T or F: Convincing an athlete that their training is the best is more important than the training actually being the best

Who is Tyler Mueller? What have "Tinman's" athletes achieved? Belief and training yield results, proof is in the pudding.

SUPERIOR COACH JS wrote:

HRE wrote:

I too immediately thought of Brannen and Willis when Webb's struggles at Michigan came up. Thinking further along those lines, if people today saw what Timmons had Jim Ryun doing but did not know that the training was from Timmons to Ryun what the reaction would be. I think a lot of people would consider it bad training.

Yes an interesting point there HRE. Probably a lot of people would think it was very "odd" training and not a program

up to a classy coach.

Just curious HRE.....Do you think it`s possible to create a training system that suits all levels of runners

and also when it comes to mental and physiological aspects?

You know, we really should meet somewhere midway, maybe Iceland, have a few drinks and answer all the running questions that have ever come up and then create some new ones. That's a great question but before I come up with an answer I need to ask if you mean a system which follows the same principles but adapts to the level and needs of individual runners or a system where everyone does the same things? And even there we have to deal with what we mean by "same." If two guys with ten mile best times of 50 and 55 minutes respectively do a ten mile run together in an hour, did they both do the same run? After all, one is likely working much harder. Would they be doing the same run if each ran ten minutes slower than his best, 60 and 65 minutes in this example?

HRE wrote:

if people today saw what Timmons had Jim Ryun doing but did not know that the training was from Timmons to Ryun what the reaction would be. I think a lot of people would consider it bad training.

What exactly does this mean?

Grasping at straws, throwing iconic names against the wall.

Maybe for a young person this is trie. WIth experience this is a non-factor. Unless you are a non-thinking sheep, after a few cycles you know yourself, and you would know whether your training is good or not, because you have been through it. At that point you can't get any placebo effect off of giving your coach, or you book, or whatever you got your plan from, the benefit of the doubt.

Translation to English language wrote:

HRE wrote:

if people today saw what Timmons had Jim Ryun doing but did not know that the training was from Timmons to Ryun what the reaction would be. I think a lot of people would consider it bad training.

What exactly does this mean?

He is saying that Jim Ryun coach experience was from swimming. So he just took swimming training and converted it to track. Jack Daniels talks about this on a seminar you can find on YouTube. On Jim Ryun's training by most standards was crazy i.e. 50 x 400m or 20 x 800m, high volume 100+ miles a week and a crazy amount of intervals 5 days of the week.

I would like that. Should be a very interesting discus about training and life. Have only been in the flight terminal at Reykjavik when I fly to Boston 2000 and the marathon.

I mean a training system which follows the same basic principles, but adapts to the level and needs of individual runners. In your example with the two guys 50 and 55 min best at ten mile they can only run ten mile in an hour together if they have different purpose with the run in such a system. Also the basic system would suit all race distances from 800m up to Ultra marathon with just some different adds and change of mileage. Not an easy task to come up with that kind of system if possible, but I think I have found it.

Exactly. Thanks.

HRE wrote:

Exactly. Thanks.

Your welcome, anytime.

I think having the best training is most important. Convincing the athlete is probably not among the ten most important things. It comes after things like nutrition, altitude, aqua treadmills, and cryoboots. It might be more important than massage.

If you ever come back to Boston we'll have to get together.

I think that all training needs to develop endurance and aerobic capacity and then include some race specific work in some form or another. So really, all successful systems should do that. It becomes a question of putting it into a form that an individual runner can see him/herself doing successfully. Igloi's guys, for example, did almost nothing but rep work but it was big volume and many of the reps were at fairly low intensity. I always thought that if I coached a runner who wanted to do almost nothing but rep work on the track I would still be able to apply Lydiard's principles but not in a way that would seem very Lydiard-like. I used to get into big arguments here when I'd look at various things successful people did and see Lydiard's principles applied because the principles weren't exactly Arthur's. .I liked what Troop said because I had come to think that most successful training is variation on the same theme.

I`ll hope I will come back to Boston some day. Maybe as a Master marathoner in the age 60 group. Depends on if my knees can take the training needed.

I`m with you there in your thoughts that most successful training is variation on the same theme. And exactly, I also thought of "a perfect system" that still applied Lydiard`s principles. And not only Lydiard`s principles , also the principles of Gerschler, Igloi, Stampfl, Horwill, Pereira,Canova, Daniels,Cerutty ,Salazar, Bowerman and many,many more great coaches in history.

