Running with Lydiard: Greatest Running Coach of All Time

This book was carefully researched. However, all information is supplied without liability. Neither the authors nor the publisher will be liable for possible disadvantages or damages resulting from this book.

ARTHUR LYDIARD | GARTH GILMOUR

RUNNING

WITH

LYDIARD

GREATEST RUNNING COACH OF ALL TIME

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Running with Lydiard

2nd revised edition 2017

Maidenhead: Meyer & Meyer Sport (UK) Ltd., 2017

All rights reserved, especially the right to copy and distribute, including the translation rights. No part of this work may be reproduced—including by photocopy, microfilm or any other means— processed, stored electronically, copied or distributed in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.

© 2017 by Meyer & Meyer Sport (UK) Ltd.

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ISBN: 978-1-78255-452-3

E-Mail: [email protected]

www.m-m-sports.com

Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF EXERCISE

MARATHON CONDITIONING TRAINING

SPEED AND THE ANAEROBIC CAPACITY OF EXERCISE

TRACK TRAINING

CROSS-COUNTRY TRAINING AND RACING

WARMING UP, COOLING DOWN

CLOTHING AND SHOES FOR TRAINING AND RACING

TACTICS

BODY TEMPERATURE, ELECTROLYTES, AND RUNNING

FOODS, FADS AND FANCIES

INJURY PREVENTION AND CURE

THE SCHEDULES

SPRINTS

CROSS-COUNTRY

MARATHON

RUNNING FOR BOYS AND GIRLS

WOMEN IN TRAINING

CREDITS

LYDIARD FOUNDATION

Foreword

When I began my coaching career more than four decades ago, I had just retired from competitive running and was an eager young coach who wanted to provide my athletes with the best opportunity to reach the same goals I had aspired to as an athlete. At this time, there were no formal coaching education programs nor a plethora of digital information available to increase one’s knowledge; there was only the written word of highly respected coaches whose work centered around the success of the athletes they coached. Arthur Lydiard was first made famous by the huge success of legendary runners like Peter Snell and Murray Halberg, 1960 Olympic medalists from New Zealand. Like the rest of the athletic world, I was eager to learn the methods and training philosophy of their mentor and coach. So I began researching and collecting publications about Arthur Lydiard’s coaching philosophy. As lifelong learners, coaches must continue to add to their library of knowledge to have a sound coaching philosophy.

Arthur Lydiard’s books have provided the applied science knowledge to coaching that allows every coach—regardless of academic background—to understand why I do the things I do as a coach. The uniqueness of the human body makes it necessary for every coach to understand the physiology of human performance. Arthur Lydiard not only applies that evidenced-based knowledge to his training programs, but he also relates it in terms that can be understood by the average runner or aspiring coach or even the veteran coach who is looking for an affirmation of his training regimen.

How fortunate for 21st century coaches to have a new edition of Lydiard’s wisdom and practical knowledge to add to their library! The work of legends is best validated by the test of time. This new edition of Running With Lydiard contains the Lydiard methodology and training regimens from which every coach or endurance runner will be inspired to follow in this 21st century of wellness and running, be it for leisure and health or for breaking records. Whether into the coaching profession two or twenty years, this is a must-read for every coach!

Terry Crawford

Director of Coaching, USA Track & Field

Introduction

In 1961, in the foreword to Running to the Top, the first book Arthur Lydiard and I wrote together, I said he was one of the most outstanding athletic coaches of all time.

Twenty-one years later, when we produced Running with Lydiard, an updated sequel, I wrote that it was now doubtful if there would ever be another coach who would even equal the impact Lydiard had made on physical conditioning as a prerequisite to sporting achievement in any field and as a way of life for millions of happy joggers and fun runners.

Now, fifty-six years later, there is no room for doubt. Lydiard’s training and conditioning methods have not been bettered. They have not been equalled. They have become, in one form or another, the training basis of virtually every successful athlete – the variation being that the more complete the adoption of the Lydiard way, the higher the degree of success is likely to have been.

