Agree wrote:
It would be much better to begin a new thread and discuss these issues, rather than posting training logs, etc.
Nothing wrong with posting training logs.
Agree wrote:
It would be much better to begin a new thread and discuss these issues, rather than posting training logs, etc.
Nothing wrong with posting training logs.
OK, look - Yes, I have posted a lot my own running, but always as a lead in to a question that is related to the topic at hand. Not because I am cheerleading or because I want the world to know what a superb runner I obviously am.
Man, over the last 2-3 pages I've had a lot of questions on topic that remain unanswered. This thread is so good that we overtake ourselves constantly. Hahahaha.
An unanswered question: Did Daniels invent the 4 multipacing zones that so many others talk about?
Soooper thread; Jtupper has not been scene for a while. I do not think he will take credit for coming up with the zone specifics although I would like to know when and where that all began. I am of the opinion that 6by800 and longer repeats as such were not a part of Lydiardeal and perhaps that is one heoooge diff between these men. If so many of us believe that mile rerererepeats is a ginourmous thing then surely Lydiard has been overuled in that specific area. Possibly.
Hey Nobby or others
Why is it that AL said that you could not continuously train well and race well? Craig Mottram - and David Moorcroft - as well as others seem to do well with it.
Why are they able to race well even though they train hard just before a competition?
Moorcroft's training:
http://www.britishmilersclub.com/bmcnews/1999spring.pdf
page 6-12
Is the feedback from races during the basework, sometimes better than just doing more mileage?
Ernst van Aachen had people doing a 4 or 5 pace sort of thing in the 50s. It's really hard to come up with anything new in the business of training distance runners. Even most of us who are Lydiard fans will generally agree that he took things that were already around and organized them into his own system.
As to the mile repeat thing and Lydiard, if you look at his race week/non-race week schedule, you'll see that he has sessions od 800s and miles. I don't think he used that sort of repeat very much in his original schedules as he was, I think, more inclined to use fast, steady, runs to do the sorts of work that others use longer repeats for.
I know that I had a discussion about that with Barry Magee and he said that they were more likely to do something like a fast 30 minute run than a session of longer intervals.
As to the length of the thread, it has disappeared several times and people like Nobby, Kim, and I have thought it was dead. Then someone brings it back and it goes on a bit longer. If it's creating a problem for the site, I imagine someone will lock it or remove some pages as happened once before.
I think you'll find that Mottram hides away for months at a time doing his endurance work. Some will argue (tinman?) that Moorcroft did not race well at some championships due to not being able to peak at the right time due to general flatlining of his training throughout a whole year. Training hard before competition must surely be a part of the complex pyramid of reducing volume and increasing intensity as one climbs to the top. Coe did speedy things all the year but it took on so many Baskin Robins flavours appropriate to the month, unlike Vanilla Moorcroft.
as to the original question- i like the daniels approach for coaching of high schoolers, but personally, i'd rather have the opportunity to work with coach lydiard. i really like the effort approach as opposed to training paces.
the lydiard approach - oultined here by so many knowledgeable people - suits my personality and psyche better. i have used the running formula guide with some modest success and pleasing results. this year, i plan to use my summer (i am a teacher so i have more time then) to sommit fully to the lydiard way. i am looking forward to the task.
Thanks for posting the British Miler Club article on Moorcroft. Very interesting. I haven't read it thoroughly or put down those sample schedule in such way I can see them easily. Unfortunately sample scheduls only show a part of training weeks and it is very difficult to fully understand what they are doing without knowing the over-all picture. So Moorcroft trains 80+ miles a week on the race week but it is too much? If he trains (I don't know), say, 120 miles, probably 80 is not too bad. He seems to do fair amount of repetitions but does he do them year-round. Once again, Lydiard training has lots of repetitions and fast training toward the end of the cycle. If you only saw the last month or 7 weeks before the competitions begin, most people will not believe it because it's so different from well-known 100-mile-week training. Speed, in terms of "seconds", is the same thing; it seems awefully fast to me, but then again, any of his runs would be well into anaerobic range for me! But if you saw him doing 30X200m two days before competition, 1) it's a sample when he was younger and/or 2) I think it's a typo. I'll bet it's supposed to be 3X200; comparing with the rest of his program and other samples schedules.
