October 1964 and it’s the Tokyo Olympics. New Zealander Peter Snell is competing in the 800m where he aims to repeat as Olympic champion. Since winning in Rome four years earlier, he has broken the world record in the 800m, 880yd, 1000m and mile. In the final he runs 1:45.1 to win by half a second.
August 2021 and it’s the pandemic delayed Tokyo Olympics. In the 800m final, Kenya’s Emmanuel Korir takes gold in 1:45.06 – just four-hundredths of a second quicker than Snell had run almost sixty years before.
Snell’s 800m world record of 1:44.3 is barely a couple of seconds behind David Rudisha’s record of 1:40.91sec. While modern runners are capable of running quicker times they aren’t that much faster. In Snell’s era he had the disadvantage of running on tracks which were still either grass or cinder and wearing shoes which didn’t involve hightech carbon footplates.
All too often I see complicated training plans and methods being targeted at recreational runners and find myself thinking it was all so much simpler in Snell’s day. His coach, Arthur Lydiard, is renowned for revolutionising running with 100 mile weeks and periodised training. The interval training methods which allowed Roger Banister to become the first sub-4 minute miler were still used, but only for a short part of the year while the remainder was spent building the aerobic base.
This isn’t going to be a deepdive into Lydiard’s method – just some things I want you to consider about the circumstances and era in which his runners trained. Perhaps there is something we can learn from how runners trained in the 1960 particularly if we’re still only recreational or sub-elite runners.
While I have no firsthand experience of the era because I was born in the 1970s, the society I grew up in was still structured in much the same ways. Colour television had only just become the norm, we walked to school where there was no national curriculum. Home computers, games consoles and the internet were still science fiction. As kids we played outside, climbing trees and playing football on the street until it was time for tea or it got dark.
I didn’t get my first digital watch until the 1980s, own a wireless heart-rate monitor until the 1990s, see a GPS watch until the 2000s or start using Strava until the 2010s. I’ve yet to own a smartwatch or download a phone app which can track my sleep, breathing rate or measure any number of other variables.
My grandfather, born in 1897, owned a pocket watch which I now have tucked away in a drawer. When my dad turned eighteen my grandfather gave him a gold wristwatch as a birthday present. These watches were hand wound daily because there was no battery power. I doubt my dad would ever have risked playing sport wearing his wristwatch – it was too valuable. I’d imagine that’s true of Lydiard’s guys who ran in the 1960s. While coaches had stopwatches for timing athletes at the track, distance runners were left to approximate the distance of their runs and log it in a notebook if they were so inclined. There definitely wasn’t a Strava upload for Kudos!
The closest they came to heart-rate training was counting their pulse at the end of an interval effort. Distance runners just went out and ran. For me this might be the most significant difference between modern runners and those of Lydiard’s generation. They had very little data available to them and they just ran to feel.
There was no concept of training by heart-rate because a distance runner couldn’t run along counting his pulse. Consequently you never heard a runner return from a run and say “That was a zone 2 training run”. They just went out and ran.
Those runners didn’t have smartwatches telling them how much time was required for recovery before their next hard effort. They didn’t rely on a watch to tell them how much sleep they got. They just listened to their bodies and if they weren’t feeling great backed off.
They didn’t have GPS telling them the current pace or breaking down mile splits, so they never went for runs at say “Marathon” or “Easy” pace. While Threshold runs, Tempo runs and Progression runs were a thing of the future; they did vary their daily distance runs. Lydiard had a simple fractional system to indicate the effort to use – 1/4, 1/2, 3/4s or on a Time Trial it was 7/8ths.
In compiling 100 mile weeks, Lydiard’s runners were typically running 10-15 miles every day with a long run of 22 miles on a hilly course on Sundays. They didn’t have gels or hydration packs. They just ran and let their bodies adapt to the training. If the body runs out of fuel it adapts by being able to store more muscle glycogen. Not only this but by doing all these miles they were teaching the body to burn more fats and the glycogen more efficiently.
While I’m not advising any recreational runner to start doing 100 mile training weeks, training more frequently is helpful. By training seven days per week, Lydiard’s runners rarely got to run feeling fresh and rested. That forced them to listen to their bodies and slow the pace on the days they were tired.
Of course, lifestyles in the 1960s were different with a standard 9-5 working day and fewer entertainment options in the evening outside of watching television or going to the pub! Generally modern runners have many more things competing for attention in their lives and it is only the most dedicated marathoners who run every day and log big mileage. Nonetheless running more frequently, even if only for a short time or distance has benefits.
These days runners start with a goal in mind – they want to run a 5K or complete a marathon and the distance becomes the focus of their training. Runners in Lydiard’s day started as track athletes contesting races of a mile or less. If you weren’t a good sprinter, maybe you had enough speed for middle distance – races lasting less than five minutes. They had strong legs, big hearts and powerful lungs, strengthened in the winter by cross-country. As they got older, runners moved up to longer distances and finally the marathon. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to run long distance immediately – after all parkruns, 10Ks and marathons are the most accessible races to enter. But the tendency of modern runners is to value training for distance over building speed first.
There’s no doubt with 100-mile weeks, Lydiard’s runners ran distance but that all ended when the track season came around. For three to four months they would focus on rebuilding their speed. Many modern runners are now so focused on their races that they never set aside time to build speed. They’ve got distance races booked in one after another and all too often there’s a marathon on the horizon which definitely doesn’t give them much scope for improving speed. Many training plans and systems try to work on speed and distance at the same time but I contend that it’s very difficult for a sub-elite runner who hasn’t already maximise their speed previously to do this.
We live in different times. Times where runners are marketed gadgets, nutrition, training plans and races. Runners of the past didn’t have these yet they somehow managed to be almost as fast as runners of today.
They didn’t have watches or apps to tell them how they felt. They didn’t take gels or hydration packs on training runs. Their training was simply to go out and run hard or easy every day to build stamina in the winter before heading to the track for speedwork in the summer as the racing season approached. Many modern elite runners still do these things with the gadgets supporting training, not defining it. Recreational runners often don’t and maybe it’s time for them to reconsider whether they’re helped or hindered by a modern lifestyle.