Running to the Top. Arthur Lydiard

natural resource.

      Girls can run just as easily as boys; when they’re young, they can often run better. But as they develop and, as many of them do, get wider hips, they can’t run as well because their physical changes prevent them from bringing their legs through as easily or as straight. They start to get knock-kneed and throw themselves around a bit. The tall, willowy build, what we might call the Swedish type, is physically best equipped for running. This is no hard and fast rule – I’ve seen girls with markedly wide hips develop into excellent runners – but it’s common.

      Another fact, of course, is that women, again as a general rule, have more subcutaneous fat in the muscles than men and, when it comes to real endurance, they seem to have an advantage. It’s a natural storehouse of energy which they can use before running into deficit.

      In 1971 in Copenhagen, two doctors specialising in cardiology put on a 100-km run which drew about a hundred starters. It was the first ultra I had seen so I was keenly interested in the outcome. And it was most interesting to observe that, at the end of that race, most of the men were lying down and relaxing and the women were still standing up talking.

      They still don’t run as fast as men, of course, because they don’t have the same muscle power – probably about thirty to forty per cent less – although there are the inevitable exceptions of weak men and strong women. I would say, too, that their oxygen uptake level isn’t as high, so cardiorespiratory efficiency isn’t as great although their cardiovascular efficiency could be. I could be wrong in this, but the evidence seems fairly convincing.

      This means they don’t have the ability to run marathons as fast as men because they cannot generate power, drive and speed as economically as a man with his greater oxygen uptake capability. There is no reason why a woman will not, sooner or later, run a 2:18 marathon, but they have the same limitations that I predicted over 30 years ago for men. I said then that, at this stage of human evolution, it wasn’t physically possible for a man to run under two hours for a marathon; 2:05 would be about as fast as they would go. I think we’re stuck around about there now.

      The best marathon times for women have improved faster than men’s best times in recent years because, until ten or twenty years ago, not many women ran marathons. Now, many women run marathons and they are training as hard as men, which is bringing their times down rapidly in comparison with men. Not that you can always go by times in marathons.

      I always quote the Boston marathon as an example of a point-to-point race fashioned to produce fast times, because runners fall two hundred feet in elevation and invariably have a following westerly wind to help them along. Some years ago, I took a girl, Maria Moran, to Boston to help me with some seminars. Maria came from a place called Taiko at the foot of a South Island mountain range, and I had trained her to be the New Zealand junior secondary schools cross-country champion. She’d followed that with four years on a physical education course at Otago University in Dunedin, most of which is built on steep hills. So, while we were in the US, I suggested she should run the Boston.

      “I’ve never run a marathon“, she said.

      “Well“, I said, “I’ve trained you so you can run a marathon. Just get in there and run it.“

      So Maria ran it. She wasn’t a heel-to-toe runner, she ran on the balls of her feet, but she still finished in around 3:12. She just jogged through and didn’t look as if she’d run around the block.

      That evening, at the after-race function, someone asked her: “This is your first time in Boston?“

      “Yes“, she said.

      “Well, what did you think of Heartbreak Hill?“ the guy asked.

      She said, “I never saw any hills.“

      They make a big thing in Boston about that hill but to Maria, with her background in hill training, it was just a bit of a rise.

      Children can be started as runners as young as five or six, around the parks, jogging with their parents and so on, and there’s no reason why they can’t go into short sprints at school or with track clubs. Sixty or seventy metres is the desired distance; the sustained sprints, from 200 to 400 metres, are unwise. Most kids have strong hearts and they love to win, and, over the longer distances, they run fine and hard until they get to the straight and it starts to hurt. The risk then is that they’ll push themselves to please their parents on the side or to beat someone in front of them.

      Anaerobic training is what destroys young runners. I’ve had people complain to me that kids shouldn’t do all the running that I prescribe, but what I have them doing is all aerobic and that’s good for them. I do not use anaerobic training.

      Think again of the Africans. They are doing aerobic training all the time as kids – and lots and lots of it. It’s the main reason why they’re beating most people when they become mature runners.

      Kids have been running through the centuries. They mostly run barefooted so their feet develop properly and naturally. They’re not, in most cases, getting into these stupid running shoes with all the gimmicks wich lead to problems. Their bones aren’t set, of course, until they’re mature but as long as they’re running easily, no problems arise.

      They’re not going to hurt themselves because running, as part of whatever they’re doing, is natural.

      CHAPTER 4

      DEVELOPING FITNESS

      If we next want to add speed to our endurance, we move from basic running because we now need to use muscle groups against fast resistance, such as in isotonic exercises. We must also give them good rest periods, because the white fibres, the fast-twitch fibres which dictate our speed, lack myoglobin, a red pigment chemically related to the haemoglobin of the blood and probably important as a reserve store of oxygen and iron within the fibre or in the transport of oxygen and iron between cells. This pigment gives its name to the red fibres, which produce slow, powerful contractions and are not easily fatigued. Morehouse and Miller discovered that if the tendon of a red muscle was cut and then sewn to the tendon stump of a white muscle, forcing the red muscle to take over the white muscle’s function, its myoglobin content and resistance to fatigue gradually diminished, indicating that the appearance and endurance of a muscle are largely the results of the type of work it must perform.

      If we’re going to develop muscle bulk through the red fibres, we can use weights and resistance exercises, progressively increasing the periods of exercise and the weights and resistance employed. The balance depends on the sporting activity in which we are involved and how we want to go about developing muscular efficiency, strength and power. But it must all be built on that solid foundation of endurance and stamina.

      A lot of people sign on at gyms, pay the annual subscription and think, “Now, I’m going to be fit.“ Certainly, some of them are going to sweat a great deal and they will improve their muscular efficiency and strength and physique, but, unless they improve blood vascular efficiency, unless they raise their oxygen uptake levels, they are really not going to be as fit and healthy as they would be if they had climbed into a pair of shorts and running shoes or on to a bicycle, gone out into the fresh air and spent their time on steady aerobic exercise. It is a mistake to think that working out in a gym with weights and other activities is going to give you good cardiac efficiency.

      During the 1974 Commonwealth Games in New Zealand, Drs McDonald and McLauchlan, who had a physiological testing laboratory in Wanganui, tested various athletes and came across an Asian weightlifter, who had a huge body and was extremely powerful but an oxygen uptake level that was less than one litre a minute. He was getting barely enough oxygen into his body to keep him alive, let alone healthy, despite his ability to momentarily lift huge weights. He faced the prospect that, unless he did something about it, he could be an early cardiac patient.

      A properly fit high school boy or girl would have an uptake level of around four litres a minute, and it is common for top athletes in endurance sports to have an