And when we come to think about what this thread initially was about, the questioning if "Convincing an athlete that the training is the best is more important than the training actually being the best" , the answer out from our content have to be : It`s a kind of paradox that is impossible to perform by a coach because there are so many training systems in history that was very successful.

Sand Dunes, everything that you said was totally wrong. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Way off base wrote:

Sand Dunes, everything that you said was totally wrong. You have no idea what you're talking about.

And why do you say that?

Not sure what you mean? wrote:

Way off base wrote:

Sand Dunes, everything that you said was totally wrong. You have no idea what you're talking about.

And why do you say that?

Here is that Jack Daniel video he was talking about.

I'm thinking of Anne Audain whose ear;y success came when Gordon Pirie coached her. Pirie pretty much had athletes he coached doing things similar to what he'd done. And he had some successes doing that. But ultimately Audain struggled, switched to John Davies and became arguably the best woman road runner of her time. If we conclude that Pirie's coaching was bad, how do we explain the success he had as a runner and to some extent as a coach?

I would argue that having sound training was only part of the issue. She was put off by Pirie and felt like her career was unravelling. Davies was a very different sort of person and coach, a kind that she believed in and respected and that was probably more important than the nuts and bolts of the kinds of running she did.

Similarly, Neville Scott didn't seem to mesh well with Lydiard. But he did much better with Arch Jelley whose methods were not very different from Arthur's. But I've been told that temperamentally Jelley and Lydiard were different. Maybe that difference was why things worked better for Scott, though maybe the drinking problem was not the issue when Scott was with Jelley than with Lydiard.

I think that we get so focused on training methodology here that we don't look at other things that affect performance. Feeling comfort and confidence with your coach is very important but because we can't quantify it we don't look at it very much.

My opinion: one should never convince an athlete that their training is the best. That's a lie. It can always get better. That's part of the allure of the sport, always getting better even as we age. As a coach what you want to instill in an athlete is that they are doing the best they know how to, but in the future they will do even better. In that sense you could argue for or against their training being the best and be right on both accounts.

You want to teach humility to an athlete. That is where the greatest chances for success lie. Telling them their training is the absolute best is an outright lie at least in the sense that nobody could possibly know that without having parallel worlds to check it against. It's a mental crutch at best in the short term, but it doesn't build a strong individual to have them think like that.

The absolute best training is not needed to win. It's important, but there is more to it.

An interesting angle of incidence HRE. Had been very interesting to hear Anne Audain`s own words about why it at the end didn`t click with Pirie`s coaching and got so much better with Davies. As you know Pirie had himself received coaching from E.J Holt, Franz Stampfl, Geoff Dyson, Bill Thomas and primarily by Woldemar Gerschler. I just remember that I read somewhere that Pirie wasn`t so easy personality to cope with ( correct me if I`m wrong). So you have definitely one point there I think. The examples you mention , and many more, points to that not only the methodology is of importance for very good results.

But maybe to make matters even more complicated I mention my own online coaching during now three years. I have never met any of the runners I have been coaching in real life ( now just one exception) but nevertheless all of them improved. But of course personality also shines through in what a person communicate by written words.

Webb ran all of his PRs under Raczko, including his 27:34 10,000.

But that was in 2006, an otherwise down year for Webb. His season fell off and he did not run well in the 1500 that year.

His one good 5000 (13:10) happened in 2005. His second best time was 13:37 at the end of his career.

Look at his 1500m progerssion

2001 - 3:38 - high school coached by Raczko

2002 - 3:41 - struggled at Michigan coached by Warhurst

2003 - 3:47 - struggled with the move back home and with Raczko

2004 - 3:32 - things clicked again with Raczko

2005 - 3:32 - another good year with Raczko

2006 - 3:46 - he ran that great 10,000 and then got hurt

2007 - 3:30 - his best year

2008 - 3:35 - I think he over trained that year

2009 - 3:42 - losing confidence

2010 - 3:36 - Ok but that was the end for him and Raczko

2011 - 3:37 - early season time with Salazar but he didn't stay with him

2012 - 3:37 - don't remember who coached him then

2013 - 3:42 - party is over