My father used to be interested in horse racing, and he was a friend of one of the most successful trainers in the North East. When I met him, I took the opportunity to talk about his training methods. I was shocked at how little his horses did compared to runners. The regime he and other trainers used sounded very old fashioned to me, so I did some research, and wrote an article comparing the development of athletic performance with that of horse racing. I compared the world record for the mile with the winning time in the Derby. I thought that was fair because the Derby has been run over the same course for well over a century and always attracted the very best horses.
Walter George broke the world record for the mile in 1886, when he ran 4 minutes 12.75 seconds. In 1999 the record was reduced to 3:43:13 by Hicham El Guerrouj. That is an improvement of about 29 seconds, which is 12%. The winner of the Derby in 1910 ran it in 2 minutes 35 seconds. The winner in 2008 took 2:36, and the fastest time in recent years is 2:32. With the exception of a few years where the race has been run slowly, the Derby is always won between 2:32 and 2:36. In other words, there has been no improvement at all in the last hundred years.
In my article, I suggested this difference might be down to training methods. If it was possible to train a horse to show the same improvement as humans had done, you could win the Derby by over 200 yards; or you could take a horse that was simply decent, and turn it into a Derby winner.
I was very naïve at the time because I sent this article off to a horse-racing magazine that my dad used to read, simply hoping to be published. Of course, it was never published because whoever opened the envelope would have realised that if what I was saying was true, it would be worth millions of pounds to the trainer who could achieve it. I heard nothing more about the article, but a little while later some of the best-known running coaches started getting phone calls from Newmarket’s finest racing yards.
It is over thirty years since I wrote that article, and the winning time for the Derby still hasn’t changed at all. The reason is probably that horses in the Derby are all three year olds, and they don’t have time to go through the long process of development that runners use. I should have concentrated on winners of the Grand National, which are typically nine or ten years old. Perhaps horses just cannot be developed in the same way as humans, who continue to run faster thanks to ever-improving training methods. This human progress at middle distance running can be traced to the ideas of a small number of pioneering coaches.
The work of Harry Andrews is not well known, but it is interesting. His book Training for Athletics, and Health was first published in 1903; my copy is the fourth edition which appeared in 1911, suggesting this was a popular book at the time.
Harry Andrews was clearly a successful coach. His methods produced athletes whose performances live forever in the annals of athletics’ history. Who could forget such famous names as Frank Shoreland, Blatt Betts and Montague Holbein? No, I haven’t heard of them either, but I have heard a lot about his star pupil, Alfred Shrub, who set world records at every distance from one and a half miles to the hour run.
Alf and the boys used to do all their training on the track. It was regarded as inappropriate to run through the streets in 1903, and of course, this was 70 years pre-Nike so the footwear wasn’t suitable for too much road running. Walking was the basis of the Andrews’ training system; lots of brisk walking, at least four to six miles per day, before breakfast, before lunch, before supper and before retiring. Running was reserved for two or three occasions per week, and was always related to the racing distance.
A typical schedule for any distance up to six miles would be:
For two weeks, three times a week:
1 mile further than race distance at ¾ speed.
For the next two weeks, three times a week:
½ race distance at your best speed
On one day in this period:
Race distance trial at your best effort. (I wonder how many world records Alfred Shrub set that didn’t count, because he did them in training.)
Extremely long races were popular at the time, and for everything over 15 miles, he suggested 7 or 8 miles, three times per week. Certain stimulants were in common use at the time, but Andrews felt that the use of strychnine was overrated, and cocaine lozenges were definitely not a good idea! He did recommend some substances in the closing stages of very long races. His favourite was half a sponge cake soaked in champagne, 25 minutes before the end. This could be followed 10 minutes later with a third of a tumbler of wine to ensure a strong finish.
He clearly didn’t expect his athletes to be teetotal, but smoking was not allowed, and being the correct weight was vital. The most gifted athlete he ever saw was W. G. George, whose world mile record, which I mentioned earlier, was a performance that he thought would probably never be beaten.
His book contains advice for everyone, and he says, ‘I believe that there are very few people who would not derive benefit from a moderate course of training. A walk before breakfast is in my opinion worth all the medicine in the world. To the average individual it will be a hard and gruelling task for the first fortnight; but let him take heart from this very fatigue, for it is the surest proof that he is in need of what he is doing.’ So, here is a man, from over a century ago, with advice that if heeded would probably have prevented the epidemics of obesity, heart disease and diabetes that now afflict us.
Dr Woldemar Gerschler made his mark on the sport about thirty years after Andrews. Gerschler was a professor of physical education in Freiburg, Germany. In contrast to Andrews’ steady running around the track, he developed a method of running short distances at high intensity, repeated often, with short breaks and incomplete recovery. In other words, he invented interval training. His methods were first made famous by Rudolf Harbig who, in 1939, set a world record for 800m of 1:46.6, which stood for 16 years.
