For the past year I have been analysing the training methods of great runners and coaches from the 1920s to the present, partly as it is fascinating following the strands of different thinking in training methodologies and how effective they were, and partly as I’m thinking of someday writing a book in which I pull all this together to broaden our understanding of training. The adage that we stand on the shoulders of others is really true. It is always good to understand why you are doing a certain session at a certain time in your programme, rather than to just follow it blindly. Coaches often use different terminology for the same thing which can be confusing and hopefully this will give you a framework to put your training in context. Modern training methods can be traced back to Arthur Lydiard, the New Zealand milkman who produced world-beaters such as 800m and 1500m runners Murray Halberg and Peter Snell and marathoner Barry Magee. These runners took podium places at the 1960 Olympics while Snell went on to run double golds at the 1964 Olympics. There were many great coaches and runners before Lydiard, each with their own distinct approach. However I feel it is safe to say that while most runners and coaches used a simplified single system (such as fartlek or intervals training) Lydiard was the first to figure out a recipe that could bring a runner to peak at the right time, every time - as we saw at the 1964 Olympic games when Peter Snell went into the Olympics still not at his peak, and used the heats to hit his peak for the final heats and win two gold medals. Now that is what I call timing! Lydiard provides us with a plan that takes a runner through all the phases such as base training providing aerobic conditioning, hill work and interval training. It is interesting to note that his base training of around 160km/week for his top runners was also used by South Africa’s great miler Johan Fourie. During a chat with Fourie in the late 1980s I was amazed to hear that his out-of-season training was 160km/week! Lydiard used exactly the same base training for both his track runners and his marathoners as the aim of this phase is to improve aerobic conditioning. In the 1940s during the second world war the Swedes (Sweden was a neutral country and did not take part in the war) Gundar Hagg and Arne Anderson used fartlek in the forests to repeatedly break the world mile record until they were banned for accepting payment from race organisers (this was still in the amateur era when runners weren’t allowed to receive money). Fartlek is an unstructured form of speed work in which you do fast running interspersed with jog recoveries, but you run completely on how you feel so the first fast burst may be 30 seconds and the next may be 3min for instance. Had they not been banned either of these great runners may well have become the first to break the 4-minute mile as they each broke the world mile record three times! In 1945 Hagg broke the world record with a 4:01.4 which remained until 1954 when Franz Stampfl used interval training to help Roger Bannister break the 4-minute mile. An advantage of intervals over fartlek is that you can manipulate the variables such as speed, distance and recovery precisely making it a very time efficient session. Fartlek however is a great session to use early in the season to become accustomed to speed training. The type of training on some of my programmes where runners do intervals on the road for a set period of time such as 3 x 3min with 2min jog recoveries, is a structured form of fartlek and falls somewhere between fartlek and formal interval training. Meanwhile at the same time, Stampfl’s arch rival, the Australian coach, Percy Cerutty, used training in natural surroundings (no artificial tracks or regulated intervals such as used by Stampfl) with athletes such as the great Herb Elliot who won gold at the 1960 Olympics. Cerutty’s hill repeats on the sand dunes at Portsea were notoriously tough! John Landy – the second man to break the 4min mile - trained as a youngster under Cerutty before leaving as he found Cerutty an abrasive, eccentric character. However I think it is safe to say that Cerutty’s methods would certainly have influenced Landy. To confuse matters further, the Czech Emil Zatopek who was a world class 5000m and 10 000m runner took golds in the 5000m and 10 000m at the 1952 Olympics as expected. And then having never run a marathon, decided to run the Olympic marathon as well and take on the great British marathoner Jim Peters (the first man to run under 2hrs 20min on a marathon). History shows that in his first ever marathon Zatopek won the gold! And his training methods? A very high volume of interval training such as 40 x 400m with a short 100m or 200m recovery. However these intervals were not flat out, but were probably about 80 seconds, so that it become a speed endurance session. Zatopek became the first man to run under 29min on 10km in 1954 using this training. In the 1980s the great English miler Sebastian Coe was coached by his father Peter, who was not a runner. In his biography we see that Coe often did hard 10 mile (16km) runs on a hilly route and he had a section of dirt track along a river where he did regular intervals. He would usually alternate 1 hour runs at half marathon pace (which we now call tempo runs) on one day, with interval sessions at race pace and faster the next day. Coe set 8 outdoor and 3 indoor world records and won gold medals at the Olympic 1500m in both 1980 and 1984. Not bad results for a coach who had never run! More recently coach Jack Daniels – who to my mind is perhaps the greatest coach in recent years – has pulled all this together using terminology which you have been accustomed to hearing – VO2 max intervals, lactate threshold training (tempo runs), aerobic conditioning (marathon pace runs), hill work and peaking, and all of this is done using periodisation which is essentially what Lydiard was doing in the 1960s. And so the wheel has turned a full circle. And then of course we have the Kenyans and Ethiopians with high altitude training and progression runs which is a discussion for another day. Next week I will discuss some of the individual elements in training such as the Billat 30-30 session which I have just started using with Judy Bird. The session is named after exercise physiologist Veronique Billat who discovered that after an interval session a person’s heart rate stays in the VO2 max zone for about another 15-20 seconds during recovery as it takes that long for your heart rate to come down. The aim of the session is to spend as much time in your VO2 max zone using the extra time in the VO2 max zone during recovery as a bonus (and we’re talking about as much as a third of your recovery time being spent in this zone!) The session involves fast running over 30 seconds, interspersed with 30 second jogs and by doing this a runner can get up to third extra time in the VO2 max zone as a bonus. So it’s actually a speed endurance session even though the intervals are very short. Hopefully this has made you keen to get out there and work on your 10km speed …. Enjoy!
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 08:45:45 +0000
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