I have NO idea what type of training Mottram does so I won't comment. Or I don't even know if they really train "hard" before competition in comparison to their level of fitness, what I could speak for is what Lydiard had meant about "you can't train hard and race hard at the same time." Again, don't forget the line, "at the same time". It is Lydiard's belief that you need to be FRESH and SHARP when you're competing. I wrote it somewhere (it could have been at run-insight thread) that tired muscles are tight muscles and they don't perform well. Or simply put, if you're tired, you can perform well (yeah, thank you!). Once racing starts, and as HRE explained, Lydiard's runners competed quite a bit contrary to popular belief once they start competing, they kept their training short and fast with plenty of rest and, if doing aerobic runs, it may be fairly long but at much easier ace. All the focus should be geared toward keeping your body and mind well-rested and be sharp while making sure to maintain your aerobic capacity (by jogging a lot). They might do something like 3~6X200 very fast but with plenty of recovery in between. They might still run 22-mile Waitak but at much easier pace.
In regards to typical American high school scene, they tend to do lots of traditional 400s, which is just fine; but the problem, as far as Lydiard was concerned, they do those WHILE they are racing a couple of times a week. In Lydiard's program, those types of training is already behind them once racing starts. Especially for young developing athletes, combination of tough anaerobic training and continuous racing can be, as Lydiard would say, "deadly". They could perform for a coule of years; but then what would happen? Well, we see it every year with young high school kids. They get their potential "squeezed out" and do well while in high school; but rarely continue to improve or produce good form after they leave high school.
Fascinating that Moorcroft did so much long recovery stuff. Generally, I think there is a tendancy to minimize recovery, but perhaps Moorcroft was really onto something there. Man, his 1000m repeats were almost at Mile race pace. Really intense stuff. His 13:00 in 1982 was absolutely stunning.
I like to think that he MAXIMIZED his recovery! :)
Skuj wrote:
Fascinating that Moorcroft did so much long recovery stuff. Generally, I think there is a tendancy to minimize recovery, but perhaps Moorcroft was really onto something there. Man, his 1000m repeats were almost at Mile race pace. Really intense stuff. His 13:00 in 1982 was absolutely stunning.
This is actually one of the reasons why Lydiard cared less with what and how you do anaerobic training; the emphasis and focus can be quite different from individual to individual. You can make the fast running section getting faster (to Skuj's argument, this way, you can monitor the progress); or you can make the fast section longer (at, hopefully, same pace); or you can decrease the recovery section as, in some way, Frank Shorter did... You can certainly use different repetition/interval program to get the best out of yourself.
To Lydiard repetition/interval has very specific purpose and that is to develop your anaerobic capacity to maximum. To best achieve that purpose, there are several points: it should be long (running distance) enough--shound't be shorter than 200; it should be long (duration of the entire workout) enough--if you're done in 10 minutes, you may not stimulate over-all body's pH level; should be fast enough--if you're very highly conditioned athlete, running 4:40 per mile pace and doing repeats may not even tap into anaerobic metablism and it would strengthen different development... I guess those are the main ones. I don't have them all written down as a formula so there may be others. But the point is; this is why he liked 200~400 repeats with equal distance recovery. You can cut down the recovery distance but then you may end up completing the workout prematurely. You can do mile repeats but you may not be running them fast enough. You can run them very very fast with very short recovery but if your name is not Frank Shorter, you may finish it in 10 minutes and you would most likely not achieve desired physiological reaction.
Now you can take a completely different approach. There is this guy in Nagoya, Japan, who coached a couple of Chinese girls to sub-2:30 performace (highest finish by Asian athlete in 88 Olympics). His approach was more or less like Lydiard--he had them run around a gold course and he never know how far they're running--the pace was completely irrelevant to him; but the time they took to run the exactly the same route was very important to him. They would run around the same course in the same time and they would take exactly the same length of recovery. This, I don't think, was never published so nobody else knew about it but he personally told me that he checked their pulse rate during the recovery phase and "how quickly they recover within the same recovery period" was the most important gouge of development to him. To him, this type of "repetition" had very specific purpose and he didn't care what it is or how it's done as long as he can check the pulse rate. I believe this is pretty much how Gershler and Reindel did their original interval training??? HRE or Tinman probably could explain that better but I believe they used to have the runner lie down even and checked his pulse during the recovery phase. It was the gush of blood back to the heart during the recovery phase that had significant importance to the development of the heart---or something like that.
Gerschler and Reindell had an approach that was somewhat similar, though I believe they did time the repeats. The whole idea for them was to increase the ability of the heart to pump more blood per stroke and this was supposed to be accomplished by getting the heart up to 180 beats per minute, (interestingly one of them, Reindell, I believe, wrote that he had never found a person able to get their heart rate above 180.) Then the heart was to slow to 120 bpm. Once it was back to 120, the next repeat began. As I recall, the athletes did lie down, at least sometimes, between repeats while Reindell or Gerscher measured their pulse. Yes, I do think the idea was to get blood back to the heart as soon as possible and to get the HR to 120 as soon as possible. They also said, and Tinman may correct me here, that it was during the RECOVERY that the increases in heart volume took place,i.e. when the HR was around 120, which is why, as I understood it, van Aaken came to oppose their system and preferred one where the bulk of one's running was done at heart rates in the 120-130 range.
