Question about Bowerman's Oregon training

There was a period in running where some people were trying to take what was actually working and then try to overlay that on whatever current exercise physiology was out there.

This is what happened with the Oregon System. If you go looking for specific elements (like Freeman did) you may find some, but that really misses the overarching orientation of the approach. And truthfully this ends up being a disservice, dumbing down both the science and the training system.

Bowerman had wisely borrowed much from Igloi (which was wise) but then later fallen into the Lydiard trap. Nothing that Lydiard thought he knew though could improve on what Bowerman was doing.

VO2max training is now outdated terminology and often overly simplified as is the anaerobic/aerobic terminology.

In truth, there is no steady state training either; things are far more complex.

The real brilliance of Bowerman is recognizing the importance of individualizing training, which these formula books tend to downplay.

Bowerman also knew that less could be more.Too much work without sufficient rest, is training to fail whatever the mileage totals.

I could go on but I encourage you if you are interested to get to basic principles of the Oregon System. For that, you want an earlier book on the topic.

dsrunner wrote:

I could go on but I encourage you if you are interested to get to basic principles of the Oregon System. For that, you want an earlier book on the topic.

Any suggestions?

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Also, for anyone with the knowledge was the anaerobic work described actually done during buildup as part of the base?

It's not anaerobic is it? 12-15 minute of running?

Anaerobic = sprinting.

Bowerman was done coaching long before all this physiological terminology came along. He may have tried using it retroactively but you'd do better if you can find samples of what his guys actually did.

The two pillars of his system were the hard/easy day thing and the date pace/goal pace thing. I'll assume you understand the former. The latter involved a time trial at the start of the school year followed by setting a desired time for your racing distance by year's end.

Reps were done either at the pace of your time trial result (date pace) or at the pace of your ultimately desired result (goal pace.) Ideally as the year progressed the two would merge

That is also a reason I hope that someone with knowledge of the system would shed some light on this. What I posted is a direct quote from the book. I took it to mean actual anaerobic work. I'm mainly interested as to whether that type of work was done in the buildup period and preseason base period.

Jon Orange wrote:

It's not anaerobic is it? 12-15 minute of running?

Anaerobic = sprinting.

bump

any old Oregon runners or someone with knowledge of the system care to comment?

It's hard to overstate how influential Bowerman and Dellinger were in the 70s. Most high school coaches used their date pace / goal pace terminology.

Anaerobic base conditioning wrote:

bump

any old Oregon runners or someone with knowledge of the system care to comment?

Know one guy who ran for Bowerman back in the 60s. He hasn't elaborated to me on workouts they would do, but said that days they didn't do workouts they just ran an easy 4-6 miles in the morning and called it good.