Is Arthur Lydiard’s training system the best ever?
Recently I stumbled upon a 33-page Arthur Lydiard training guide that’s apparently based on talks Lydiard gave during a 1999 lecture tour of the U.S. If you’re not familiar with Lydiard, he coached a number of great New Zealand distance runners during the 1950s and 1960s. The best known was Peter Snell, but there were many others as well.
Lydiard also introduced famous University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman to “jogging” as a healthful activity for average midlife individuals. Bowerman then brought this practice to the American public in his book, Jogging, co written with W.E. Harris, M.D.
You can read the full 33-page Lydiard manual at the below link. Here are a few highlights: Lydiard says his system is “based on a balanced combination of conditioning, strength, and speed. The end result is stamina, or the ability to maintain speed over the whole distance.”
Lydiard recommends “running at a good effort and finishing each run feeling pleasantly tired.” He doesn’t advocate Long Slow Distance, but admits that LSD will produce the same end results; you’ll just spend more time on your feet.
He also recognized the need for faster training. “You should do three hard workouts a week.” It doesn’t matter what distance and speed you use, according to Lydiard, as “No coach can tell exactly how many repetitions you can do or what your recovery intervals should be on any particular day.” So don’t worry about that stuff. “Trust your instincts and responses.”
Before you begin speedwork, Lydiard advocates for a transitional training period that “is accomplished by bringing resistance to the leg muscles.” How? “By springing uphill with a series of short and sharp bounding steps.”
You can achieve “sharpening” ( peaking) by running “sharp sprints of 50-100 meters once a week with an equal distance of ‘floating’ in between.”
And here’s Lydiard’s number one Golden Rule. “Never try to run too fast during the initial training period. You can never run too slowly to help bring about some cardiac development, but you can run too fast, causing undue strain, sore muscles, and slower recovery. This inevitably affects the following day’s training.” More at Champions Everywhere, a lengthy PDF that includes many full blown training plans.
Run stronger and faster with more emotional intelligence
Let’s say you’re aiming to hit a specific split time at the 5K mark of a race you’re running.. You get there, and … damn, you miss the mark. This is not good. You’re all too likely to blame yourself for one reason or another--not pushing hard enough in the race, not training hard enough before the race. We all know how easy it is to slip into these negative, self-critical patterns.
The problem is, such negative talk will likely make things worse. You can’t run well when you’re thinking badly.
That’s the topic of the current paper, which explores negative talk, emotional intelligence, and perceived stress in runners. It finds that runners fall into two main traps: imagining that other runners around them are feeling better than they are; and failing to use emotional intelligence to reinterpret “the association between stress perception and negative thinking.”
Avoiding these traps are skills that can be practiced and learned. The result can be “the evaluation of one's own emotions as a readjustment mechanism … and effective ways to reduce negative self talk.” From that point, runners “would be able to identify their current emotional state and change what is necessary to achieve their goals.”
You know you’re going to have a few bad moments in every big race. But you don’t have to let these bad moments roll into an insurmountable tidal wave. You can prepare for them in advance, develop alternative thought patterns, and deploy these thoughts as necessary on race day. More at Psychology of Sport & Exercise with free full text.
How Clarence DeMar changed running forever
Clarence DeMar was one of the all time great marathon runners, with 7 Boston Marathon wins and a long running career. Then, in death, he made a bigger contribution to health/fitness science than any other runner.
His family allowed his body to be autopsied by a small team of expert cardiologists (including one who was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s consulting cardiologist). They found that DeMar’s many years of marathon training had increased the size of his coronary arteries and produced additional small arterioles.
The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1961, and gave the first objective indication that regular (even hard) aerobic exercise improved heart health. Prior to DeMar, it was widely believed that such regimens weakened the heart. DeMar had died from cancer at age 70 in 1958.
"It was one of those first studies that taught us that the human body can really handle, very healthfully, lots and lots of exercise," said Dr. Aaron Baggish, a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the former medical director of the Boston Marathon.
This wonderful article about DeMar’s running and the research surrounding his autopsy was produced by New Hampshire public radio at the time of the annual Clarence DeMar Marathon in his hometown, Keene, NH. It’s a terrific piece of journalism, complete with the audio version and classic photos of DeMar running the Boston Marathon. Don’t miss it. More at NPR. (Also, see “Great Quotes” below.)
[ Check out the podcast, “Running: State of the Sport,” with Amby Burfoot and George Hirsch.
Recent episodes feature Deena Kastor, Mark Milde, and Jack Fleming. ]
Strength training fails to prevent injuries. (But is still recommended.)
Many runners do regular lower body strength training in hopes of improving their performance and limiting injuries. The following report casts a bit of a shadow over those hopes.
It finds no evidence that leg strength training reduces injuries. In fact, strengthening the hips (a frequent suggestion to runners) is linked with a slight uptick in injuries. At the same time, ignoring upper body resistance work also correlates with injury risk.
Of course, like most injury research, this one paper can’t prove cause-and-effect. Only associations.
The findings were based on questionnaire data from 616 runners who had been running an average of 13 years, and generally logged 4 running workouts a week. Those who covered more than 19 miles/week had more injuries than lower-mileage runners. Also, those with a strong “performance orientation" were more likely to be injured.
That’s possibly because they didn’t listen to their body when they should have. They continued to push hard in training when they should have backed off and recovered.
Conclusion: “Completely eradicating RRIs is unrealistic.” Also, despite their findings, the authors retained their belief in strength training. They state that it can improve “capacity to tolerate training load and, thus, should be recommended.” More at J of Functional Morphology & Kinesiology with free full text.
