Running to the Top. Arthur Lydiard

said earlier, even young people have died in fun runs from unsuspected and undetected causes. Young children can have health problems – cases are recorded of children dying in sprint races because no one knew they suffered from heart defects.

      Don’t take the risk of adding to the number. Very few doctors these days don’t recognise the value of restrained exercise or don’t understand its benefits. Having got the green light, consider whether you really want to run. Some people just don’t. Consider the options and find something you’ll be happy with because enjoyment is one of the critical requirements of this project.

      If you’re a big person, possibly overweight, consider that when you begin running, you’ll be slow, and all that weight means you’ll be hitting the ground hard. The faster you run, the lighter you hit. The sprinter, for example, doesn’t run heel and toe. His centre of gravity is carried forward so fast he is landing on the balls of his feet. His heel will make only light contact with the track before he springs off his toe into his next stride.

      The jogger comes down nearly flat-footed on the outside of the heel, rolls through on to the ball of the foot and then, ideally, pushes off again with the toes. So the correct shoes are a vital piece of equipment to handle that pounding. We discuss that subject in more detail in a later chapter because you’ve got to fit your feet into something that will take the jarring and thumping properly or, eventually, your joints are going to suffer.

      Cycling is a good exercise for cardiac development and general fitness if runing isn’t your style. You can row and get excellent results because it employs a legs-arms, arms-legs action. Swimming is beneficial but it does lose some effect because your body weight is being supported against gravity in the water. Whatever activity you choose, the main requirement is that you keep the exercise of that activity within strict limitations. Most people, unfortunately, are competitive by nature, particularly if they have a friend or neighbour down the road who can run or cycle or row faster. They can be lured into pushing themselves to inefficient and even dangerous efforts as a matter of pride or challenge.

      Look at cardiac development as a progression which lasts for several years, even the rest of your life. We are going to develop further and further as we go, as long as we don’t thrash ourselves competitively from the outset. Your objective must be to make yourself a fitter person, not to beat the chap down the road.

      Seek out the advice of the best people you can in the activity you’re taking up. Don’t be afraid to go to the champions; they like to help people. Ask people who are successful coaches or have been in the sport for a long time. They have vast reservoirs of knowledge, which they may not realise, but tap them and you’ll make your own progress that much easier because you’ll know the right things to do and the wrong things to avoid.

      A good coach, for instance, doesn’t have injured athletes. He knows how to protect them from hurting themselves, and that’s a subject for much deeper exploration and explanation in other chapters.

      The stranger to jogging or running will follow his medical check by running easily out for, say, five minutes and then turning for home. If he makes it back in the same time, he’s already learnt to move aerobically. If he struggles, he’s gone out too fast. But even if he feels good on the way back, he doesn’t make the mistake of finishing with a sprint. The ideal way to finish is always to feel that you could run some more.

      That five-minute out-and-back routine should occupy a few days to accustom leg and arm and body muscles to the activity. The beginner can then start adding time on his or her feet.

      When you can do 15 minutes every day, or at least every other day, step up to 30 minutes, followed by two days at 15 minutes, another 30, another two 15s and so on. Always give your body adequate recovery. Then go out to 45 minutes, with two 15-minute days in between, and then on to an hour plus two 15s when you can handle it. Then you can start to bring up the intermediate days – alternating an hour, two half-hours, an hour and so on.

      Now you can extend that long run as you like. This is the most effective way to do it. Some people start running 15 minutes a day every day, then 30 a day, then 45 a day. It seems to be the faster way to achieve fitness but it will take them three times as long to achieve the goals they would get if they used patience. You cannot neglect those vital recovery days.

      As we have said, the world’s first group of joggers in Auckland were about 20 businessmen. Most had had mild heart attacks. They were aged from 40 up to 70 or so. Inside eight months, eight of them ran a full marathon. Since they couldn’t run 100 metres when they started, their results demonstrate the reaction you can expect from a systematic approach. One 74-year-old had had several heart attacks and couldn’t run 50 metres. Inside six months, he ran 20 miles without stopping and had lost 60 pounds in weight. A friend just up the road lost 60 pounds in a year and had already tackled and completed a full Ironman. He was 47 and he had done nothing before he started. He was a huge man then and was still bigger than average – the difference is that he after he was fit and confident.

      He is not an unusual case. One of the remarkable aspects of jogging has been the discovery by so many who have taken up running, even late in life, of potential they didn’t know they had to be quite successful athletes.

      They have found that, provided they keep training systematically and don’t suffer any major setbacks – like being knocked down by a car, for instance – they can continue to improve and can even run better 10Ks or marathons after ten years of running than they could after two. This is the most significant result of the continual build-up of the basic ingredient in running, endurance.

      This has been reflected in a number of sports with the emergence in masters classes of quality athletes who are comparative newcomers.

      When you start jogging, you are almost certainly going to get sore muscles. By all means, try massage, but the important thing is to out and jog again the following day, even if it’s for only a slow ten or fifteen minutes at the most. Allow your heart to push the blood around and raise the blood pressure and use the exercise to flush out waste products which are causing the muscular discomfort. Let the heart do the gentle massage for you.

      If you stop the exercise until the muscle ache disappears, you’ll have to begin again and work through sore muscles again. You’ll have gained nothing.

      Hot baths help. So does turning a cold hose on your legs as soon as you finish a run, or a wade in the sea or lake. You can use ice packs if any soreness is bothering you and follow it with an application of heat. The cold brings the natural cortisone to the area, which stimulates the circulation and helps the recovery process. The heat prevents stiffness.

      Another source of soreness is the tearing of muscle tissue when you first subject muscles to a new exercise. They will probably have been gummed together all the time you weren’t training. Increased circulation is probably the best remedy for that kind of soreness.