Arthur Lydiard, who was unknown when his athletes astounded the world by winning three medals at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome – Murray Halberg (5,000 metre gold), Peter Snell (800 metre gold) and Barry Magee (marathon bronze) – is an international athletic and physical fitness icon without peer.

Lydiard had the magical combination of conditioning savvy, peaking expertise and psychological understanding and encouragement that enabled him to take any average athlete and, with that athlete’s faith and full co-operation, produce an outstanding sports achiever.

Lydiard’s methods are freely available to anyone who wants to use them, and his system has been applied, with success, to the conditioning of football players, cyclists, canoeists and kayakers, squash players, gridiron footballers, triathletes and duathletes, pentathletes, tennis players … the list goes on. It has a place in every sporting activity because its fundamental aim is to build a high level of basic fitness on which the specific skills of any sport can be balanced.

The millions who were caught in the world-wide flood of interest in jogging, which Lydiard and friends launched in New Zealand in 1962, could testify that the same fitness basis has contributed to improved work performance, to better sleep patterns, to greater interest in everyday activities and, if not to longer life, then to greatly enhanced enjoyment of the later years when, in the past, people began looking downhill all the way to the cemetery.

The story of how Lydiard evolved his revolutionary training method has been told many times, but its bare bones bear repeating because they explain how thorough was his research into perfecting it. At the outset, he did not plan to become a champion; he had no intention of producing champions; he had no idea of changing the way the running world approached training methods. He was merely concerned, in 1945, that he was not as fit as he thought he should be as a football player and was only an occasional and sometimes successful runner. He worried about what he might be like in another decade or two if he did not change his casual and haphazard training, if he continued to kid himself he was fit when he knew he was not.

His experiment to raise his own level of fitness lasted for ten years. He returned to active athletics to measure his progress and, at an age when everyone else was convinced they were too old, became a scratch runner over three miles, a provincial cross-country representative and a contender for national titles. His early competition results revealed flaws in his training so he continued flogging himself through slowly-evolving patterns of exercise until, gradually, the final basic theory emerged – that long, even-paced running at a strong speed produced increasing strength and endurance, even when it was continued close to the point of collapse, and that it was beneficial, not harmful, to regular competition because it enabled the easy absorption of intense speed and strength training later.

Compulsion drove him to further refinements. He battered himself over steep country runs up to 50 km, determined to find the limits of human endurance and, within it, the formula for successful competitive running. He was growing older, but he was growing fitter, so he turned to the marathon and found that by training for marathons he could run even faster on the track. The key was in his hand.

Along the way, he had caught the attention and then the faithful dedication of a number of young runners who lived in his neighbourhood. They shared his enthusiasm and were inspired by his intensity and convictions and, when one of those early pupils, after trailing Lydiard on his runs for two years, whipped a provincial championship field by 80 metres – a gap he established in the first lap – Lydiard was established as a coach. The lad, Lawrie King, went on to be a New Zealand cross-country champion, a six-mile record-holder and a 1954 Commonwealth and Empire Games representative.

Lydiard was by then his country’s top marathon runner, and more people were taking notice of the sophistication and challenge he was bringing to a race long regarded as the occupation of mental deficients.

When, in 1957, he finally retired from competitive running, one of his motley following of youngsters was Murray Halberg. Lydiard had predicted in 1953 that he would become the finest middle-distance runner New Zealand had known, Jack Lovelock included, and, although few then believed him and quite a lot laughed at him, he was right. Seven years after Lydiard made the claim, Halberg thrashed the world in the Olympic 5,000 metres and went on to become a sub-four-minute miler and world record breaker. He, Snell and Magee raced themselves to fame and their coach to immortality.

From then on, Lydiard was in demand all over the world and he was still, in his eighties, a key figure at coaching seminars and as a motivator and mentor of men, women and children in all kinds of sporting activity. He no longer chose to coach athletes but could not resist when youngsters with signs of promise approached him for help; he even scored national and international success with many of them.