The benefits of training with a weight vest
Runners generally want to carry a low but healthy body weight, since more weight could increase injury risks and decrease performance. However, a new study indicates that there may be a time and place for additional weight, particularly in the form of a weighted vest that you wear in training.
Researchers tested this idea by having volunteers run on a treadmill while wearing three different vests that added anywhere from 10 pounds to almost 30 pounds to their body weight. They also ran at two different speeds.
Result: The weighted vests “increased muscle force amplitudes and variability”--a good thing. On the other hand, running faster “decreased this variability.” I received these comments in an email from senior author, Guillaume Rao. He added: “This is a very interesting finding in the way that after an injury or a rest period, it might be helpful to add this kind of workout before running faster.”
Translation: Rao believes that weighted-vest training could build a stronger musculoskeletal system, always important to healthy running. Then, speed training can be added later. “These findings may help improve the design of military or trail running training programs and injury rehabilitation by progressively increasing the mechanical load on anatomical structures,” says the paper’s conclusion. More at J of Biomechanics with abstract and snippets.
Some caffeine abstinence may be required to boost endurance
It was almost 50 years ago when a Runner’s World cover story first revealed that coffee/caffeine was performance-enhancing for endurance runners. At the time, we were told the program worked best if we refrained from coffee/caffeine for several days or longer before taking it on race-day morning. Later a number of studies seemed to indicate that such “withdrawal” was not necessary.
This implied you could drink your coffee regularly, and still get a nice boost on marathon morning. Whew! Many addicted coffee fans regarded this as sensational news.
Now the newest paper on the subject has retested the whole “withdrawal or no withdrawal” protocol, and concluded that, yup, you gotta take at 8 hours off to get the full benefit.
The experiment included 10 regular coffee-drinking recreational cyclists. In a randomized order, they received either a caffeine pill or a placebo pill 8 hours before a laboratory cycling test. Then, one hour before the test, they again received either a caffeine pill or a placebo pill before beginning a 10K time trial that also measured power output. Caffeine use was administered with a dose of 6 mg per kg of athlete body weight.
Result: Cyclists’ time-trial performance and power output was improved only if they had consumed no caffeine 8 hours prior to the 10K time trial. The authors believe this finding means that “previous work may have overstated the value of caffeine supplementation for habitual users.”
Of course, most road races begin in the early morning when you haven’t had any caffeine during your 8 hours of nighttime sleep. So you pass that hurdle. How about abstaining for the full day (or more) before your race? That’s one of those personal experiments you’ll have to try on your own. Also, the researchers say that “Future work should examine higher doses of caffeine for habitual users.” More at International J. of Sport Physiology & Performance.
Do runners need to “insure” their health with multivitamins?
As runners and proponents of optimal health-fitness, we naturally gravitate toward multivitamins. Who hasn’t been won over by the argument that they provide relatively “low-cost insurance?” Still, we often read that vitamins and supplements are unproven health-enhancers, and sometimes even linked to increased risk of certain conditions. Not to mention possible contaminants.
So it’s always good to check the latest research and expert opinion on multi-vitamins. That’s what you get here in this solid review of the topic.
Bottom line: You probably don’t need a multi, and you’d be much smarter to get all the nutrients you need with a varied diet. Food “is always the gold standard,” notes one nutritionist.
That said, a recent Columbia-Harvard analysis of a randomized trial found that those over age 60 experienced a significant improvement in their memory after beginning to take a multivitamin. The effect persisted over the 3-year term of the investigation. “It’s certainly not a panacea for cognitive aging,” said one of the study authors, “but it is a reliable effect.”
If you’re tempted, most experts recommend taking a name-brand multi-tablet (rather than a single supplement pill). And, of course, eating as healthfully as you can. More at Outside Online.
Camille Herron’s weird (but record-setting) ultramarathon training
If this isn’t the year of women’s running, I don’t know what is. Faith Kipyegon, Tigst Assefa, Jeannie Rice, Courtney Dauwalter, Camille Herron, and others have produced stunning performances.
Kipyegon burned up the track all summer, while Tigst Assefa ran a mind-boggling 2:11:53 in the Berlin Marathon. Jeannie Rice is aiming for a female 75-79 world record at the Chicago Marathon this weekend to add to others she has already set in 2023. Dauwalter won three major 100-mile trail races, and Herron last weekend took two hours off the course record in the famed 153-mile Spartathlon race in Greece. That put her on the overall podium, as only two men ran faster.
Herron’s Spartathlon record followed on the heels of her 48-hour record set last March--270.5 miles. In this article she explains how she keeps running so fast over super-endurance distances. I find her long-run strategy most interesting, especially for an ultra-runner. She doesn’t like long runs. Instead she believes iit makes more sense to do two shorter runs a day because there’s less wear and tear on the body.
Herron also acknowledges the social-cultural changes that are helping women make such great strides in this historical epoch. “My generation is the first to see pro women athletes continuing into their 40s and beyond. There’s greater visibility, support, and open talk now about menstrual health, perimenopause, menopause, and what we’re experiencing as athletes.” More at Canadian Running.
SHORT STUFF you don’t want to miss
>>> Step up to the challenge: The higher your daily step count, the longer your likely lifespan
>>> Protect the future of running: How to become a more sustainable runner (Hint: Start at breakfast)
GREAT QUOTES make great training partners
--Clarence DeMar
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading. See you again next week. Amby