runnah wrote:
Spenato Cantdova wrote:Why ignoring "this idiot" that produce great coaching? Have you ever heard about a coach that is able to improve every runner that goes inside the system? And maybe he coach one of the worlds now biggest talents.I follow his coaching at Facebook and must say I am impressed. To me he looks very clever and I think he will be a big coaching name in some years.
He does say some interesting things, I am not sure that his "system" would work for every single runner but I imagine that he makes adjustments for each individual runner he coaches. I can't comment that every runner he coaches improves because I don't know who he coaches exactly. He does come accross as a good motivator making you believe in you can improve which is a big part of coaching - Lydiard had that ability.
That being said there are a lot of VERY bad coaches out there - generally they have "sucess" with a beginning runner or a runner who is coming back to the sport after a long lay off for several years and this makes the coach believe in their own nonsense and they delude themselves into thinking they are some sort coaching guru. However, whenever they try to coach a more experienced runner at a higher level they will invariably fail and this will make them come up with endless excuses when challenged such as the runner was badly trained before they met them and already finished, the runner ran PRs on short courses or tracks before meeting them etc etc but never will they admit that they just don't know anything about training serious distance runners and they never improve upon their poor coaching ability. Its almost like they have some kind of mental disorder.
From what I see I don't think coach JS has any of these hallmarks - he does seem aware that you have to be consistent and that you cannot do very tough workouts (for your level of fitness/ability) week after week to do this. I am not sure how he concludes what the best individual paces or heart rates are for an indivudual athlete. My concern would be whether or not it would be better to go by "feel" like Lydiard rather than being a slave to a particular pace each day as weather conditions, or the athlete's individual condition will surely have some variability over several months.
I think you runnah have a good analytic point here. Just follow the js coaching and one will see that there is a variation in the weekly paces and amount of reps and so on for the runners. Just think it would have been interesting to see what could have been with js coaching Kenenisa Bekele. I am sure it hadn`t been worse than its now.