Coach and prophet without honour

John Davies (left) and Arthur Lydiard tackle an uphill slope on a golf course in 1962.

ARTHUR LYDIARD 1917-2004

All too often coaches carry the can for sporting failure. Arthur Lydiard constantly broke that mould, rarely copping such criticism.

But in a world which did not understand, the accolades, particularly at home, were a long time coming.

His death in Texas on Sunday while on a scheduled eight-week lecture tour marked the end of an era. Consider the legacy the 87-year-old has left.

From the outset his methods were considered by many as being outside the norm. The old school scoffed at his radical ideas. Running long distances, they said, was no way to build speed.

Peter Snell, Lydiard would point out, had the slowest basic speed of the Olympic finalists in the 800m at both the Rome and Tokyo Olympics. That he was able to outsprint the world's best to win both was early testimony to the effectiveness of Lydiard's programme.

Using himself as a human guinea pig, Lydiard experimented with training runs over varying distances.

His theory was that by varying his training distances he could develop greater muscular endurance (with the longer runs) and recovery and consolidation (over the shorter distances).

The closest any coaches in the early-middle years of the 20th century came to the Lydiard theory were those using "fartlek" - a seat-of-your-pants approach that interspersed running with sprints over varying distances and terrains. Lydiard wanted to delve deeper.

In his book Running With Lydiard, published in 1982, he looked back and explained his methods and their aims. Anaerobic training, built by miles and miles of LSD - long slow (steady) distance - allowed Lydiard's athletes to build their aerobic capacity and with it the ability to run quicker over shorter distances.

While many coaches did, and do, advocate the typical stopwatch-slung-around-your-neck, bark-from-trackside approach, Lydiard was rarely seen with a watch or at the track. Roads, trails and the natural environment were his habitat.

The success he enjoyed in watching his athletes win medals in distances ranging from 800m (Peter Snell) through 5000m (Murray Halberg) to the marathon (Barry Magee) at the 1960 Rome Olympics convinced Lydiard he was on the right track.

Many immediately sought him and his ideas. It was, he quickly pointed out, no hit-and-run mission. He had put himself though the 100-miles-a-week regime, testing and experimenting with himself. He wanted to know what the body could and could not endure.

His schedules, modelled on what he found worked, were good enough to win him selection in the marathon at the 1950 Empire Games and later a couple of New Zealand marathon titles. He refused to subject any athlete to any schedule he had not tested on himself.

Coaches and administrators here were reluctant to acknowledge the Lydiard doctrine, but many Europeans and Americans could see the merit in what he was doing.

He was in instant, and soon constant, demand. Students of the sport wanted to quiz the master coach on his methods and philosophy. His training edicts were quickly accepted. The running boom was born. Records were broken. The Lydiard methodology was more often than not credited with the sport's rapid improvement.

Some, who would point to the meagre training distances undertaken by Roger Bannister in his build-up to the world's first sub-four minute mile in 1954, scoffed at Lydiard's ways, saying those following his schedules would burn out.

It is ironic that Bannister's record was broken a few weeks later by Australian John Landy and, in 1958, by another Australian, Herb Elliott. Both were pupils of the sometimes eccentric coach Percy Cerutty, who worked in similar ways to Lydiard.

For every sceptic, there were far more who accepted the merits of Lydiard's methods and the push to increase anaerobic capacity.

Lydiard was constant in his search for knowledge, looking for ways to improve his methods.

Speaking from his Dallas home yesterday, Snell told of the last conversation he had with his mentor, at a restaurant last week.

"We asked ourselves what is wrong with middle-distance running nowadays. The talent, we agreed, is in both New Zealand and here in the United States," said Snell, "but the times and performances are not.

"The system, we felt, is killing the sport. We enjoyed our running. We raced when we were ready, not when we were told. The athletes at colleges here are racing too much. They are expected to race indoors, outdoors [on the track] and cross-country. Burnout, surely, is inevitable.

"It is interesting to compare middle-distance running today with the time when I was running. The Americans I ran against - and they were among the best in the world - did their best after they left college. They had a coach who kept them together and based their programme on the Lydiard system.

"These days runners seem more concerned with what shoe contract they can get rather than the programme they should be following," said Snell.

"Over dinner, we agreed the value of distance running is reflected in the ability to turn it on at the finish. Without that, too many run out of gas at, or before, the finish. There is no substitute for miles in the bank."

Lydiard was a modest runner at the Owairaka Club, of which he was the patron saint and at which his stable was based. I remember his circuit training, a loop around streets in Blockhouse Bay where we were expected to work hard up the hill, do some fartlek along the top, push down hill and complete the two-mile lap with further fartlek along the lower reaches before repeating the dose between five and 10 times. It hurt. It worked.

Sadly, Lydiard and his methods found greater acceptance in countries such as Finland, Mexico, the United States and South Africa than they did in mainstream New Zealand.

Thankfully, coaches such as Arch Jelley (who coached John Walker), Alistair McMurran (Richard Tayler's first coach) and John Davies (who coached Dick Quax and Anne Audain) would not be swayed.

They saw Lydiard for what he was. A genius.