In interval training, speeds are constantly practised that are faster than the runner’s race pace. This speed training increases the ability of the body to run with an oxygen debt, and the runner learns to run hard in a state of fatigue. The runs are over 100 and 200 meters, with occasional use of 400 meters, and the efforts have to be intense. The number of times the runs are repeated depends upon the fitness of the runner, but at least 10 and up to 40 repetitions could be used in a session.
The interval between each effort was the important thing. Gerschler worked with cardiologist, Herbert Reindel, to establish the Gerschler-Reindel Law to determine the length of an interval. ‘The running effort in interval training should send the heart rate to around 180 beats per minute. From this point, the heart is allowed 90 seconds to return to 120–125 beats per minute. If the latter takes longer, the effort has been either too violent or too long. When the pulse returns to 120–125 beats per minute, the runner should begin running again, even if it takes less than 90 seconds to recover.’
Apparently, there are people who enjoy a bit of Germanic regimentation, coupled with physical pain, but going to the track everyday to run fast repetitions until you can’t do it any more doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me.
In 1947 another German, Dr Ernst van Aaken, published his pure-endurance training method for long distance runners. It is completely different to interval training, but just as one-dimensional.
Van Aaken believed that man has the speed but not the endurance to run well, and that two to six years of endurance training, good physical condition and light body weight are essentials. Light body weight was one of his obsessions. He coached Harold Norpoth, who was the most emaciated man ever to win an Olympic medal. He recommended athletes to eat small quantities of highly nutritious foods. That sounds fair enough – but how small? For six days a week very small, and on the seventh, you were to eat nothing at all. Of course, alcohol was out, and you were advised not even to look at a cream cake.
Van Aaken believed that since oxygen was needed for a fire to burn, it was also needed to burn off fat. He also believed that athletes should never dip into their reserves, except when racing, and therefore, if you ran without getting breathless, your heart was pumping lots of oxygen-rich blood around your body, burning calories and increasing your endurance, all without making you too tired. He recommended daily doses of this, depending upon your condition, of between six and fifty miles!
Mihaly Igloi produced a group of world record breaking Hungarians in the 1950s, and then moved to America and repeated his feat in the early 60s. However, he had little success after that.
Like Gerschler, he had his athletes on the track every day, but he used repetitions instead of intervals. The difference is that he believed the distance run was more important than the rest in between, and so, for his athletes to maintain their pace over a repeated distance, they could take longer rests as they tired. He didn’t write training schedules because all his training was on a personal basis.
Igloi, like Gerschler and van Aaken, had some success because there is some validity in their methods, but their results have been left far behind, because they are so one-dimensional.
The man to solve that problem was Arthur Lydiard of New Zealand. He was the first coach to introduce a long-range training plan with distinct periods of different training. It was all designed to bring an athlete to peak performance for the most important race of the year. It worked extremely well, as a number of his athletes proved with their collection of Olympic medals in the 1960s. Lydiard was a decent runner, and he developed his system after experimenting on himself, and then on other runners.
There are three phases to his method:
Marathon Training – Whether you are training for the marathon or the mile, you need as much endurance as possible, and this you get from running as many miles as your ability will allow. He recommends a variety of terrain and pace during this phase, but it must include lots of long runs.
Hill Training – This phase lasts six weeks. The idea is to add specific leg and ankle strength to your highly developed basic conditioning. The ideal hill is both steep and long, and you are supposed to bound up it with an exaggerated knee lift and extensive push from the ankles. This is done three times a week, and on alternate days you work on leg speed. Lots of short sprints, especially on a slight downhill gradient, will reduce the ‘viscosity of the muscles’ and prepare you for the work required in the third phase. On the seventh day you do a long easy run to maintain the endurance you built up in phase one.
Speed Training – This is another six-week period that develops speed and puts the final racing edge to all the work you have already done. It consists of a steadily increasing, and balanced intensity of track repetitions, which teach you to run faster and cope with fatigue.
These were all the options when I joined the sport, and a runner, or his coach, had a lot of decisions to make. He had to decide how many miles to run; how many hills to do; how many intervals and repetitions to run; what speed to run; what rest to take; and how much sponge cake soaked in champagne to consume. When I started training it was only five years after Lydiard’s most famous athlete, Peter Snell, had won the 800 metre/1500 metre double at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and most people were adopting his methods.
I followed Lydiard’s basic methods for years, but with only limited success. Throughout all those years, when I was running alright but not fulfilling myself, I was doing a winter of steady running to build endurance, and then having two problems when I tried to sharpen for track races. I often suffered injury when I started running faster, and it would take me a long time and several track races to get any quicker.
