I have just finished reading the latest book on this great running coach, and thort i would share a piece from the book that amazed & scared me!!
But i was determined to find out what the human body would take without cracking, so i frequently ran myself down to an exhausted walk. i always got home - somehow - and my track work improved. I realised i had the basic element of my plan at last. i was training for the marathon and marathon running enabled me to run faster on the track than i had ever run before. If it was good enough for me, why should it not be good for others?
I made the discovery neither easily nor entirely accidentally. I had begun a semi-schedule that combined distance with speed work and i just had to keep balancing the two elements against each other. I learnt that lack of the necessary conditioning made speed work useless; I could get one good race and then level off. So i altered the schedule and tried again, and as my condition improved, i found myself peaking too soon. i retimed my schedule again to try to slow down the accretion of speed. Essentially, every new point of reference i established involved a rearrangement and adjustment of my schedule.
It sounds simple but it took Arthur nearly nine years of training, experimentation, trial and error sacrifice and hardship, during which he ran thousands of kilometers, before he felt that he had perfected the marathon-type training system he was seeking. He was so preoccupied with this quest, he did little competitive running during those years, apart from marathons.
The marathon distance was the cornerstone of his schedules in which he delicately and precisely balanced sharp sprints, repetition training, hill work, medium-pace running, distance running, speed running & time trials.
"I don’t have a record of the miles i ran while i was looking for the answer but i guess i must have covered about 30 000 miles (48 000kms) or so. A typical week would have seen me run, say, ten miles on Monday, fifteen on Tuesday, twelve on Wednesday, eighteen on Thursday, ten on Friday, fifteen on Saturday and twenty two to twenty six on Sunday.
Think about that 48 000 kms. Its roughly two and a half times the distance from Auckland to London, nearly 70 runs btwn Auckland and Wellington.
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The man! 