Calder at large: Arthur Lydiard

A prophet without honours...

By PETER CALDER


You'd think he would have counted. Somewhere along the winding tarmac of the bush-clad Waitakeres, pounding through the rain, he might have done a little basic multiplication. Just out of interest.

But Arthur Lydiard has no idea how far he has run in his long life. He does volunteer that every week for "at least 15 years" he ran 150 miles (the man who held three national marathon titles before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile doesn't think in kilometres, but it's 240km).

So we can work it out. Those regular training runs add up to almost 190,000km, or about 4.7 times around the world at the equator.

And he's not counting the times when he was spending his weekends building a bach at Stanmore Bay on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula, north of Auckland.

He would run up there from his Devonport home on a Saturday morning and put in two full days before running home again to a week's work.

Arthur Lydiard, who turns 83 in July, doesn't run these days. He hobbles around his Beachlands house and through the laden fruit trees in his backyard orchard with short, jerky steps, like a man walking on sharp stones.

The cartilage in his knees has been replaced by plastic and titanium, and much as he would love to go for a run he dare not.

"If I do too much, maybe I'll wear the bloody plastic out," he says, his irascible tone of voice a clear sign of how frustrated he is to admit it.

"I go walking down here along the beachfront and every now and then I have to have a bit of a jog. I'm not used to walking. It's so bloody slow."

In his prime, Lydiard was the best kind of coach because he never asked any of his charges to do something he hadn't done himself.

Indeed, throughout his distinguished running career in the 1950s, he was his own guinea pig as he developed a style of training which would change the world of athletics.

In the process, he invented a leisure pursuit so universally popular it is called by the same name in any language - jogging.

At last week's Halberg Trust Sports Awards, miler and triple Olympic gold medallist Peter Snell was named the country's Sports Champion of the Century.

But he would be the first to admit that Arthur Lydiard's name belongs on the trophy beside his.

For it was Lydiard who developed the programme - high-mileage, aerobic fitness work to build stamina and endurance - which made this country's middle-distance runners the stars of the '60s and '70s.

Snell and others such as Murray Halberg, who won gold in the 5000m at Rome in 1960, were in essence Lydiard's creations. And he would be the last to pretend there was any mystery or magic to it.

"There are champions everywhere," he says simply. "All you've got to do is train them properly."

Lydiard may not be in his prime any more.

The knees, he says, are nothing to do with those 200,000km on hard tarseal, but the legacy of medical mismanagement of an injury sustained when he slipped on uneven ground carrying a heavy load. Whatever the cause, they slow him down.

And they make it hard for him to maintain his balance - he slipped and fell the day before the sports awards, badly gashing his arm. The stitches came out yesterday.

And he had a small stroke while in surgery. His speech slurs slightly, and his mouth gets dry when he talks because of the medication, which thins his blood.

But he's married (for the third time) to a woman almost 50 years his junior. Joelyne Van der Togt, whose lissom running form adorns the cover of a German translation of one of his books, sought him out for his coaching skills, Lydiard says with an impish smile.

"She came up here and stayed," he says, pausing as the smile widens, "and then we got married."

Lydiard lost his Finnish-born second wife to cancer in 1984, but she smiles down from several photos in his house. She was beautiful, too.

"You might as well have a pretty wife as an ugly one," says Lydiard, when asked to explain his secret. "Maybe I'm a good talker."

He's still training half a dozen athletes of various disciplines - triathletes and swimmers among them. Yet, incredibly, for most of his life his talent has been virtually ignored by the athletics Establishment.

In any other country, Lydiard would be declared a national treasure - and in several he is one. He regularly tours North America and Europe to lecture, and has relationships with athletes in Finland, Mexico and Venezuela.

And he often hears from devotees who have spotted the Lydiard method being used in other countries (Portugal, Spain and Morocco were recent examples). Yet, although individuals continue to beat a path to his door, his skills remain officially unwanted.

When Texas-based Snell ruefully remarked last week that he would love to come home if someone would employ him, ears pricked up in the Beehive. Yet the man who made Snell what he was languishes in obscurity.

"I don't get bitter about it," says Lydiard. "I just get frustrated and pissed off. I see all the wonderful talent we've got going down the tubes." He recalls turning up at a single athlete's invitation to a New Zealand Commonwealth Games training session in 1990.

"I was available to anyone who wanted to talk to me," he says. "But they don't want to ask anyone. They're too big in the head.

"I sat there watching other guys doing things you just don't do. They were cutting their own throats but I couldn't go over and tell them. You can't interfere."

Yet the cold shoulder has done nothing to dissuade Lydiard from a confidence in his own methods that borders on zealotry.

Age frays his memory at times, leaving him sometimes struggling for familiar names, but he reels off runners' records and physiological facts ("for every extra kilogram of fat-free bodyweight you need another 0.17 millilitres of oxygen to run one metre") like familiar mantras.

And he tells an illustrative story about that day in 1960 when, in the space of an hour, Snell and Halberg took Olympic gold in Rome.

Arthur Porritt, a former Olympic bronze medallist who later became Governor-General, had been invited to present some medals during the day. He asked Lydiard what events he should choose.

"I told him," Lydiard says, "that if he wanted to present them to New Zealanders he should choose the 800m and the 5000m."

"That's how sure you were?" I ask.

"That's how sure I was."