Running to the Top. Arthur Lydiard

21 FACTORS

      Twenty-one factors influence the running athlete. Some are factual, some physical, the rest mental. All of them play a part in how well an athlete performs, how successfully he or she can reach whatever level of achievement he or she aspires to.

      They are:

      1.The date of the race

      2.The challenge the race represents

      3.Age

      4.Talent

      5.Health

      6.Nutrition

      7.Drugs

      8.Hormones

      9.Body build

      10.Running technique

      11.Aerobic capacity

      12.Weight

      13.Body fat

      14.Training methods

      15.Coaching

      16.Tactics

      17.Self-discipline

      18.Track conditions

      19.State of the weather

      20.The opposition

      21.The balance between aerobic and anaerobic exercise

      Some of them appear under more than one heading. For instance, your weight and body fat at any given time are facts but they are also physical conditions which can be altered. And there are some physical conditions which are susceptible to mental influences or can influence mental attitudes. Each is an integral part of the whole athlete and his or her personal encyclopedia of knowledge.

      We have not given them any order of priority because none exists but, perhaps, the single most important factor of them all is the first listed – the date of the competition.

      Think about it. You do not have to be an Einstein to see how significant that race date is. Whether the race is a club championship, a national title event or an Olympic Games final, everything that happens in the lead-up to it – and we’re talking from weeks to years depending on the individual athlete’s level of experience and ambition – is aimed at that single event. Anything else along the way is merely a stepping stone to the ultimate goal.

      So, everything the athlete does in that lead-up has to be timed correctly and precisely to produce the peak performance when the starting gun sounds on the big day. If you doubt that, listen to any group of athletes talking after a championship.

      They are noted for their excuses after events. A lot of Olympic titles were won in times that very many competitors had comfortably bettered. Yet, on the day, they cannot perform anywhere near their best.

      This demonstrates that the race date is indeed the key to correct training. I often tell young people, “Look, last year, you ran the best race of your career. Everything went right and you performed at your very best. Now, if you know why that happened and you put your training plan together properly to reproduce that peak performance again on the day of the first race you want to win this season, then I would say you know something about training.

      “Until you can do that, you don’t know a damn thing about it. You are just a good athlete who, one day, without realising why it is happening, will run a good race.“

      I often refer back to Lasse Viren, who, after his first Olympic triumphs, was injured and out of running for a couple of seasons but then came back as great as before. The American accused him of blood-doping, which was ridiculous. The reason was simply that I had taught the Finns how to construct a programme and follow it to achieve peaks when they wanted them – and the Finns had listened and learned. Viren knew the programme that got him his first Olympic medal; all he had to do to win some more was repeat it.

      Many of the medal winners in the Olympics are not the best athletes but they are the best-prepared athletes on the day of competition. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: A world of difference lies between the two.

      So that, fairly succinctly, is what this book is all about: Guiding you to get all those 21 elements together in the right place at the right time for you to attain your selected goals in athletics.

      Let’s begin by considering why running is for everyone – from potential Olympic champion to the woman or man, girl or boy who merely wants to get that extra enjoyment and satisfaction out of life that spring from simple physical and mental fitness.

      CHAPTER 2

      WHY IS RUNNING VALUABLE?

      The key that opens the first door to your goal is oxygen. We can be healthy without being fit. Or we can be fit without being healthy. What we need to aim for is both fit-ness and health. The first fundamental we have to recognise, in trying to reach this happy combination of both, is that nearly every metabolic reaction in the human body depends, directly or indirectly, on oxygen. The key, therefore, is to achieve the best oxygen uptake level possible to feed the metabolic processes.

      The second fundamental is that the only way we are going to get that higher oxygen uptake level is by steadily exercising over long periods – and the only way we can do that, day after day, is by maintaining the exercise at an aerobic level, not an anaerobic level.

      What’s the difference? Aerobic exercise requires the presence of oxygen; anaerobic exercise does not. A muscle can contract for a while under the anaerobic conditions of inadequate oxygen supply but, sooner or later, the restoration of an adequate oxygen supply is essential for the recovery of that muscle or it ceases to function efficiently.

      Drs Laurence Morehouse and Augustus Miller in their Physiology of Exercise say quite simply that aerobic metabolism is far more efficient than anaerobic metabolism because more energy is derived from a given amount of foodstuff when the reactions occur under aerobic rather than anaerobic conditions. So it follows that aerobic activity can be sustained by drawing energy from the oxygen we supply to the operating muscles and, the more efficient the supply, the more efficient and enduring will be the activity.

      This brings us to the heart, the large pumping muscle which transports oxygenated blood from the lungs through the bloodstream to supply those muscles. We have to teach that pump to work progressively harder to take more blood with more oxygen to where it’s wanted. Only one set of the body’s multitude of muscles can work long enough and hard enough to maintain a reasonably high aerobic pressure on the blood vascular and cardio-respiratory systems to achieve that desired result. They are the quadriceps, the large muscles at the front of the thigh.

      An evaluation of various sports has proved that the activity that best produces this consistent aerobic pressure is cross-country skiing. It works all muscles but it works the quadriceps best. Not everyone is in a position to go cross-country skiing all the year round but, fortunately, next comes an activity which is available to virtually everyone – running. Running lifts the body weight against gravity, largely using the upper leg and thigh muscles hard enough and long enough to get a better result even than cycling, which ranks next, rowing or walking.

      Swimming, for instance, is well down the list because the body weight is buoyant in water. Once swimmers reach a level of endurance and technical skill, they can go through the water fairly well without too much strain and without exerting that required level of pressure on the heart that running achieves. Compare swimmers at the end of a 1,500-metre race with runners who have just competed over the same distance.

      To use running as the cornerstone of fitness depends on the development of a programme that enables us to maintain that aerobic pressure at its upper limits – just short of tipping into anaerobic effort – for long periods.

      You cannot build a house