In what ways did Lydiard get it wrong?

Yeah, but all those coaches before Lydiard were loony. He was the first one with a bit of sanity.

Interesting discussion here. Thanks to all! Just a couple of quick notes:

1. I don't think Snell should be used as an example for (or against) anything. He was a physiological marvel who (I believe) would have been a champion under any high-level training system. The man was sui generis and I'm just sorry that he (I believe?) never had children--keeping his genes in the pool might have been a good thing.

2. As a few have already touched on, Lydiard was a great *coach*. Jack Daniels, same thing: a tremendous ability to inspire confidence in his athletes. When assessing a coach's performance, his ability to *coach*--and not just the physiological principles he espoused--should be considered.

3. In Lydiard's earliest schedules a weekly day of fartlek was included IIRC. In addition, as others have pointed out, he advocated different speeds on his schedules' "distance" days; and his athletes were training on some quite hilly local terrain, that "speedwork in disguise" that some have mentioned. So his schedules never had an all-one-speed phase, much less an all-slow phase.

Don't know about "loony", but I would like to clarify: "Lydiard was not the first at anything." His pioneering contribution was finding a better way to combine all these previously known training ideas, so that athletes showed up at the start line of the season's goal ready to win (combining coordination and balance and peaking).

Lydiard was right wrote:

Yeah, but all those coaches before Lydiard were loony. He was the first one with a bit of sanity.

lease wrote:

Interesting discussion here. Thanks to all! Just a couple of quick notes:

1. I don't think Snell should be used as an example for (or against) anything. He was a physiological marvel who (I believe) would have been a champion under any high-level training system. The man was sui generis and I'm just sorry that he (I believe?) never had children--keeping his genes in the pool might have been a good thing.

Stop right there with the genetics rhetoric Lease. You were the fool who told us endlessly we have to land under our center of gravity. You grasp of science weak. I find your type of received wisdom annoying. And this is me on a good day.

rekrunner wrote:

Don't know about "loony", but I would like to clarify: "Lydiard was not the first at anything."

His pioneering contribution was finding a better way to combine all these previously known training ideas, so that athletes showed up at the start line of the season's goal ready to win (combining coordination and balance and peaking).

Lydiard was right wrote:

Yeah, but all those coaches before Lydiard were loony. He was the first one with a bit of sanity.

Uh huh. And that takes a non loony brain to filter.

Cerutty was nut. Gerschler was obsessed with his reductive stroke volume hypothesis. Zatopek was also obsessed with Gerschler's hypothesis.

Lydiard's methods only need a minor tweak in the 21st Century tailored to each individual and their specific requirements.

Obviously a 400/800 runner is different to an 800/1500 runner and so Lydiardism is not applicable so much to the former.

It's interesting to me how Peter and Seb Coe deliberated slighted Lydiard, which I found somewhat disingenuous.

Base training wrote:

There was an element of long slow distance. To build an aerobic base the runners would run long and slow before they were able to run long and faster/steady state. 800m runners didn't need to run 20+ miles. A person may not call what they do LSD but to an 800m runner being asked to run 20+ miles it sure seems like LSD is a good term for it.

This is not correct. They did not start the Marathon Conditioning Phase by running slow. Yes, they worked into those fast steady state paces but the beginning of the phase did not involve a lot of jogging around. There were stories he had of his runners falling apart at first because they were not used to it but the plan was never to jog slow.

Say whatever you want, but again, the term LSD really annoyed him.

Lydiard was right wrote:

It's interesting to me how Peter and Seb Coe deliberated slighted Lydiard, which I found somewhat disingenuous.

I haven't seen (and I haven't looked) either Coe slighting Lydiard, but it is curious you say that. (IMO) the success of Coe as a middle distance runner, and the creation of the "myth" of the superiority of low mileage and high intensity training was one factor contributing to the relative decline of "western" nations in the '90s.

It never sat well with Arthur when people lumped his ideas into the "LSD school." But he knew there was value to slow running and problems with running too hard. So his comments about this were inconsistent. He would tell you that you can get as fit doing slow distance runs as by doing faster ones but that the former takes longer. So there was, "What the LSD runner will do in two years we can do in maybe one." There was "Good runners rarely run slower than 7:00 miles."

He'd sometimes use that as a launching pad for a story about three Aussies, Trevor Vincent, Tony Cook, and Ron Clarke saying that Cook and Vincent started doing Lydiard style distance work at around 7:00 pace and Ron Clarke started running with them at 7;00 pace when he began running again in 1961. But as Ron got fitter he quickened his pace while Vincent and Cook kept to 7:00 miles and became a multiple world record holder while Cook and Vincent "went nowhere." Aside from being very inaccurate, the story illustrates Arthur's idea of pace for distance runs; let it come to you but don't force it. Clarke was probably working no harder in, say, 1965, when he was banging out 10-12 miles in his hour's run than when he was running 9 miles or so in that time a few years earlier. There is no need to lock yourself into a particular pace for your distance runs. Run slowly enough to cover a lot of miles and when and if you can cover those miles faster do it.

