Experienced runners are familiar with various kinds of training.  They know about long-distance work, fartlek, hill work, sprinting, interval and repetition running.  Additionally, they are probably familiar with concepts such as aerobic and anaerobic work, and maximal oxygen aerobic capacity.  Runners understand how to run these workouts, but usually fail to realize that balanced training is not just a matter of mixing various runs during the week.

Putting together effective training is analogous to assembling a jigsaw puzzle.  You may have all the pieces, but you don’t get the picture until you put them in the right order.  Even many world-class runners do not realize this.  Various training approaches confuse runners because almost any kind of running that places intermittent moderate-to-heavy stress on the athlete will usually result in fairly fast races.  A coach could train a beginning marathoner on nothing but 220s and 440s and get him fairly fit (in fact, Emil Zatopek trained this way and won gold medals in the 1952 Olympic 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon.  But to make a better weekly program, one should mix distance work, intervals and sprints to balance training.  Many runners condition this way and run faster times.

However, merely racing a fast time is not the ultimate goal.  For example, 17 men had faster 5,000m times than Lasse Viren going into the Montreal Olympics, yet no one has beaten him in two Olympic 5,000m and 10,000m.  The reason no one could beat Viren was that his coach balanced his program so that he would peak during the Games.

The concept of timing one’s optimum condition was popularized in the early 1960s by New Zealand’s Arthur Lydiard after he coached gold medal winners who set world records.

Lydiard trained his runners in stages, each built around a specific kind of running.  The first phase for all runners was marathon or distance training, which in the early 1960s was highly unorthodox because it put half-miler and milers on the roads to cover 100 or more miles a week.  Lydiard’s program subsequently became so identified with distance running that many runners and coaches overlooked the ultimate goal.

This article was originally published in “Marathoner”; 1978 Spring issue

A deep-thinking man, Ron