Running to the Top. Arthur Lydiard

highest because they use all their upper-body muscles as well as their legs against hard resistance.

      The use of cyclo-ergometers, treadmills and running machines is becoming popular as a testing ground, but we would make the point here that they don’t always produce accurate results in the individual. Even some very good athletes, once they are wired up and wearing oxygen masks, perform poorly on these machines; they find themselves in an unnatural and uncomfortable environment and can be affected by claustrophobia. The air they are breathing is very dry because the humidity is low, the throat constricts, and the uppermost thought in the runner’s mind is to get the darn mask off, instead of concentrating on running with freedom, particularly when the technician is demanding faster and faster responses.

      The researchers, allowing for margins of error, can get significant information from testing programmes but, for the individual, the best way to test for personal fitness levels, quite simply, is to run. Cover a measured distance on a fairly regular basis and you soon will establish a pattern of time and effort that gives a good indication of progress. After-run pulse checks at, say, 30-second or minute intervals will quickly chart whether your recovery rate is improving.

      Heart monitors which record as you run are also enjoying a vogue in this age of gimmickry but there is an inherent risk in setting yourself to run consistently at a certain heart rate. Your condition changes day by day, so do the climatic factors, so you could force yourself too much in following the dictates of a piece of equipment. How you run should be governed by how you feel on the day and by the simple catch phrase I invented years ago, “Train, don’t strain.“

      We all know during conditioning when we are going too fast and getting beyond our limitations and that’s when we should ease back. For instance, if you are recovering from a previous run and then go out on an extremely hot day or in severely cold or windy conditions and try to keep pace with the inflexible requirements of a monitoring system, you could find yourself straining – and not training. You could push yourself into anaerobic running and that is undesirable on top of a previous day’s hard work, particularly when you are in a conditioning stage of your development.

      The Americans work to a different catch-phrase which is totally wrong – “No gain without pain“ or “No pain, no gain.“ That is not the way to train for steady improvement and it’s one of the reasons why a nation like America, 250 million people capable of producing millions of runners, doesn’t succeed particularly well in Olympic and other international endurance events. They could dominate if they stopped applying so much pressure on their athletes from school age onwards.

      Some years after jogging began in New Zealand and William J. Bowerman, the University of Oregon track coach, took it home from here, the American physiologist Dr Kenneth Cooper set up an aerobic testing system in which you ran for twelve minutes and then, according to your age, were given a certain fitness grading. But age doesn’t enter into it. Many fit people in their sixties and seventies would leave a majority of university students behind in a running race. And plenty of evidence exists of people in their twenties and thirties who have collapsed and died, while running, from undetected cardiac disorders.

      You cannot classify anyone by age. The fit and the unfit are there in all age groups.

      Other factors must be considered when fitness testing. Fat-free body weight is an important one because running requires about 1.7 ml of oxygen per metre for every kilogram of fat-free body weight. So, when we run a mixed bag of people for twelve minutes, without taking that factor into consideration, a lot of the light, skinny runners are going to run farther yet, fundamentally, they may be no fitter then the heavier runners they are leaving behind. They could even be considerably less fit.

      So the Cooper test wasn’t accurate in that context, and I believe he deleted the age factor later and used other parameters.

      Psychological reaction is another factor. The big runners in fun runs, particularly those over hilly courses, where you have to use more calories and need more oxygen than in level road running, will be mentally deflated when they are beaten by lighter runners, not appreciating that it isn’t an indication that they’re not as fit.

      The most valuable way to test your fitness level initially is against yourself, by checking your progress over courses you run regularly, by noting your recovery rate after running. If you begin quite unfit, your rate of improvement could be surprisingly rapid at first, but it will level off gradually as you approach your optimum or maximum oxygen uptake level – not that there is any real maximum because it is a factor still with a measure of infinity. No one can say positively what the limits are in blood vascular or cardiorespiratory efficiency. With regular controlled running, the upper level in any runner can be extended for many years.

      The 1984 Olympic marathon produced a classic example. I was lecturing in the US earlier and was asked if I thought Alberto Salazar, who was winning everything at that time, would win. He had just changed his training methods, so I questioned whether anyone thought he would even make the team. I didn’t think the training he was doing, running around with oxygen masks on for simulated altitude training and so on, was correct. That shocked them a bit. (Salazar did eventually make the US Olympic team by finishing second in their national championship.)

      When I was asked who would win, if Salazar wouldn’t, I named the Portuguese Carlos Lopez. Their reaction was: He’s too old, he’s 36.

      I said that was to his advantage because over the years he had been developing greater and greater cardiac efficiency, better capillary development and finer muscular endurance and, given that all other factors were equal, he would win because he would be able to maintain his knee lift and leg speed best.

      That is exactly what happened. Over the final kilometres, Lopez just ran away from the field. Salazar finished eleventh or twelfth. He was, without doubt, a great marathoner, but he changed from a training programme that was successful and the change didn’t pay off.

      Lopez was a fine example of self-improvement and that’s the main motivation for many people in fun runs. They know they haven’t a hope of beating the fast runners so what they do is try to improve their own times; in a sense, they run their races against themselves. Fun runs, since they are usually of five or ten kilometres, are good testing runs.

      I recommend that an aerobic run over five kilometres or a test of how far you can run aerobically in fifteen minutes are the best for checking fitness progress.

      Check your pulse rate when you finish and then every thirty seconds or so and, if you’re getting fit, you will find it is going to come down and recover to normal faster. You may not have run the distance faster, but you will have run more efficiently.

      The resting pulse rate can be unreliable as a guide because it’s subject to emotional variations and so on. I was once asked by a man at a seminar in Pennsylvania whether, if he took his pulse every morning when he woke up, he would build a good indication of his fitness level. I said, jokingly, that it all depended on who he was sleeping with. I was trying to impress on him that, even in bed, the pulse rate is subject to varying factors – hot night, cold night, deep sleep, restless sleep and so on.

      One woman runner in New Zealand told me that every time her doctor took her pulse it was much higher than she believed it should be. I took it and it wasn’t high at all. Then I remembered that the doctor she was talking about was a very handsome young man. There was the difference.

      Every sportsman and sportswoman needs stamina, by which I mean the highest possible uptake level and muscular endurance, the ability to keep the muscles contracting consistently. Once those muscles begin to tie up, performance drops. Very few runners, for example, can maintain a good knee lift throughout a race because they lack the muscular endurance which comes from well-developed capillary beds in the upper leg muscles. Once the knees go down, stride length shortens and leg speed dwindles. That was the factor that Lopez demonstrated so well; he maintained his knee lift all the way to the tape.

      This applies in any sport. When the Olympic canoeist Ian Ferguson came to me in 1983 and asked me to look at his training programme because he wasn’t succeeding as well as he should, I found he was a well-built man with large, powerful muscles – partly developed in the high surf of New Zealand