I think Lydiard’s method worked wonderfully for someone like Snell, who was naturally very fast, and just needed to add endurance to his speed, but someone devoid of real speed, like me, needed to maintain some faster running all the time. I discovered the importance of this during my year in Boston, when after doing a few indoor track sessions, I ran 13:42 for 5,000 metres in January, and went on to have a good summer. Some faster running throughout the year did two things for me: firstly, it kept my muscles attuned to the extra stress of faster running, resulting in less stiffness and fewer injuries; secondly, it improved my lactic acid tolerance.
Lactic acid is a by-product of muscular energy production without sufficient oxygen. It causes the stinging pain in the muscles when you run fast for too long, and it is a major limiting factor in middle to long distance running performance. Without fully realising it at the time, I was training my biochemical systems to deal with lactic acid when I was doing my winter track sessions at my 5,000 metre race pace.
For years I, and most other runners, had a simplistic approach: run a lot of miles to develop endurance, and then run fast to develop speed; put the two together and race well. When training like this, I ran dozens of track races where I was going well, but would fade badly over the last two or three laps. I always thought I needed to do more speed work to make me faster, but I was wrong. I didn’t need speed I needed lactic acid tolerance. We all used to run slowly for stamina, and quickly for speed, and think we were ready to race, but we rarely trained at race pace.
Training at race pace develops the specific bio-chemical systems and enzymes that deal with lactic acid at that intensity. Your body is badly equipped to do that, if a race is the first time you run at that pace. Lactate tolerance training is one of two developments that have taken performances on to new levels. The other is aerobic threshold running, which I mention later. Lactate tolerance works by running repetitions on the track at your race pace, and increasing these sessions, so that you can run further and further into your race distance without suffering from oxygen debt. These sessions can be carefully controlled by taking fingertip blood tests in between the efforts and measuring the levels of lactate in the blood. There are hand held machines available that can produce a reading in 45 seconds, from just one drop of blood.
A certain amount of lactate is produced at low levels of exercise, and the concentration at which it usually starts to become a problem is 4 millimoles (mmols) per litre of blood. A well-trained runner can often run 5,000m at 7, 8 or 9 mmols, and the great athletes, who can sprint the last lap of such a race, can push the level up to anything from 14 to 20 mmols.
By training at race pace, you can develop the ability to run with high concentrations of blood lactate, and maintain your pace. During a track session at race pace the level of blood lactate should be almost constant, and increase only slightly. If it goes up rapidly, the session is too hard. If it doesn’t increase at all, it is too easy. When you can perform a session at almost constant lactate levels, you are ready to add the final stage of race preparation, which consists of tolerance to extreme levels of lactate, which you need for the last lap. This is achieved by very fast running with very short recovery. It needs to be the final stage of training, because it will quickly make you over-trained and over the top if you don’t have the race pace lactate tolerance that comes before it. And, of course, you also have to have a lot of aerobic endurance too.
I used to do some runs that involved a sustained effort at high intensity, because it felt the right thing to do. This type of training has developed considerably since my day, thanks to advances in technology.
The aerobic threshold run has become a vital component in the development of runners. It involves running for 20 to 25 minutes at a speed that is right on the edge of your aerobic ability. In other words, you don’t get out of breath, but any faster and you would. These sessions push back the threshold, and allow you to run further and faster, before you get into oxygen debt and start to produce too much lactic acid. The effort required is related to your heart rate, and after determining your heart rate at the threshold, you can perform these runs with the help of a heart rate monitor. Lindsay Dunn pioneered the use of heart rate monitors in relation to these sessions, and developed a method to gauge an athlete’s threshold, without the need for laboratory tests.
A heart rate monitor consists of a thin elasticated strap around the chest, containing a sensor that transmits the heart rate to a digital display on the runner’s wrist. While wearing this device, Lindsay has his runners perform a 20 to 25 minute run at their half marathon race pace. After eight minutes of running, when bodily systems should be stabilised, the runner checks their pace over a measured distance, and then checks it again after about nineteen minutes of running. The two measured sections are to ensure the run is performed at a constant pace, and at the correct pace. If the pace is constant, the heart rate should increase by a few beats per minute as the athlete becomes more tired. Typically, a runner will record 160 beats per minute during this run. In the latter stages it should go up to about 163. If this happens, a runner can confidently accept their aerobic threshold is reached at 160 beats per minute. If the heart rate doesn’t increase at all. the effort is too low, and if it goes up too much, the effort is too hard. Lindsay reckons it only ever takes two or three attempts to establish an accurate threshold level.
He credits these threshold runs with a great deal of the improvement in many of his athletes. When they handle these sessions well, he introduces a variation in which the session starts at 5 beats per minute below threshold, then increases to threshold pace, and finishes at 5 beats above threshold pace. He can be mean like that!
