Running to the Top. Arthur Lydiard

I set out a programme which required him to do a great deal of steady, long-distance aerobic paddling.

      When he went to the next world championship against the East Germans, who had never been beaten, he won the world title. He knew more about rowing than I did but I knew more about training for it.

      After Ferguson came back to New Zealand, the seven class canoeists we had in New Zealand worked on a refined programme of mine, went to the 1984 Olympics and won seven gold medals between them. They now had their technical skills founded on a strong aerobic base so they could come out day after day through the heats and the semis, row right up to their optimum and recover rapidly in time for the next race. The schedule was perfect in the sense that we got the aerobic and anaerobic sections right at the right time. Everything was coordinated and balanced to produce top form on the day of competition.

      I did the same in San Antonio, Texas, with Greg Lousey, who, at 32, was the fencing champion of the US but had been told he was too old for the LA Olympics and wouldn’t make the team. He was a big man but he went out and ran 100 miles a week to my schedule, rode his horses, did his cross-country work, swimming, shooting and fencing, and not only forced his way into the team but won a silver medal in the modern pentathlon. He was a perfect example of what a good foundation of endurance can do.

      Dr Uhlenbruck, from the West German Sports School, made a study of ultramarathoners, people of all ages who could run 50, 60 and 100 miles a day for day after day. Max Telford, of New Zealand, comfortably ran 240 miles without stopping. Siegfried Bauer, an ex-patriate German who then lived in New Zealand, never put his shoes on without going for a run of 40 to 100 miles.

      Dr Uhlenbruck came to the conclusion that if you use muscle groups continuously for long periods, even at the low levels adopted by some ultra runners in training, you very quickly develop the dormant capillary beds and also establish new ones and, as well, a mitochondria that will be likely to remain indefinitely. This, he said, was unquestionably the secret of muscular endurance.

      If a boxer punches a bag steadily for two hours, without stopping – not fast but fast enough to keep the blood flowing through the muscles at an elevated rate – he will build the muscular endurance which will enable him to throw those punches hard and fast for the length of a 15-round bout.

      Lionel Spinks, who won the heavyweight championship of the world, was trained on a tape I made for the coach and physiologist who controlled his training. This required him to punch the bag for long, steady periods. When he went into the ring, he was still throwing effective punches when his opponents were tiring to the point where they not only couldn’t match his punching ability, they couldn’t get out of the way of his blows.

      Of course, when he met Tyson, he didn’t get the chance to throw a punch but the point had been made – he won his other fights with a continuous barrage of punches because his arms, trained for endurance and with highly developed capillary beds, didn’t tire.Whatever the event, physiology and mechanics don’t change. The fundamentals must be followed.

      In New Zealand, we have seen the effect in rugby football, our national winter game. Years ago, I lectured in Hawke’s Bay and the flanker Kel Tremain, who was in the audience, was fired up to run 100 miles a week to see what happend. He found it was too much for him, so we refined a programme which had him running an hour every morning as part of a conditioning system. The effect was that he not only improved his endurance, he got into the All Blacks, the New Zealand national team, because, at the end of a game, he would be running as fast as he had been at the start. He established himself as a leading try-scorer.

      Des Christian, a friend who was an All Black many years ago, once challenged, “Arthur, all this running is no good to an All Black. Rugby is sprint, sprint, sprint.“

      Trying to make him understand the point he was missing, I asked him how many times he could sprint the length of a football field. He said ten. I doubted if he could do six one after the other, but I explained that, if he could do ten and then set out to develop a higher oxygen uptake level, he could probably do twenty. He could never understand that but Tremain proved it. Tremain also had a wonderful effect on the Hawke’s Bay team of that time. They used a friend of mine, who was also a physical education teacher, to refine the Tremain programme for the whole team and quite soon won the Ranfurly Shield, New Zealand’s premier rugby trophy. They were not a team of internationals but a collection of run-of-the-mill footballers who, collectively superfit, could play their best football all the time when other teams were falling apart with fatigue.

      Most people never realise what their potential is or understand the simple truth that it is based on their ability to assimilate, transport and use oxyen. If we can appreciate that and then improve that ability, we lay a better foundation on which to build the technical skills and reach a tireless physical and mental state in which we can employ those skills and techniques much better and for much longer.

      If, for instance, you are a skillful soccer player but too tired to get to the loose ball, you cannot make use of these skills efficiently.

      The first group of joggers we had in this country, more than fifty years ago, were mainly obese businessmen. Many had had coronary attacks. Their recreation was usually golf. The interesting outcome with most of them, after they had been jogging for some months, was that, not only were they feeling physically and mentally better, they were beginning to reduce their golf handicaps. It was an unexpected bonus for them but it was perfectly logical – their concentration and co-ordination over the closing holes of a round were much better than they had ever been. They were no longer finishing in a state of tiredness.

      Blood toning and diet play a part in the ultimate conditioning. When I was in Finland, exercise physiologists were keeping a close eye on their top marathon runner and testing him regularly because he had an abnormally low blood count and they thought he might have some blood disease. They gave him B12 and iron and liver injections to try to improve his condition. They never succeeded but the guy went on beating everyone. This had them confused but the fact was that, because he did all this long running as a marathoner, the improvement in his cardiorespiratory efficiency was so great that he could pump huge quantities of blood between his heart and his lungs and gather in a lot of the oxygen that other people just breathe out. Even though his blood wasn’t what everyone thought it should be, he transported and used all that oxygen with complete efficiency.

      I was involved in an unusual experiment in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on one of my trips to the United States. A number of schizophrenic patients of the University of Wisconsin Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic, most of them suffering from depression, were started on a jogging programme and, at the end of ten weeks, seventy-five per cent of them had recovered from their depression.

      The goal of their therapy was simple: They were taught stretching before and after running and then filled 30 to 45 minutes with comfortable movement – not to cover a particular distance at a set pace, just to jog. The researchers, two associate professors of psychiatry at the university, John Greist and Marjorie Klein, a running therapist, Roger Eischens, and a Madison doctor, John Faris, were all joggers who had noted that their own momentary blues virtually always disappeared while they were running.

      One of their conclusions: “If there is any secret to the success our patients have had in treating their depression with running, it is that they have tried to run each day in such a way that they would want to run again the next day.“

      As an exposition of training, not straining, it’s an excellent vision.

      We had already seen similar results in New Zealand because many of the people who joined the jogging movement were inclined to be neurotic. They were self-centred, disinclined to be outgoing and largely treated their neuroses with nicotine and liquor. This all changed once we got them interested in the routines of simple jogging. The smoking and drinking, the outward effects of their neuroses, were either drastically reduced or stopped altogether. They became more confident and self-reliant, they began to enjoy meeting new people and throwing off their inhibitions.

      CHAPTER 5

      HOW TO START RUNNING

      Right, you‘ve decided you