Arthur Lydiard. Photo: lydiardfoundation.orgIt’s not hard to start a conversation about famed running coach Arthur Lydiard. The New Zealander, who passed away in 2004, forever changed the sport of distance running by way of his influential teachings. He coached athletes like Peter Snell to the Olympic podium and was a prolific writer in his own right. Lydiard was also a dynamic speaker who preached his training philosophy like a fervent evangelist, creating disciples who still quote him in a quasi-religious way.
Lydiard was a legend, but unfortunately he gets labeled as an elitist and “the long, slow distance guy” who preached rigid periodization in training. At risk of his important teachings being oversimplified and misunderstood, it’s critical that we dig deeper into three of Lydiard’s most under-acknowledged secrets of success:
1. Lydiard believed in speed work.
“Far too many people think Lydiard training is all about long, slow distance running,” says Nobuya “Nobby” Hashizume of the Lydiard Foundation. “How many people realize that he used to have his runners, even marathon runners, compete in a 100-meter dash in a local track meet?” Hashizume contends that many people who study Lydiard’s teachings come away thinking that a lot of long, slow distance is the answer to successful running. He calls it “the plodding zone” and says that Lydiard did believe in 100-mile training weeks, but only to build aerobic strength to prepare the body for race-pace work that followed.
Greg McMillan, founder and head coach of McMillan Running, says that Lydiard’s anaerobic and lactate threshold workouts are often forgotten. “It’s important to remember that [Lydiard] was working with very competitive runners training for shorter distances and though everyone talks about his endurance or base phase, his programs have a lot of fast running as the race nears,” he says. McMillan points out that Lydiard incorporated 2-3 days of speed work after his endurance phase so that the athlete peaked on time instead of the 20-40 x 400m interval workouts used by other coaches that he didn’t think was as predictable in performance improvement.
2. He called for flexible, individualized training.
Many runners think of Lydiard as someone who followed a one-size-fits-all approach, but that wasn’t the case. “As the runner got into the race-specific training, Lydiard was doing many, many test runs and based on how these runs went, the athlete would adjust the program going forward,” says McMillan, who accompanied Lydiard on his final U.S. tour before he passed away. Lydiard knew that flexibility was a vital component to success and that both the coach and athlete had to work together closely in order to observe how the body and mind responded (and recovered) from training and racing. “They had to then adjust to build on the strengths and shore up the weaknesses,” McMillan says.
If you want to get faster run more, it really is that simple, or is it?
Been reading about Arthur Lydiard a bit lately. An article below by Duncan Larkin dismisses the myth that Lydiard was just about distance and slow pace. He also believed in speed work, flexible training and training longevity to achieve true potential. I must agree with him on all three of his ‘secrets’ described below by Larkin.
His approach with speed work fits closely with the 80/20 split championed by Matt Fitzgerald ( http://mattfitzgerald.org ) and also a book I am currently working my way through by Joe Friel, Fast after Fifty ( http://www.joefrielsblog.com ). Joe also advocates using high intensity work outs to retain fitness for the ‘older athlete’, rather than relying on long, slow, distance workouts. (LSD) Both these well respected coaches teach secret number 1 below. The second secret about flexible training is also a concept I would agree with. Each runner is unique with their own training threshold, be it distance or intensity, as well as their ability to perform a training program without the danger of injury. Each runner has different parameters that need to be monitored and to do this the coach needs constant feedback on the program selected. Finally Lydiard believed to reach their full potential a runner would need between 3-5 years. I’d hope it takes a little longer as I’m probably on year eight in my journey and hope to find a few PB’s before I start back to the chasing pack, we’ll see.
So it looks like all distance and no pace will not allow a runner to reach their trust potential. You really need to change into the high gears once in a while with fartlek, threshold, tempos and track sessions. These sessions do come with their own dangers but , as runners, we do enjoy testing ourselves and sometimes you just got to run as fast as you possibly can. I understand it can be painful but the feeling you get when you finish an intense session and reach your target is worth the suffering, and let’s face it running fast is fun.
Rod Dixon, winner of the 1983 New York City Marathon, used to listen to Lydiard speak when he was a young runner in New Zealand and says that Lydiard encouraged “learning by doing.”
“He told us to apply the principles he taught to our own environment,” Dixon recalls. “He wanted us to evolve as runners and keep things simple—not to make the sport a complex formula. We knew that we wouldn’t respond the same way to everything; we learned that we had to adapt in order to run well.”
3. The potential to improve exists in everyone.
Lydiard is best known for the grueling workouts he passed on to the likes of Snell and for attracting the very best runners who were aiming for the Olympic podium, but what many don’t realize is that he worked with runners of all ability levels. “Lydiard is often described as a hard-nosed elitist coach who insisted everybody to run 100-miles-a-week,” says Hashizume. “Quite far from it. Remember, he was not only a maker of champions but also the father of jogging.”
In 1961, Lydiard gathered 20 obese middle-aged runners who couldn’t run a single lap around the track and coached them to run a 4-hour marathon in just eight months. “Arthur’s jogging program was ahead of its time,” says McMillan. “Bill Bowerman and subsequently Jeff Galloway saw how this idea was very, very beneficial to the masses of runners who weren’t trying to go the Olympics but wanted a more appropriate running routine to get them fit and healthy.” Hashizume says that his mentor maintained “hope for positive human potential” and told him that one can never know their true potential until they train systematically and intelligently for three to five years.
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A running tragic.