Ah, every thread gets someone feeling angry and cranky every now and then. The poor chap must be feeling great pain; Socrates said (paraphrase): the only way to truly punish a man is to make him a worse man. Not much more work to do here.
Mike Sokowlski: I've enjoyed your blog. Good luck. It seems your target is R-n-R Arizona?
Perspective from the slowpokes: I am a mid-40s recreational marathoner (often 60-70mpw if healthy), and slow by any proper elite standards. But what I've enjoyed about Lydiard systems includes:
1. It lets one run to effort, which is valuable, because I can always run an hour but I can't always run fast (work, family, life, age, all the usual excuses).
2. It's simple enough I can do it, mainly as it lets you focus on one thing at a time.
3. I agree with an post a couple back: doing a hard (effort) 5k-10k in training is almost certainly akin to anyone else's tempo runs (I won't speak for Daniels/jtupper, but I suspect he'd agree). And I can do those on my treadmill if I need to ( . . . treadmills are great for that).
4. The hill phase really does seem to be a valuable piece for a lot of us -- very few of us would stress it except for the Lydiard system encouraging it. (By the way Nobby -- are you done with the final Hill video yet?)
5. It works. I won't try to say that Arthur's schedules are superior to any other approach for every other runner for all time, but it works better than most other things I can do and better than any other approach I've found that I can work into my life (that work/family/life business again -- schedules that work for professional athletes with 10hrs a day to train, coaches, masseuses, and personal chefs don't have a lot of meaning for me).
BTW, jtupper -- I hope the general affection for Arthur doesn't distract you; I've enjoyed your book and find it very useful, and your ability to put numbers to things has been very helpful.