Thats great , mainly for the passion and love for running , at a competitive level for so many years!!! Thats a great record
About his approach of easy running training, well thats also what the late John Hadd was saying as the base phase is the most important
phase of training and (especially for fast twitch runners ) you can perform well just out of that base phase .
But I also think that this guy started from 14'55" 5000 and 2:24 Marathon. So the talent is there.
Sure if he did a training program like Canova's or Daniels so with interval, Lactic threshold , marathon pace probably
had some marathon with faster time . Maybe for example instead of 2:40 , he could had run 2:36.
But sure the stress on the body to gain those 4 minutes thanks to the hard training was not worth while for him.
He already had his personal best in the past so I m sure he didnt care to go into a hard training program just to gain a few minutes
And sure the hard training to gain few minutes on the final time of marathon wouldn't allow him to have such a long
running career .