Flashes of Panic

There are too many things to write about, but since nearly everyone else has some sort of qualifying cross-country meet tomorrow, I’ve got running on my brain. On my way out of the pool this morning (I crashed on the last 6x50y set) I stopped by the cross-country coach’s office to offer my good-luck wishes for their regional meet (qualifying for Nationals) tomorrow, and wound up talking about plantar fasciitis for half an hour. (He’s been there, done that, and had the surgery.) Alison’s girls have their regional meet (qualifying for States) tomorrow as well. One hopes the snow we’re still getting has mostly thawed, not that a little snow ever got in the way of good cross-country.

But I keep remembering bits and pieces of Lydiard, and since I seem to have a column next week, I should get the ideas in order. Perhaps if I regurgitate a few thousand words here, I can distill it all to a few hundred for the column.

As I understand it, the biggest concept in the Lydiard training system deals with a pair of very basic physiological processes. We produce fuel-energy through a very efficient process which uses oxygen (and is therefore referred to as the aerobic process) and a wasteful and waste-producing process which doesn’t use oxygen (and is therefore called anaerobic). When the lungs and heart can’t send oxygen to the muscles as fast as it’s being used, the anaerobic process kicks in; endurance athletes call this “going anaerobic.” It’s like seeing the fuel light in your car: you’re still moving, but not for long.

Marathoners talk about “hitting the wall,” but it’s different; marathoners seldom, if ever, go anaerobic, and their wall has more to do with a lack of food-fuel (glycogen) than a lack of oxygen. Sprinters, particularly swimmers and quarter-milers, call it “rigging up” or talk about “when the bear jumped on my back.” That’s when the consequences of going anaerobic hit. “I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid,” goes the Fight Club quote.

You can’t push back that wall. However, according to the Lydiard system, you can improve your ability to work while staying aerobic. (Let’s not argue about “aerobic capacity” or “Max VO₂”, and whether those can change, because that’s not the argument; it’s what you can do with the oxygen you get.) Your anaerobic ability is only trainable to a certain point, but over the course of three to five years, you can develop your aerobic capacity so it takes longer to go anaerobic, or so you can cover more ground faster before you decide to go anaerobic.

The classic example of this is Peter Snell. Snell was a half-miler; he held the world and Olympic records at the 800m distance and won two consecutive gold medals. But he trained like a marathoner. Snell, Lydiard said, had the most natural speed of anyone he’d ever trained. Lydiard gave him such an aerobic base that with a half-lap to go, the rest of the field was beginning to feel the burn, and Snell was still fresh. In the video clips we saw, most of the athletes were beginning to show the signs of the bear on the backstretch; Snell’s stride was still long and loose. It was obvious that he still had speed left to use.

So, there’s the basis of the system: develop the aerobic base. The popular perception is that this means hundred-mile weeks, and it can, if you’re that fast, but the real idea is time-based rather than distance-based: you’re not supposed to worry about distance covered, but to just go out and run easily for as long as it’s comfortable. When it stops being comfortable, you stop running. When you’re starting from nothing, this can mean fifteen or twenty minutes a day; eventually, you start needing shorter days for full recovery (say, alternating half-hour and hour days, just as an example. I’m horrible at deriving realistic examples from the general concepts, by the way.) Eventually you’re hitting two-hour and longer runs on the weekends. Maybe it takes you two hours to cover ten miles, but you’re getting the same aerobic benefit as the Olympians who cover twenty in two hours.

And here there’s a neat argument for running to time and not distance. If you try running to distance, and you’re fast, you may actually get away without as much work as you need; you may run too fast and get done early, for instance. If the point is to run for two hours, cover two hours; don’t do a sixteen-mile route and be proud of yourself for running an hour-fifty, because you’ve shortchanged yourself ten minutes of aerobic development. Likewise, if you’re running twelve-minute miles, a sixteen-miler is just going to beat you up; ten miles gets you two hours and the same benefit as the fast guy got.

The aerobic base takes a long time to build. Lydiard’s marathon program suggests ten weeks, but he reiterated that successive programs get progressively better results; Snell, he said, was his fastest developer, reaching world-class in “only” three years. Truly, a sport of patience.

I’ve just started, of course.