Flashes of Panic

(If you missed them, and are curious: Parts one, two and three.)

Speed training for endurance athletes has, since the middle of the last century, focused on intervals, which can be roughly explained as running fast for a while, recovering, running fast again. There are then a few zillion ways to refine the details: how long are the efforts? How fast? How many? How long are the recovery periods? Does the athlete continue running at an easy pace during the recoveries, or walk, or stand, wheeze, and look vaguely at their watch? The answers vary according to the athlete, the coach, the target race, and how much the coach has read about physiology. (The variance has led one of my running circle to drop a “w” and refer to this as “speedork.”)

The time was that intervals were the exclusive method of training for distance runners. (For swimmers, even distance swimmers, they still are.) Roger Bannister trained almost exclusively on intervals, as did many of his contemporaries. However, when Lydiard-coached Murray Halberg was planning his 5,000m race at the Rome Olympics in 1960, Lydiard pointed out that the interval-trained runners tended to run hard for a certain amount of time, then invariably backed off, because they weren’t used to sustaining their effort over the full distance of the race. Accordingly, Halberg worked his way from the back of the race until he was fourth or fifth, then when he detected a slight slackening of the pace with several laps remaining, he pushed hard and opened an unbeatable lead. Halberg had been training with regular time-trials over the race distance, and he knew what he could do and when he could do it.

(It’s interesting to note that Bob Schul, the American athlete who won the same race in 1964 in Tokyo, was trained by Mihaly Igloi, a Hungarian coach who trained world-class athletes almost entirely on intervals.)

The use of time trials to gauge the state of training is one of Lydiard’s additions to speed training, but while he’s dismissive of total reliance on intervals, his athletes did use them. The biggest difference was that they built up to them, building a base, then adding hills, then drills before finally reaching real speed work. Even then, Lydiard favors avoiding tracks; he much prefers a long loop laid out on trails or around playing fields.

One reason for this arms-length handling of speed is that an excessive reliance on anaerobic training can actually cut in to an athlete’s aerobic base. If the speed phase is too long, the aerobic benefits of the base phase wither away, and it is nearly impossible to train for both while properly recovering from each training run. So there’s a penalty to starting speedwork too soon. This goes along with the idea that the anaerobic system has a hard limit to how far it can be trained; once you hit that limit, you’re ready to race, and you’d best not be too far away from your target race.

This was not a primary focus of the seminar, because speed training has been very thoroughly explored by many different coaches, and the innovations Lydiard made in training methods did not, for the most part, come in this area.

(One more to go: sharpening and laying out a training program.)