Flashes of Panic

If you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about for the rest of this post, you may want to read my previous posts about Arthur Lydiard, the seminar of his that I went to at the beginning of this month, and my understanding of his training program. This post should make sense without them, but it’s useful to have all the links here in one place.

• A legend in winter
• Notes on the Lydiard seminar: Base training
• Lydiard 2: The hill phase
• Lydiard 3: Drills, springing, bounding, etc.
• Lydiard 4: Speed and anaerobic training
• Lydiard 5: Sharpening, tapering, peaking and recovering

Saturday evening, I had a lengthy discussion with a local runner, B., who is also a strong believer in the Lydiard method, and tried to sort out some of the ideas I’d had about the seminars. One of the things that frustrates me is that this all seems startlingly obvious to me, perhaps because I’ve been trained along roughly similar lines for my whole athletic career; however, plenty of runners, and even many coaches, don’t really understand the basic principles, or are simply unaware that there are basic principles which make sense even if you have your own feelings about how to translate them to actual training. I hinted at this in my column about the seminar.

The presentation we saw at the seminar was the clearest and most understandable explanation of any training program I’ve ever seen. B. agreed that some of the most useful training books he had read were the ones he had to read several times to figure out; it seems that many great coaches are not similarly gifted in one-to-many communication. B. highlighted this by pointing out a book he was able to grasp and put to use immediately: Pete Pfitzinger’s Advanced Marathoning, which is good because Pfitzinger had a co-author, Scott Douglas, who is talented at communicating this sort of thing clearly.

In Lydiard’s case, the communicator was “Nobby” Hashizume of Five Circles, an organization to “promot[e] health, fitness and personal well-being through running.” Hashizume calls the tour “Project Lydiard 21,” preserving Lydiard’s legacy for the 21st century. I didn’t press him for details of how he planned to do it, but I’m a computer geek, and some ideas came to mind.

See, in the computer world we’ve got the example of the open-source movement. The highest-profile example of Open Source Software (OSS) nowadays is Mozilla, which you’re already aware of if you’ve been reading here for long. Mozilla’s model is built around a small core of professionals and a legacy of source code, but the real power of the organization is the massed attention of thousands of volunteers (many of them hackers) around the world, all contributing features, bug-fixes, bug-finding, and even promotion through simple things like links on weblogs.

There are other open-source models; one in particular is the Free Software Foundation (see Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for more on OSS development.) The FSF is responsible for a number of tools and system libraries (the “GNU” in GNU/Linux) which don’t have the massed attention of Mozilla, but are nonetheless free, with the source code readily available for perusal.

I wonder if a parallel could be found somewhere between Mozilla and GNU for Project Lydiard 21—a sort of open-source training reference, if you will. There’s a small core of editors and organizers who keep things together, and a much larger group of volunteers who make the contributions necessary to keep this legacy alive: spreading it, evangelizing it, building the websites, finding bugs, and even “compiling” the system into specific, individual training programs. The “source code” would be maintained by the foundation, but it would be freely available to anyone who wanted to use it and incorporate it in their own work (like the GNU libraries.)

That “freely-available” part is important to me. There are a lot of coaches out there who don’t really know why they do what they do; they just do the workouts the way they always do, put them together haphazardly, and make do. They’re unlikely to go for a certification; USATF Level 1 certification (the most basic) requires a two-and-a-half day seminar costing $150, and if you’ve ever tried to get $150 plus expenses out of a high school (or considered paying it out of your own pocket for the high school’s benefit) you’ll know why so few high-school level coaches will ever be certified. And a book is something some people might understand, but others might be confused by, as my conversation with B. underlined. I really think a free resource would be most useful.

Could enough volunteers hold a foundation like that together? Could a founding “endowment” like the one Mozilla got from AOL (and others) be part of the program? Is there a place for it in the world? I don’t have answers to those questions, and since I don’t know what Nobby has planned anyway, it may be irrelevant. But it seems like a lot of us making small contributions might be able to go farther than a small group hoping to cover the whole distance on their own. And it seems like the open-source model could have applications beyond simply software. Why not mindware?

Now Playing: Everything Means Nothing to Me from Figure 8 by Elliott Smith