The coach in Nagoua whose interval session you described is similar to a session a lot of Australians use. It's a session of 8x400 with a 200 recovery. The 400s themselves are generally untimed, but the entire workout itself is timed. I think guys like Chris Warlaw, Gerry Henry, maybe Pat Carroll and Deek have done a lot of this sort of thing.
The Attack of Nagoua... I thought you were teasing me at first!
I wouldn't necessarily call the Aussie system (400 w/ 200 float) the same as this guy's approach (Shinya Takeuchi). He used a bit longer distance (something like 1200m) with something like 5 minutes rest (sometimes just walking around); but the important thing is how quickly the pulse comes down; or I should say, "what BPM would it come down within the same recovery period". Incidentally he coached Ohminami twin sisters as well. I never quite figured out why he didn't work with their running technique... I know he was very specific about Chinese girls' arm carriage.
HRE, it was Peter (Snell) who was talking about the effect of Gerschler/Reindel interval concept. It was when the blood gushes back to the heart that the expansion of the heart was exaggerated (how you described got me thinking, which doesn't happen often--not that you don't get me thinking but my thinking at all); perhaps the stroke volume exceeds regular amount when excess blood is still circulating when the heart's beat is slowing... But then again, it would be a wrong statement that "excess blood" is circulating because the volume doesn't change while you're training. I don't know. But anyways, didn't Peter say that the effect is limited to the strech of pericardium...something like that. You're the one who talked to him!
The one similarity I see is that in each case the overall workout is timed rather than the far more common way of timing each repeat separately.
Yes, I did talk with Peter about that. The interview went down in the last computer crash, so I'll need to find the magazine and check out exactly what we said.
don't know what jtupper is up to lately, but i miss him. i myself would like to know origins of 4 zones for physiological training. i agree that coe-martin in their book use a lot of the same as daniels running formula, just presented in different ways. this may have been all the rage in the 90s and in north africa, but training is always shifting. canova speaks of zones that surround your race pace for a particular distance as having the most relevance, not completely unlike horwill 5-pace theory. i tend to believe that lydiard stumbled upon a lot of great things due to gut feeling, and there's a lot to be said for gut feeling. he was creative as hell. others, less creative, more scientific, have tried to quantify lydiard and put it into boxes that they understand in more exact terms. my thoughts for now.
>>i tend to believe that lydiard stumbled upon a lot of great things due to gut feeling, and there's a lot to be said for gut feeling. he was creative as hell. others, less creative, more scientific, have tried to quantify lydiard and put it into boxes that they understand in more exact terms. my thoughts for now.<<
Nicely put!!!!
Everytime I visualize a 'something' or 'scenario' or an 'outcome' to do with training, it's usually based on a hunch of probabilities. Then I read something of Lydiard's and realize my hunch was true or similar or on the right track.
To me, Lydiardism only makes perfectly natural sense.
He did indeed stumble across something, but his eyes were open enough to see it.
good thread brewing at peeay :) well done
I think that the pattern for anaerobic work needs to be something similar to what Bowerman used. He had his runners run workouts at 2 paces, current pace and goal pace. When it comes to American coaches developing sub-4 minute milers, Bowerman has the largest list, and that is years ago. He had his athletes run intervals at "current" pace and then at "goal" pace in workouts. His runners did better than others at making the transition from 4:15 miler to sub-4 miler than any other American coach at the time. Why? Because he took Arthur's aerobic development approach and added to it the anaerobic development that was necessary to have American milers make the shift. Bowerman was very adept at taking 9:30 HS 2 milers and turning them into sub 9 minute steeplechasers and then sub 4 minute milers over their Oregon careers. He learned from the master, Arthur. He taught that to Dellinger. Dellinger learned that well during his years of non-competitive running between 1960 and 1964 when he came back to get 4th at the Olympics at 5 km.
Glenn
HRE, you devil. Brilliant post at pacath. Hahahahaha! I love it!!!
Glenn, all of these coaches were able to INFOOKINGSPIRE!!! That too! :)
What else do all the great coaches (and there are MANY of them!) have in common?
Nobby,
Choppy stride or Long stride? I have tried and perfected both and I can't decide which is best, but I found that with a choppy stride, there was a limit to how quick my turnover was (strides per minute). With the choppy stride, we drive from the knee, with the long stride, it is more about bounding and lifting the feet high behing us.
With a long stride I think I may have more scope for improvement, but I can't say for sure.
When it comes to sprinting, look at Sprinters and see how much they vary in style too. Neither appears to be definitively faster than the other.