In the Lydiard format,once true fitness in the aerobic sense is achieved, there comes a need to prepare the body for the rigours of extensive racing out of the aerobic comfort zones. Middle distance racing is very hard on the body, and to race well, one has to have enough endurance, speed-endurance, and speed, and the more of each the better! These respectively relate to the Type 1 slow twitch, type IIA oxidative fast twitch (lactic acid producing!) and IIB fast twitch (alactic) muscle fibres and energy systems. It is this last set of fibres that perhaps benefit most from hill exercises after months of more steady state work. Hopefully they’ve been ‘kept going’ through the base period with weekly strides, but hill exercises will do more again!

But where to start? A gradual transition into this new form of work with ‘no nasty surprises’ is always the Lydiard way of doing things. It just so happens that one of the best ways to prepare the athlete going into the final sharpening phase is by gradually working in ‘hill exercises’ several days a week, while maintaining aerobic development with one or two longer runs each week as well. These are basically form drills that are performed uphill. Lydiard ended up with three types of hill exercise, each with a different purpose.

1.Steep Hill Running- slow forward progress with accentuated full leg and foot extension with each stride

2. Hill Bounding- long bounding strides like a triple jumper, concentrating on full rear leg extension

3. Hill springing- very slow forward progress, with most movement coming from the ankle flexors.

In addition to these exercises, the downhill slopes were utilized for fast striding with high turnover.

For more on these, you’ll have to read Pages 108 onwards in the book!

Hill exercises can stimulate the nervous system far more than anticipated, as even mild bounding uphill has a very excitatory effect on the neuromuscular system. These days, this principle is known as ‘plyometric exercise’, and everyone from the pony-tailed ‘Personal Trainer’ to the Russian sports scientist knows about it, however it was first worked into an organized, periodized approach well over 55 years ago!

We’ll start with THE GREAT SECRET of middle distance training. Your body is actually very very intelligent, and can adapt beautifully to new workloads and higher intensities if trained very hard, SPARINGLY, after having developed a wonderfully dense capillary bed throughout the working muscles beforehand. For every very intense training session required to sharpen an athlete to his or her current racing potential, we will be very wise to have several very easy recovery sessions. The body is not such a stupid automaton that it needs to be belted with hard session after hard session just to be able to get the message that a suitable training response is required. If it is well-prepared and healthy, it just needs an occasional well-chosen injection of more intense work with very specific intensities, paces, work volumes and recoveries to get the message and adapt in due course. Your super-intelligent body will adapt to anything you give it; even week-in, week-out hard repetitions at faster than 800m race speeds. It certainly won’t thrive on them for very long- it’ll just cope with them, or make you injured so as to repair itself, or make you sick so you have to rest. Not ideal at all. It knows what it needs, even if your conscious brain doesn’t!

As an analogy, if someone comes along and speaks quietly in your ear with a certain message, are you going to be able to remember it better or worse than if the same message is delivered several times with a megaphone right in your earhole? Beyond a point that is individual to each of us depending on our training background, health, and genetics, there are diminishing returns. I’d rather train an already very aerobically-fit athlete with a hint of intense work at race-specific speeds with plenty of recovery, than do a ’stellar’ session, anytime. A ’stellar’ session may occur when good circumstances align and the athlete has one of those ‘excellent’ high-energy days. The trouble is that a ’stellar’ session that is above the realistic pace to be held in training is likely to deplete deep energy reserves at the cost of progress.

The athlete and coach should have the good sense and confidence to just trust that an already-fit body will adapt extremely well to a boringly ’solid’ session. Physically and psychologically, there is ‘nowhere to go’ from a too-intense session. Time spent training in that danger zone is basically a complete waste of time and fraught with health and injury risks. The trouble here is that we all have the capacity to train harder than our current level of development would indicate is prudent. Progress is made in a boring ‘brick-in-the-wall’ progression where we really are not after any stellar sessions.

Next post:getting ready for the big races! How we get ready.

OK: what we haven’t gone through so far is that the body seems to respond best to ‘regular variety’ in ‘aerobic’ conditioning. In other words, experimentation by Arthur Lydiard and his athletes over many years indicated that as long as the great majority of exercise was well within the realms of comfort, without distress, then the body responded best to a weekly schedule that had set types of workouts on set days, and within the week a good variety of surfaces, locations, and topography. The key staple of his program was the weekly long run; ideally 2 hours or more, once a week, for a mature athlete. His athletes in Auckland ran the 22-mile (35 km) ‘Waiatarua’ circuit every weekend. This circuit of the ranges to the west of Auckland had a climb of about a thousand feet (300 metres) which got very steep over the last few minutes, and then progressed to an undulating run along the ridges of the range before descending back into the western suburbs.

A typical week during an aerobic conditioning phase could have a bit of spontaneous fartlek running (speedier running interspersed with recovery jogs) over parkland in the middle of the week, sandwiched between several days with medium-duration “bread and butter” steady effort runs, one or two ’strong runs’ for up to an hour  and at least one longer steady effort of about 2 hours or longer. The ’strong’ effort runs, as noted in the previous post, could be introduced gradually into a program. Early in the conditioning phase, there might be one strong effort of 20 minutes within an hour run, and by the end of the conditioning phase there could be two strong runs a few days apart, with efforts out near the hour. Younger athletes in their teens should all be able to respond well to longer runs over 90 minutes in length.

If most running is done within the correct effort zones, then the body should be able to exercise every day and progress week by week as the mitochondria profliferate, the capillaries develop, and the oxidative enzymes hit high levels. Fatigue should not be an issue. In fact, after several weeks the running becomes very enjoyable.

There is absolutely no harm to the developing aerobic systems by practicing legspeed running once a week, as long as the fast runs are RELAXED, and shorter than 10 seconds in length, with good easy jogging recoveries, so as to stay in the safe alactic/non-oxidative anaerobic creatine phosphate energy system, which self-replenishes rapidly. This work is suggested so that there are no ’surprises’ when it comes to the more extensive faster work that will be introduced as we come into the racing season.

Next post : The ‘GREAT SECRET’ for Middle Distance Training that is so basic you’ll wonder why no-one understands or values its worth!