So interesting about Kuts, I always wondered how the russians trained with Bolotnikov 28.18 and Kuts 13.35, I know volum was reported to be around 5000km for Kuts but I know nothing about how the speed or volume or peridasation was done. Can someone help me with information. I do know he learned from Emil but I belive he did also different. Interesting to someone with such bodybuilt do 13.35 on dirt, worth 13.20 on tartan or mondo.
What a fantastic runner he was so aggresive always fighthing to max and he himself was person incharge in the races, But also a wey sad story after Melbourne her is a story fond on
http://www.toucantrackclub.net/current.html
wery sad, and please add information on this fantastic runner from Russia.
The first great Soviet runner was Vladimir Kuts who, in 1954, set his first world record in the 5,000 meters while defeating the legendary Czech Olympic champion Emil Zatopek. A Russian peasant serving in the Navy, Kuts did not set foot on a track until he was twenty-three. Until then, the sport he participated in was boxing, and he well might have remained in the ring if his unit had not been transferred to Lenin-
grad. There he met the track coack Grigorii Nikiforov who recruited him as a distance runner. Lean and slightly stooped, Kuts was not an impressive-looking figure on the track, but he possessed enormous dedication and strength. Every bit as aggressive as he was as a pugilist, he usually started out quickly in races, hoping to capture the lead right away and hold onto it until he crossed the finish line.
Kuts' early success as a runner was based on the German interval training program which alternated effort with recovery. Under this system a person runs a hard interval, follows it with an easy one, then repeats the hard interval. This system not only improves speed but also endurance. Enthusiastically his coach initiated Kuts into interval training, encouraging him to run intervals far longer than anyone else had attempted at that time. Convinced his world 5,000-meters record was proof of the merits of interval training, Kuts pushed himself even harder until he was running over twenty miles a day. Despite all his work, he subsequently lost two critical races to English runners, both of whom stayed back then outkicked him at the finish. Those defeats deeply troubled his coach who decided the fast, consistent pace that enabled Kuts to set the world record would not be successful enough in Melbourne.
Four months before the Games were to begin, Nikiforov devised a new training program for his star runner which was the so-called "variational" system. The proponents of the interval system beldieve that the more distance one covers during a workout the greater the chances are of doing well in a race. Nikiforov, however, realized one who wants to run fast much practice running fast. So, while Kuts continued to accrue the same prodigious distances each day in practice, now they were run over shorter and more varied segments. Sometimes he even ran in com-
bat boots with a sandbag slung over his shoulders. The influence of his coach was not confined to the track. Nikiforov believed that an athlete could be capable of enduring the most rigorous demands if his whole environment is scrupulously and scientifically controlled. He told him what to read, how long to sleep, what to eat. He was particularly fastidious about Kuts' diet, going so far as to strain impurities from every grain in the bowl of oatmeal he prepared for him every morning.
Alarmingly, two weeks before the start of the Olympics, Kuts began to display some disturbing physiological symptoms that his coach attributed to anxiety and overtraining. The pulse rate of the average per-
son is 70 to 80 beats per minute, but long distance runners often have a much slower rate. Generally, Kuts' pulse was measured at 45 beats at rest and 120 racing. Just prior to the Games, however, his resting pulse had accelerated to 120 beats. His blood pressure also had risen signif-
icantly, and heart murmurs were discovered. Kuts was not a large man, at five feet seven inches, 159 pounds, but his heart was huge. The volume of the heart in the average person is 750 to 780 cubic centimeters. Kuts' was 1.026, and by the time of the Olympics, it had grown another 45 cubic centimeters.
Kuts left for the Games aboard an ocean liner that took sixteen days to reach Melbourne. Receiving a needed respite from all his training, he not only enjoyed rich foods during the long passage but also some cognac, so that by the time he arrived his health seemed restored. With vigor he resumed his training and satisfied the scrutiny of his physicians, who declared his heart normal except for its size and pronounced him fit to compete in the Olympic Games. Kuts was relieved and excited, determined more than even to show that he was the finest distance runner in the world.
His first race was the 10,000 meters in which he was one of the favorites. As usual, he burst into the lead, but instead of maintaining an even pace as he had done in the past, he employed the cat-and-mouse tactics he had practiced diligently in training. Just as his coach had planned, he ran in spurts, slowing down for several meters then charging ahead again, which rattled the nerves of his main rival, Gordon Pirie, one of only two runners to defeat Kuts in competition. Periodically, during the long race, he urged Pirie to pass him but the Englishman always declined until the twentieth lap when Kuts came to a complete stop and forced Pirie to take the lead, which he let him have for 100 meters then rushed past him for good and set a new Olympic record and became the first Russian to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field. Five days later, against even stronger competition in the 5,000 meters, he won his second gold medal and set another Olympic record. This time he did not run in spurts but set a withering pace that overwhelmed his opponents. "If Kuts has to kill himself in order to kill off his competition," an observer of the race remarked afterward, "he has enough suicidal dedication to run himself to death."
Shortly after receiving his second gold medal, Kuts was given a medical examination, which he passed without any public expression of concern. In fact, as he admitted years later, the Soviet physician who conducted the check-up was shocked by the condition of the new Olympic distance champion. His lips were blue, his face ashen, and he had the rapid pulse of someone still running. Consequently, he was advised to rest and take some time off and did, but when he resumed training after a couple of months, he bore no resemblance to the double gold medal winner. All of his teammates routinely beat him in practice, whatever the distance, and they were absolutely dumbfounded---as were Kuts and his coach. He recovered enough to run one more great 5,000 meters race in Rome, setting a record that would last for eight years, but after the race he was carried off the track on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. And at the age of twenty-nine he was told he could never run again.
Retired, he moved in and out of hospitals, constantly in need of treatment for his ailing heart. No longer able to run, he gained a considerable amount of weight, swelling to 230 pounds. Occasionally he would attend an important track meet in the country, but if other spectators recognized him he would turn and walk away, sweating profusely, as if too embarrassed by his appearance. The authorites were embarrassed as well and prohibited Soviet photographers from publishing pictures of the once indomitable runner. To the shock of the nation, if not its leaders, he died in his sleep from his fourth heart attack at the age of forty-eight.
If the intensified training program that his coach devised for him did not kill Kuts, it certainly contributed to his general decline. Already quite large, his heart grew even larger during his running career, and after his retirement, it continued to pump large amounts of blood into his now idle arms and legs, which created further physiological problems. The sole purpose of ;the disastrous training program imposed on Kuts was to make him good enough to bring home some medals from Melbourne. Indeed, just as workers in the Soviet Union routinely signed "socialist pledges" to produce more steel or coal or cement, Kuts and his coach pledged to win medals for the nation at the Melbourne Games. Anything, in fact, was deemed acceptable so long as it accomplished this objective, even if it led to the early decline and death of a gifted young athlete. "Nikiforov seemed like an executioner," Kuts acknowledged later, "determined to break me down, body and soul ... to make a warrior of me, capable of enduring any stresses of sports combat..." The Soviet Union was a land of executioners, dutifully carrying out the demands of its creator. The brutal creed of Lenin permeated every aspect of the country: one has to beat heads he maintained, beat them mercilessly, for the new Soviet man to survive and prosper.