OK, Diesel
I did much pondering on this topic during my meeting (that I have to return to in 10 minutes). Here's what I have come up with:
1) Friel's initial target audience is cyclists. Cyclists not only need the ability to endure a long race, or back to back races, but also need to posses the ability to sprint to the finish, attack, sustain a break, etc......
2) Friel address these needs by covering SIX basic components of training.
3) In an attempt to explain them he comes up with a graphic that links them together in a way that the audience (readers of his book) can easily understand. Unfortunately, his graphis is just plain incorrect. It does a fine job if his goal is to get an ignorant reader (meaning one who is starting from scratch in the learning process) to buy into the fact that the 6 aspects of training are important and that they have a relationship. For many people, that's all they want to know and are content to just follow his system (which seems liek a sound system). However, for the person who attempts to understand the concepts and begin to asses their own training (like myself), he leads them down the wrong path.
He begins with the force, endurance, speed triangle. Fine. But then he bridges the gap between Force and endurance with "muscular endurance" (which, according to his charts leads me to believe that he is talking about Lactate Threshold) and between speed and endurance with "anaerobic endurance " (I think) which is V02max. Both of these are misleading. They simply don't relate in that fashion.
Here I have taken the training pyramid present in many running books and applied it to Friel's model to show how the graphic *should* be displayed (forgive me....I'm short on time....did the best I could):
And this is how it should relate to Friel's triangle (whoch shouldn't be a triangle at all):
I'm OK with Force and Speed combining for power.....much like a track and field sprinter has a combination of leg strength and quick moving muscles....but quickness has little to do with "V02max" and force has little to do with "lactate threshold".......in fact, lactate threshold and v02max have more to do with each other despite being on opposite ends of the triangle. Like Paulo said earlier, this should all be under the endurance umbrella.
gotta go..................
-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485