nina:
I'd be the first to agree with you! How about "Reading Between the Lines of Lydiard"? Lorraine (Moller) and I have been working on that.
Nobby
nina:
I'd be the first to agree with you! How about "Reading Between the Lines of Lydiard"? Lorraine (Moller) and I have been working on that.
Nobby
One other thing; as most everybody would agree, coaching is still an art form. If you just write a book with simplified formula or read a book and "get it" easily, there will be world record holders popping out everywhere. It is the responsibility of the coach, media and the future Lydiard Foundation to get the message across correctly; but it is also the athlete's responsibility to apply common sense and adopt the system to your own individual level and needs.
Nobby,
i didn't know about that book of Lorraine (Moller). thank you for mentioning it. when you finnish yours, let us know about.
good luck and thanks for all the info you guys are sharring
I personally use both Lydiard AND Daniels. I use the basic overall Lydiard philosophy but I use the Daniels VDOT table to evaluate how my athletes are progressing and to help determine approx. target times for certain runs since these are high schoolers I'm working with and they aren't always the best at running 'by feel.'
More than anything, Daniels 'formulas' give a better benchmark or indicator for a coach or athlete to look at than simply going by feel, BUT I don't believe his charts/tables are totally set in stone either. There are a lot of factors that go into athletes performances.
nina:
We (Lorraine and myself) are both working on it--way too premature actually to mention. Her autobiography should be coming out soon though. It's long, but great!
Ron Daws wrote "Running Your Best" several years ago. I have a copy of that as well. In the book, he mentioned that he struggled with Lydiard's schedules. He even wrote Lydiard without getting a response. He kept reading until he thought that he had the right idea.
It's a good book if you can find it anywhere.
hello nobby,
"Reading Between the Lines of Lydiard"? Lorraine (Moller)
can't find this in amazon nor in google search. can you provide a link? thanks
DougM:
Ron Daws' two books, "Self-made Olympian" and "Running Your Best" which you mentioned are two of the best books ever written on running and the Lydiard program. Perhaps explains the Lydiard program better than Lydiard's books.
dnf:
I knew I was getting ahead of myself; we have just started working on it. We have been working on the idea of the Lydiard Foundation USA for a couple of years. The tour was a part of our programs. We will be trying to explain how and why the Lydiard program works in an easy-to-understand manner. I think my PPT presentation helped for the tour; but we are planning on much much more. We will be starting to post more at
which is the official website of Five Circles, my own non-profit organization that hosted and organized the Lydiard tour in 1999 and 2004. We are taking up this project as a part of our program at the moment. More to come, I promise you, so stay tuned.
Nobby
ok. will wait for that to come out. thanks nobby
Here is the thing ... I think that coaches like to think that "coaching is an art form" because then they can take some ownership in the athletes performance. I don't need that ego trip. But I will say this. Coaching the mind is an art form ... the dedication portion, the toughness portion (this is tough, the upbringing has so much to do with it, and is difficult to crack), the understanding of tactics portion. But human physiology fits in a very small bell curve, and that bell curve narrows with each additional study which validates theory. The mind is tough to understand, the body less so. I think that some coaches love Lydiard because it keeps control in the coaches hands. I love Daniels b/c I don't need control over the workouts. Let the system coach the body, let the coach work on the head.
nina wrote:
i think that's the problem with Lydiard, unless you trained under him or spoke to him directly about his theories, his books are "difficult" to understand or not very clear. i hope his disciples can write something that will supplement his books.
A lot of us who knew Arthur would agree and we are trying to clarify his ideas. Nobby spends tons of time doing so and I also am looking forward to what he comes up with.
Thank you all so much for your messages, I was hoping you would all like the topic. And I am excited to here about that news nobby, let us know more as you get closer.
-Snookie
I would ditto this. I only got into this because I felt there was heaps of misinterpretation. The experts on here like Nobby in particular and HRE and Glen McCarthy have helped heaps.
What I like about this thread is the "Crazies" stayed away.
Keep the communication going. It all helps.
Perhaps off topic a bit, but a question for NOBBY, HRE and KIM STEVENSON nevertheless:
When I went to one of Arthur's lectures last year, we saw a video showing, I believe, the three different types of hill springing & bounding that Lydiard had his athletes do. Knowing that sometimes his writing could be confusing to the reader, could you guys give insight into exactly what the spring and bounding is. I've read "Running to the Top" and "Running with Lydiard" (both the most recent editions) and have seen several good sites devoted to Lydiard's philosophy, but I think the video I saw at his lecture was the best in showing exactly how to do his hill phase. Wish I had a copy of it, but again, if you guys could help us out and give your insight into exactly how to run the hills, we'd appreciate it.
Thanks!!!
I'm with hyena in that he hill phase of Lydiard is in my opinion the most diffcult to interpret because it is so "unique". I read how it has you doing hill springs 3 days a week for about a month in between your base period and the track workouts. What I have done to incorporate this- and I know it's not the same or really even close- is that 1-2 times a week my athletes do hill strides of about 150 meters on a grass hill with bounding the last 30 meters. They will usually do this at the end of a distance run during their base phase.
It looks like I'm the first who'll have a go at this. I'll say right away that I'm not good at this sort of description.
I'll start with bounding. Imagine that you're a kid skipping happily along the sidewalk. Imagine what your push off leg is doing as you skip. That's what your push off leg does during bounding. As the push off leg pushes off, it comes forward and has much more knee lift than it would if you were skipping giving you a running stride with an exaggerated knee lift.
Springing is done with the knee locked and ALL forward motion coming as the result of drive from the ankle. You lean slightly into the hill and will be moving at a pretty slow pace.
If I've mangled this too badly, Nobby or Kim can pick up after me.
On the contrary, pretty good description. Thanks.
How about the distance of springing/bounding? Total for the workout and for one repeat? Thanks for informing us.
Jack Daniels system is far more more science based than any Lydiard schedule out of one of Lydiards books. I am sure that actually being coached by Lydiard himself was a different situation than following one of the plans in his books. I would think most people if they had to do the program presented in one of Daniels' books would do better than one pulled from a Lydiard book. Lydiard might have been the best coach ever because he individualized his philosophy for different athletes. But Daniels approach for the average person getting something out of a book is far superior.
Daniels is a trained scientist and more trustworthy than Lydiard when it comes to fine-grained physiological explanation. But this isn't as important as one might think.
Consider "tempo" runs. Daniels defines these with with apparent precision, both in terms of intensity (current 1hr race pace) and workout time (20min). Lydiard's picture of high-end aerobic work is more fluid and intuitive for intensity and duration. Lydiard's picture, I would argue, is more realistic.
The most important difference between Daniels and Lydiard, I think, is in the sense of PROPORTION. Daniels's ideal progression breaks into four six-week blocks, the first of which is base. With Lydiard - obviously but importantly - the base lasts far longer.
i know that in Fred Wilt's "How They Train: Long Distances," Jeff Julian describes doing hill springing on a 660 yard hill. I think Arthur may have written somewhere in his earlier years about finding an 800 meter long hill. I think that's the length of hill Ron Daws used.
It's quite flat where I live. The best I can find for a hill is about 450 yards. The one Nobby and his wife ran on in the video shown at Arthur's talks wasn't terribly long. Arthur used to talk more about the time spent on the hills rather than the actual length of the hill. E.g., he'd tell me to run on the hill for 30 to 45 minutes. So on a shorter hill, you'd do more repeats than on a longer one.