So we come back to what I said earlier. The past has established, without question, that Arthur Lydiard remains the best distance coach the world has ever known, never, I believe, to be eclipsed.

Garth Gilmour

Auckland 2017

1. The Physiology of Exercise

When we wrote Running to the Top, the world of running was comparatively small. Jogging, the exercise form which has since turned millions into runners, was about to take off. I had not then delved deeply into physiology as it applied to athletic performance; nor, in fact, was the significance of it as an explanation of, and a guide to, athletic effort widely understood or even under investigation.

Since then, I have been able to add several years of lay study of physiology in conjunction with physiologists and sports medicine institutes to my 48 years’ practical experience as an athlete and coach. It is still impossible to be explicit or exact about the physiological reactions of hard training because, whoever and however many we study, every athlete is a distinct individual with subtly different reactions. But what we have learnt, and are still learning every day, is enough to enable us to lay down, with considerable accuracy, training parameters or guidelines which will help to bring you to maximum efficiency as an athlete.

Fundamentally, my training system is based on a balanced combination of aerobic and anaerobic running. Aerobic running means within your capacity to use oxygen – everyone, according to his or her physical condition, is able to use a limited amount of oxygen each minute. The limit is raised by the proper exercise.

We call the limit the maximum steady state; the level at which you are working to the limit of your ability to breathe in, transport and use oxygen. When you exercise beyond that maximum steady state, your running becomes anaerobic. Chemical changes occur in your body’s metabolism to supply the oxygen you need to supplement what you can breathe in, transport and use. It is a reconversion process with strict limits – again extendable to a known maximum by balanced exercise – so the body is always limited in its anaerobic capacity.

The reaction that takes place to sustain anaerobic running is called ‘oxygen debt’. It can be incurred quickly and is accompanied by the accumulation of lactic acid and other waste products which lead directly to neuromuscular breakdown or, simply, tired muscles that refuse to continue to work as you want them to. That absolute limit when you are exercising anaerobically is an oxygen debt of 15 to 18 litres a minute; but that is a level that the average athlete will not reach until he or she has exercised properly and for long enough.

One feature of the oxygen debt is that, as you run into it, it doubles, squares and cubes. As the speed of running is raised, the oxygen requirement increases with dramatic speed.

Morehouse and Miller’s The Physiology of Exercise records these figures to show the effect:

Morehouse and Miller have also shown that aerobic exercise is 19 times more economical than anaerobic. The more intense the exercise becomes, the faster and less economically the body’s fuel is used and the faster the lactic acid forms.

Having established the basic fundamental of my training system, let us look more closely at the running body. It is not just a matter of working muscles; exercise requires continuing adjustments in respiration, chemical reactions, circulation, temperature-regulating mechanisms, kidney functions and so on. The entire body is involved and affected when you run – one of the reasons why running is such a fine general conditioner.

The effect of lactic acid in the bloodstream is to alter the blood pH – the measure of the blood’s degree of alkalinity or acidity. The neutral point between these two conditions is 7.0 and normal blood pH is between 7.46 and 7.48, or slightly alkaline. Under severe physical tests and hard anaerobic exercise, however, the increase in acidity can lower the level, in extreme cases, to 6.8 or 6.9 and, if it stays at that level, the nutritive system is upset, which destroys or neutralises the benefits of food vitamins and slows general development. The pH range within which vitamins function is small, so any prolonged lowering of the level can be damaging. Enzyme functions are adversely affected, so recovery from training is poor and subsequent training becomes more difficult. A continued lowered pH level can also affect the central nervous system, causing loss of sleep and irritability and, consequently, a lessening of interest in training and competing. This is a physiological reaction which can become seriously psychological. Blood platelets are reduced in number, and the athlete is more susceptible to injury and illness because immunity is weakened.

Your general efficiency and ultimate results in running depend basically on your ability to absorb oxygen from the air, transport it to various muscles and organs and then use it. Most people take into their lungs far more oxygen than they can use because