Knowing it All

For the past few days, almost a full week now, I've been slogging through Running with the Buffaloes. Originally I had choosen the title of the book as the title for this blog but as I began to write it became apparent to me that I was addressing some thing much more important than just this book.

Every year I meet more and more track coaches and as I do I become accutely aware of our differences. There are distance coaches, throw coaches, high jump coaches, hurdle coaches, vault coaches, assistant coaches and head coaches. Each coach seems to want to know or understand "their" event. It seems to me that to be good coaches we must understand our sport in its entireity. In my mind that may be as simple as knowing competitive times in each event. It would be even better to have a strong understanding of the technical aspects of each event. I'm including distance running in this thought process today because I consider that to be my weak point. 

I understand the concepts (you have to run a lot to be good at running a long ways) but I am struggling with what I believe about training distance runners. There is of course the thoughts and techniques that Arthur Lydiard meted out during the 1950's. Since that time Jack Daniels has published this thoughts on the matter. The LetsRun.com crowd has continually called for a return to Lydiard principles which involve higher milage and lower intensity over long periods of time. Tudor Bompa comments in his book that distance runners develop their capacity for work over years rather than months and weeks. This goes along with what Lydiard preached. In contrast to all of this american coaches have become, according to lets run and Running with the Buffaloes, interval junkies.

In closing I believe it's important to know the sport as a whole, which means coming to grips with and forming my own beliefs about training distance runners.