The conventional wisdom on altitude training is well known. At altitudes higher than 2,000 metres above sea level there is less air pressure, and therefore less oxygen. When you live and train there, your body compensates for the lack of oxygen by increasing the production of red blood cells. This acclimatisation takes about three weeks. When you return to sea level, the extra red cells have increased your oxygen carrying capacity, and, therefore, your performance should improve.
The disadvantages of high altitude running are caused by the lack of oxygen. It is impossible to train at the same intensity and speed that you would have done at sea level. This has led some athletes to spend extended periods of time at altitude, running everything quite slowly. I do not understand how training to run slowly makes you a better runner, despite achieving the holy grail of an increased haematocrit. (Haematocrit is a measure of red blood cell concentration.)
Lindsay Dunn has a different approach to all of this and I agree with him. Lindsay has taken several groups of athletes to altitude and invariably had success. His approach is to reduce the distances but run quickly in both the steady runs and track sessions. Neither can be done as quickly as they would be at sea level, but a fast pace, with reduced oxygen, produces a considerable training effect upon the entire cardiovascular system, from the pumping heart to the chemical processes at cellular level. When you return to sea level you can train the muscular and nervous systems to run faster because the cardiovascular system is no longer such a limiting factor. To achieve this progress at sea level requires such hard training that it risks injury.
Most coaches will say that it is pointless going to altitude for less than three weeks. If all you want to do is maximise red blood cells they are right, but with Lindsay Dunn’s approach, you can gain benefits in as few as ten days.
All the progress I have mentioned has come from challenging the conventional wisdom of the time, and learning from what others are doing. In a constant search for improvement, good coaches will look beyond their own ideas and learn from the methods of successful athletes. I was always a little surprised that nobody asked me how I prepared for the Olympic marathon in the heat of Los Angeles. (Nobody asked me, apart from Lindsay who took a photocopy of my entire 1984 training diary.) I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I don’t know if other runners were already doing the same thing, but one of the most important sessions I did was a 15 mile run at three quarter effort. I felt that I had to get used to maintaining a brisk pace over an extended distance, and I ran intuitively at a pace that was brisk, but sustainable, for 15 miles. To run like that for 20 miles would be too hard, and to run for 10 miles would lack relevance for the marathon. I always thought this session was an important part of my training.
Several years later, a group of Italian scientists and coaches produced an article in which they claimed that the regular use of a 90 minute run at a blood lactate level of 3 mmols was a primary reason for the success of Italian marathon runners. (They have produced two Olympic champions, in 1988 and 2004.) If you remember from earlier, 4 mmols of lactate is generally the aerobic threshold, so this run should be performed at three quarters of that effort, which is precisely what I had been doing.
My point in highlighting this is not to make myself look clever: the point is that I was doing something that was later proved by science to be the right thing to do, and there must be other people having success because they are doing something that is just right for their event. The sharing of knowledge and innovation pushes forward the performance of athletes. If your coach thinks he knows everything, my advice is simple – get another coach.
I had problems with my Achilles tendons throughout my career, and I have already gone through some of the gory details of the surgery I underwent. I spent a great deal of time, and quite a bit of money, lying on treatment tables with ultra sound and infra red equipment applied to my tendonitis, without very much success. I was treated using the conventional wisdom of the time, but nowadays there is a new approach that I am certain would have helped me to avoid the problems and surgery I endured.
Specialists in sports injuries now appreciate that pain in one location is often caused by a problem somewhere else. My tendons were sore, so my tendons were treated, but it didn’t work well because the real problems were tightness and scar tissue in my calf muscles. The reduced mobility in my calves transferred the stress to my tendons, making them sore. Modern treatment would involve massage deep into the muscle to break down the tightness and scar tissue, which would relieve the pressure on the tendon.
I had weekly deep massage when I was in America and avoided serious injury. If I had been able to have it throughout my career, I would have had far fewer interruptions to my training, and I could have been a better runner.
My career improved enormously when I developed a new mental approach. I had no expertise in sports psychology; I just cobbled my ideas together from things I had read, how I felt and what seemed to work. When I got it right, it worked extremely well, but I didn’t always get it right. If I’d had a sports psychologist working with me before the Commonwealth Games and the 1987 London marathon, I am positive I would have done much better in those events. Nobody had sports psychologists in those days, but they do now. British Cycling regards their psychologist as an essential member of the team. Athletics needs to follow their lead.
If I, or any of my contemporaries, were running now we would have fewer serious injuries thanks to the progress in treatment. We would be able to train more scientifically, thanks to the developments in training, technology and psychology. We would have less pressure to earn a living, thanks to the money that is available through lottery funding. With all these benefits I believe that most, if not all, the British runners I competed against would have produced faster times if they were running now, than they did in the 1980s.
So why, why, why, are today’s best British runners running slower times than we did twenty to thirty years ago?