In one of his later books you get a line like, "You can never run too slowly, but you can run too fast" which certainly does not reconcile with Vincent and Cook going "nowhere" by keeping to their 7:00 miles, which they actually did not do anymore than they went nowhere. On his last tour of the US he told Joe Henderson, "My runners ran as fast as they could without breathing hard." That's as good a summary as you can get and it conveys the idea he wanted in that circumstance ( talking to the guy who did more to popularize the idea of training slowly than anyone.) But in another situation, wanting to make a different point, he may well have said, "My runners ran as slowly as they needed to to avoid getting out of breath." The ONLY thing he ever said to me about pace was, "Enjoy yourself."

rekrunner wrote:

Lydiard was right wrote:

It's interesting to me how Peter and Seb Coe deliberated slighted Lydiard, which I found somewhat disingenuous.

I haven't seen (and I haven't looked) either Coe slighting Lydiard, but it is curious you say that. (IMO) the success of Coe as a middle distance runner, and the creation of the "myth" of the superiority of low mileage and high intensity training was one factor contributing to the relative decline of "western" nations in the '90s.

They slighted Lydiard by claiming that Elliott was the all time greatest, thereby ingnoring Snell. They slighted Lydiard by not talking about him. It's no surprise that Seb Coe became a politician with that kind of attitude.

And I don't agree about the decline in the '90s being attributable to lower mileage. I think that's another myth. The decline of the developed nations in distance running was caused by the rise of the East Africans. It could be argued that because East African runners have a perfect climate for distance running, (even more than the altitude explanation) they can train optimally for longer periods. Not to mention the social factors. And Lydiard didn't ignore these issues either.

just stating the obvious here wrote:

yes, but wrote:

Which may be better or worse. Lydiard's periodization was aimed at Olympic athletes building to one big peak and it worked, so everyone wanted to know how?

It worked IN HIS TIME because it was better than the previous approach (that is, all intervals like Igloi). I doubt the champs from the last Olympics were doing a program that was very similar to Lydiard's.

How did it work better if Schul beat Arthur's guys in '64?

yes, but wrote:

nawautin wrote:

Ever hear of Jim Ryun.

Underachiever compared to Snell. The US is has been traditionally underachieving generally in middle distance running. Something is wrong and has been for a very long time. Why?

They won the last OLy 1500 and the most recent WC 800. So nothing is wrong.

How is Lydiard "not being the first at anything" related to the OP's question of whether he got it wrong? A typically spurious point. Whether or not he was the first at anything he transformed running in a way none of those you cite before him did. Academic waffle.

How is Lydiard "not being the first at anything" related to the OP's question of whether he got it wrong? A typically spurious point. Whether or not he was the first at anything he transformed running in a way none of those you cite before him did. Academic waffle.

Bail out wrote:

just stating the obvious here wrote:

It worked IN HIS TIME because it was better than the previous approach (that is, all intervals like Igloi). I doubt the champs from the last Olympics were doing a program that was very similar to Lydiard's.

How did it work better if Schul beat Arthur's guys in '64?

Really? You think that the training is system is all that matters and can't recognize individual differences and differing circumstances? You pick ONE race as your example? Okay let's do it that way. Lydiard's system worked better in 1960 when his guys beat Igloi's guys. And they beat more of Igloi's guys in 1960 than Igloi's guys beat of Lydiard's guys in 1964.

That's every bit as superficial as your question iis.

Do you understand how I use "quoted posts" to indicate the context of my responses? I understand top-posting can be confusing, and makes graybeard Usenet gurus cringe, but the post is short enough to view in its entirety on one screen, and top-posting is a common enough convention that it should not lead to confusion. To answer your question (which I note is also unrelated to the OP's question, as is my answer to your question), I was not responding to the OP (I already did that at the top of page 3), so my post was not related to the OP's question at all. My post was a direct response to the poster "Lydiard was wrong" (whose post I quoted for context to avoid exactly this kind of confusion) who said "He was just the first training geek to systematize a passionate, ...." One could also ask, how your response to the very same "Lydiard was wrong" post: "And the earth is still flat. It must be true because most people think it isn't - and they aren't "rational" and "scientific" like you" was related to the OP's question?

Armstronglivs wrote:

How is Lydiard "not being the first at anything" related to the OP's question of whether he got it wrong? A typically spurious point. Whether or not he was the first at anything he transformed running in a way none of those you cite before him did. Academic waffle.

HRE - this pretty much eloquently summarizes what I've been looking for in these forums. Most of us are after a near optimal workout to increase our endurance. We get so caught up in chasing a certain pace or heart rate. We have complicated schedules with extremely structured workouts. Maybe it's really just as simple as you stated. It obviously seemed to work for Lydiard's runners. It almost seems too simple but perhaps this really is the key. Thanks for sharing!

The point about flat earth arguments was related to a lengthy claim that Lydiard was wrong about everything but runners aren't "rational" or "scientific" enough to know that - apparently that specious claim was a little too complicated for you to grasp. But if Lydiard wasn't "the first" at anything (wrong and missing the point entirely, as his combination and balance of training factors was his unique contribution), so what? It goes to nothing about the soundness or otherwise of his method. Pointless pedantry, as usual.

I was responding to the same lengthy specious claim, also arguing that the "trial and error" approach used by Lydiard, is, contrary to what was claimed, "rational" and "scientific".

As you can see above, before you responded, I realized that "not the first at anything" wasn't quite what I wanted to say, and had already added this statement for clarification:

"His pioneering contribution was finding a better way to combine all these previously known training ideas, so that athletes showed up at the start line of the season's goal ready to win (combining coordination and balance and peaking)."