Jeremy Donahue of Harrogate, Tennessee, has a query about incorporating alactic leg-speed drills into his high school program.

Great job on the book. Arthur Lydiard’s books were some of the first books I picked up when I began running in high school. Over the years as an athlete I have tried many different approaches however, now as a coach I am trying to follow more of a Lydiardesque plan. Your book is great to explain the principles of Lydiard’s program and how many different approaches can be taken with the Lydiard philosophy at the heart of each program.

Q:

My question in not having much experience with the Alactic Training is how you run these workouts with athletes. I have always been taught strides and performed strides with my athletes to touch on speed year round. However running 20-30 sec. strides at 1500 meter speeds does not seem to accomplish what you explain in the book. Do you have your athletes run shorter sprints at max effort or do they accomplish the work in 100-200 meters building into max effort? Also the fartlek sessions in the base phase (not the sausage sessions described later)do these consist of 10-13 seconds burst of speed or do you subscribe longer workbouts at slower speeds?

Thanks,

Jeremy Donahue.

A:

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for your question. We get our athletes to stride into maximal bursts over 60 metres or less, to keep the energy system primarily alactic. Often done close to the start of a session after a brief warm-up, before moving on to more formal work in some specified zone. I think I’ve explained it in the book in the chapter about our HIT squad, but to clarify things, there’s no-one on the planet who can hold top speed past about 60m. So anything further than that is a bit of a waste of time if we’re training SPEED. Speed is a combination of explosive muscular power (the IIB fast twitch muscle fibres and their neurons) with relaxation. The body loses both power and speed once it leaves the “alactic” time frame and heads into the lactate zones.So we keep the work bouts well under 10 seconds to be very safe. Another reason we don’t go beyond 60m is because the sprinter reaches top speed between 40-60m, then after that it’s a matter of decelerating the least. Why train deceleration?

The excellent thing about training in the alactic zone is that near complete recovery of the “phosphate battery”: the CP system- is possible within a few short minutes of easy recovery. This enables multiple repeats of very high quality to be done, that will likely stimulate only the most specific neuromuscular patterns and the most specific power fibers: the IIB again.

So we get all the benefits without the downsides of longer reps. Exercise much past 100m for the typical athlete will start to trigger the sluggish lactate response, and incrementally raise localized acidosis a little bit each time: Acidosis does not provide a good foundation for developing the neuromuscular patterns of quick and relaxed running, as it affects coordination, and beyond a point the firing of the muscle fiber is affected because it prefers an alkali environment.

Athletes will often run ’strides’ of 20-30 seconds off a curve, but this will not develop that brutal switch down that the very best athletes display. It develops more of a relaxed efficiency at race speeds.

I know Craig Mottram did a lot of work where he strode off the bend, building up to top speed over the last 50m of a 150m run-through. Snell did the same.

In fartlek sessions part of the work can be “speed play” with work bouts that may extend well past the 60m sprint, but the trick here is to keep the vast majority of the session in the aerobic or high aerobic zones, and as long as there are a few short sharp bursts in there a stimulus to the IIB fibres is still there.

Because middle distance requires the IIA fibres to be trained as well, a little bit of a stimulus in a fartlek session is OK, and it’s common sense to keep in touch with all these muscle fibre recruitment patterns and their relevant energy systems.

‘Keep in touch with’ means a little prod here and there, and as long as the aerobic recoveries are extensive, and the workbouts don’t flog the lactate system too much, we’ll be moving forward with our aerobic development without damaging the enzyme systems.

As I said in the book, it’s impossible to keep entirely out of the lactate zones in a base period, especially in a hilly region; when we ran the weekly Waiatarua hill circuit there was a very steep and sustained incline of about 5km that ensured the heart rate hovered around threshold the whole way. But the other 30km was pretty relaxed and undulating, so we really had a 6:1 ratio of aerobic: sub-threshold/threshold work in that weekly run.