has said on numerous occasions , the fitter you are the faster you run and the faster you recover from hard efforts. This applies to training as well as racing.

Coe , Ovett and Cram all followed programmes that differed from each others in certain ways ; but each developed a programme that worked for them and allowed them to , more or less, fully realise their potential. This , surely ,is the aim of any training regime?

On the issue of hard sessions on a daily basis ; look up the schedules of Brit greats from the 1950s such as Ibbotson and Pirie. You will find hard interval sessions (at varying distances and paces) on a daily basis. Yet today it is impossible to open a book or magazine without "rest" "recovery" and "easy days" being emphasised over and over again. Is this why European men appear to have forgotten how to run at world class level? Obviously there are one or two exceptions to this (literally one or two)but if you watch the mid/long distance events in this years Euro Champs you'll get the general idea!!

No joke, the training in pirie's book makes Horwill look like t ball.

But back on energy systems, if alactic sprints don't have byproducts, and your body can rapidly refuel phosphate stores, why could days of easy aerobic running, which also doesn't leave behind lactic acid or dependent as much on glycogen stores, not have a handful of very short sprints or low rep weighted plyos thrown in?

enthusiasm4it wrote:

No joke, the training in pirie's book makes Horwill look like t ball.

But back on energy systems, if alactic sprints don't have byproducts, and your body can rapidly refuel phosphate stores, why could days of easy aerobic running, which also doesn't leave behind lactic acid or dependent as much on glycogen stores, not have a handful of very short sprints or low rep weighted plyos thrown in?

They should, but probably not the day after a hard session. This is why I always prefer H-E-*E if possible.

The *E day you can add some plyo's &/or Hill Sprints, get a benefit, PLUS they make the next day's hard session more potent since you've tinkered with muscle tension and you "Feel" ready to hit another hard session.

enthusiasm4it wrote:

According to "Energy System Interaction and Relative Contribution During Maximal Exercise" by Dr Paul B. Gastin, maximal exercise bouts of 120 seconds are 63% aerobic and 37% anaerobic, 4 minute bouts are 79% aerobic, those while 75 second bouts are about the 50/50 crossover point where both systems contribute equally.

So yeah, the difference would be greater than I had initially stated, but that would still make the 800 race primarily aerobic.

Agreed the difference between how aerobic an 800 and a mile/1500 are is a lot more than 5%.

I've seen bits of some of those studies. However, I struggle to believe an 800 at under 2 mins is 63% aerobic. I ran a 1.59 on ZERO aerobic training aged 19 I think. I was doing sprints and jumps, and had decent natural stamina.

As I said, it also depends on the race. You don't sprint an 800 all out. Some are more tactical and then anaerobic and even alactic ability come to the fore. An 800 PR will be more aerobic than a tactical 800, but again, I struggle to see how for someone at 1.42 level it is anywhere near 63% aerobic.

Serious question: could it just be that back in the day they did high volume and high intensity, didn't fret over the risks, and those who survived became stars? It seems like salazar's guys are turning it around upping the tempo, and the Kenyans and Ethiopians sure don't seem to be scared to go hard and long day in and day out. Someone mentioned pirie, and if his logs are even half true, he was an animal who did it all nonstop: lifting, sprinting, threshold stuff, very long distance, intervals, just lots of hard work.

Looking back to when I played basketball in hs, we sprinted ran distance, did drills, lifted weights, etc. 6 days a week, on top of several hours of pure basketball practice, which is like a fartlek itself. On top of structured practice, we played and practiced fairly hard on our own year round as well, sometimes immediately following team sessions. That was at a small hs mind you. I would venture to say it is even more so in lacrosse, soccer, etc., especially beyond hs.

Could the key really just be the mindset to keep it in the red zone, just being lucky enough for the engine to fail?

HRE wrote:

There was a time when you didn't really plan easy or rest days unless you ran for Bowerman. You ran hard when you could, had the sense to mix up what you were doing, and rested when you needed to. Don't think that everyone did what their schedule calls for every day and every week.

HRE

You are the man of contradictions. You contradict yourself every new post.

In a early thread "Nothing new in the training after 1980" (not literally the title, but the issue of the thread is this one of the change of don´t of the didtance training methodology after the 80s until today.

On that thread you bring your idea that thers´s nothing new or relevant about training change, everything is done each period of the training history.

Actual in this post about how the 80s they train in the 80s, you said:

"There was a time when you didn't really plan easy or rest days unless you ran for Bowerman. You ran hard when you could, had the sense to mix up what you were doing, and rested when you needed to. Don't think that everyone did what their schedule calls for every day and every week".

Then the training how most people saw it in the past ansd how most people do actually didn´t change ???????

Another point. You are fantastic. You don´t lost every opportunity to mention about Lydiard - inopportunely most of the times i guess and with nothing accurately or relevant or documented.

Now about this question i guess that you lost a rich opportunity to refer Lydiard training.Why ? Because Lydiard precisely was one of the first world known coaches that during the late 50s-early 60s did contest the idea that we need to train hard and fast, maximum pace on a everyday basis. I also guess that Lydiard formulated his training that way, with an strong aerobic season base done with aerobic almost exclusively due to the crazy and inefficient training he watch oyther people do, namely the era of fast intervals in daily frequency least 3-4-5 times with no aerobic runs as support.

This was the point that Lydiardf was a revolutionary coach at that past times.

He had the courage and the vision to change the training and replace the mainstream interval training of that period by his own training method without follow no one else. That is precisely what some past and actual Lydiardist are not able to do, to move from Lydiard training to something better than Lydiard.

Well, I have no idea what you're talking about but I'm pretty sure I didn't mention Lydiard in my post here so I don't know why you're doing it. I know John Davies once wrote a schedule in a magazine with no rest days included but said "If you need a rest day take one" and that was something he pretty much got from Arthur. I don't know if that has anything to do with what you're on about.

So what is your viewpoint on my original question of training hard almost daily with different paces/energy systems? I know you are big, IIRC, on LT runs once or twice a week, and incorporating hill work. What are your thoughts on the "Five Tier" style of training Coach Cabral?