Flashes of Panic

I will, I promise, come back to that thought about the lack of an omniscient viewpoint in sporting events, but I was at a seminar this afternoon which affected me pretty strongly, and I want to at least explore a bit of why before I lose it. I took a lot of notes, and hopefully they’ll still make sense to me when I have time to write them up.

The seminar almost didn’t happen. It was scheduled for Monday, the 8th, then abruptly cancelled not long before the event. Someone who had planned to attend asked why it was cancelled, and on hearing the reason (no venue) lined up the logistics and rescheduled it for today (Saturday the 6th.) Partly due to the last-minute preparations, the word did not get around, and I was one of maybe six or eight people in attendance.

This was a surprise because the speaker was Arthur Lydiard, a New Zealander who coached four athletes to six medals (four gold) at the Rome and Tokyo Olympics, and taught the coaches of more other gold medalists than I can easily count. One of his direct athletes was Peter Snell, who won the 800m in both Rome and Tokyo, and doubled back to win the 1500m in Tokyo. Lydiard’s methods don’t appear particularly revolutionary, but they’re so effective that nowadays nearly every track coach worth the title uses at least part of his approach. To name just one of his advances, he pioneered the idea of periodizing training to peak for a single goal race.

I’d seen Lydiard speak before. My coach in Pennsylvania was an enthusiastic disciple of his, and on his last American tour in 1999 he made sure Lydiard stopped in Emmaus, where he spoke to a packed room which included our entire training group. Somewhere I’ve got a blurry picture of all of us with him, and a signed copy of his book, Running to the Top. A few weeks later I ran a PR marathon in Columbus, qualified for Boston, and was sold on the program.

Lydiard is nowhere near as spry now as he was then, when he joined us for a few beers after the lecture. (Yes, I’ve had a beer with Arthur Lydiard. Yes, I am a shameless name-dropper. I spent this evening with international magazine editors, a successful playwright and at least one rock star. I am not making this up, but I am presenting it in the most glamourous way possible. But I digress.) He’s had a stroke since he was here last, and is frighteningly wobbly when he walks (he knows this,) and remarkably non-linear when he talks (he doesn’t appear to be aware of this.) His tour manager (for lack of a better title) had a very good presentation set up, and essentially he walked through the presentation as a skeleton and let Lydiard interject stories, examples, and principles as they came up. He provided the structure, and Lydiard provided the rambling.

It worked well, but it seemed to me that this may be the last chance I had to see him. I think I absorbed a lot more of the core principles of his system than I had before, and I’ll try to describe them in a series of posts which are likely to bore you all to tears if you’re not endurance athletes or lunatics, like I am. (Both, thank you.) Unless I can find another good home for my fleshed-out notes, in which case I’ll link to them.

Anyway, the thing which struck me (and, in fact, got me pretty warmed up) was how startlingly simple it all is. Coaching an athlete, developing an athlete, with this system, is almost like baking bread. You add the right things in the right proportions, in the right order, give it enough time, and you get good results. He’s got his share of incongruous add-on results to work around isolated problems (for example, the advice I gave to the Scoplaw some months ago to take calcium and/or magnesium to prevent cramping muscles,) but the bulk of the system is really pretty easy to understand. (Maybe it just seemed that way to me, since I’ve been steeped in it for so long; I think the first real coach I ever had, in high school, worked mostly from Lydiard’s canon.)

But I feel like a lot of coaches who think they understand how to develop athletes—particularly at the high-school level, where there isn’t really a lot of qualification needed to coach—are adapting their own training to their athletes’. And in most cases they don’t really understand the principles behind the specifics, or their own coaches (if they had any) didn’t explain the reasoning behind the system. It looks like there’s an effort on to preserve Lydiard’s legacy; I hope they can contribute to making the sort of presentation I saw today easily accessible.