One of my favourite running writers is former Runners World editor Joe Henderson. In a short piece titled ‘this I believe’ (sadly now seemingly no longer available online) he identified a relatively small number of ‘facts’ about running training that he believed to be absolutely true. In my opinion, this piece is excellent and there is nothing in it with which I disagree. However, based on my own experience / research /thinking and plain old hunches, there are a few things I would add to the list:
Pacing is as relevant over the career as it is over a single race. You can be fast for a short while or have a long moderately successful career. Very few remain fast for the long haul.
Whatever measure of training ‘load’ you choose to use, the average is relatively meaningless. Far more important is the range.
‘Clustering’ of high load days is superior to spreading the work out evenly.
Related to the above, individual long runs are more important than high volume per se.
It is a mistake to attempt to train physiological variables (eg VO2 max, lactate threshold) in isolation. Rather, if you focus training on improving the ability to run further and faster you can be sure you are training the ‘correct’ Physiology.
Extensive interval training is a very potent endurance stimulus but is also a ‘high risk’ activity.
Being slightly ‘under trained’ is FAR preferable to being slightly overtrained. If in doubt don’t!
Occasional very brief, very intense sessions (eg. 10 second maximal hill sprints) are extremely beneficial.
The most important training to do is whatever you are not currently doing.
There is no recipe.
In a nutshell, that’s it in terms of what I absolutely believe to be true. Of course, others may disagree and I have opinions about a lot of other aspects of training, but these are not held with the same degree of certainty.
According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the entropy (or disorder) in a closed system continually increases. Even if you work hard to maintain order within a system, the total disorder within the universe itself is increased. In his book ‘a brief history of time’ Stephen Hawking explains that although the storing of information on a computer hard drive appears to be creating order, the heat released by the computers cooling fan still results in an increase in total entropy in the environment. A more practical example concerns my kid’s bedrooms which rapidly descend into the state of disorder. In my futile attempts to reverse this process I generate heat via use of the Hoover and washing machine, as well as contribute to disorder in my own ‘system ‘through the process of the physical work involved.
Entropy increases in living organisms (biological systems) as they progress through the lifespan. To function properly, organisms require a high degree of organisation, or low levels of entropy (death is therefore the default condition). To allow relatively brief periods of life to occur, organisms must therefore ‘fight’ entropy. It does this by extracting energy from foodstuffs and using this to build order within itself, whilst at the same time increasing entropy in the nutrients ingested and releasing heat energy into the environment. This can only happen for a while though – the process becomes less efficient over time, eventually order cannot be maintained, and death becomes inevitable.
Relating this to exercise training is interesting. Whenever we attempt to increase performance, we need to build protein structures within the muscle cells. The exact structures will depend on the type of training performed, but include contractile elements, mitochondria, enzyme structures and so on. Part of me wonders if this is one of the reasons why exercise appears able to delay the ageing process to some extent -does it simply maintain biological order (or delay entropy) for longer? In terms of practical applications though, little comes to mind apart from the obvious, and already well known, need to maintain a net positive energy balance if biological adaptation is the goal. Presumably, detraining represents an increase in entropy due to neglecting the work required to maintain a high degree of biological order?
Given the huge numbers of people who voluntarily take part in amateur sport, it would intuitively seem that participation is obviously ‘good’. There are indeed many potential benefits to engagement, but I wonder if the down sides are often overlooked. Of course, potential downsides do not automatically make participation ‘bad’ – rather it is the balance between the upsides and the downsides that determines whether it is a net positive or net negative experience.
The potential upsides all well known, and include health (physical and mental), goal achievement, self-confidence, social interaction, travel opportunities, and many more.
the potential downsides include overtraining, illness, injury, failure to achieve goals, missed social opportunities and, again, many more.
The secret to making sport participation a positive addition to your life appears to be arranging things in a way so that the upsides outweigh the downsides. This is where things get complicated…
From a personal perspective, I feel that my engagement in athletics has been an overall positive experience. However, this is not clear cut, and there have certainly been periods which were overwhelmingly negative. The reasons for this are again complex, and likely derive from the interactions between my personality traits, motivations at the time, lifestyle, and current levels of performance.
It is important to emphasise that I have been drawn towards endurance activities, which are very much ‘lifestyle’ sports. You can’t just rock up at the track on a whim one evening and expect to run a nice sociable ‘fun’ 1500m. It hurts (a lot) and the less fit you are, the more it hurts and the longer it hurts for. To make things even worse, your performance is clearly quantifiable, so the hard reality is presented to you by the numbers on the stopwatch. Such ‘lifestyle’ sports are very different to other sports – there is nothing to stop you living the ‘tennis lifestyle’ if you wish, but I know plenty of people who are perfectly happy playing the odd game without feeling the need to organise their life around it. Of course, there is nothing to stop anybody living the ‘parkrun lifestyle’ and just having a nice social run every Saturday morning (I’m sure plenty do). However, this is why I say motivation and personality are important – I frankly cannot comprehend doing anything other than running myself into a state whereby I need to be scraped off the floor following any organised event involving other people (not entirely sure what this says about me).
Back in the 1970’s, Joe Henderson wrote about running being a ‘positive addiction’, and this argument does make some sense. Yes, you feel a compulsion to run, and there are withdrawal symptoms if you’re unable to, but nonetheless the activity to which you’re addicted is healthy and will spill over into other aspects of your life. Because you want to be able to run well and regularly, you take care of your sleep and diet, become more disciplined in your routines, and avoid harmful activities such as smoking and drinking to excess. However, I am not sure I entirely buy into this positive addiction argument. Inevitably there will be periods when for various reasons you’re unable to run (life events, injury, illness etc), and the compulsion to get out the door every day can lead to poor decisions and running when you really shouldn’t. Ron Hill famously once hobbled a mile on crutches to maintain his 30+ year running streak, and marathon running may put marriages at risk (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1012690218813803). In fact, I’d even suggest some of the ‘positives’ identified by Henderson could actually be considered negative if they result in you obsessing over every mouthful, missing out on a social life, and walking around in a constant fog of fatigue because you get up at 5am everyday so that you can get the obligatory hour in before embarking on your full-time job.
I don’t want to sound all negative, and I am sure many people would disagree with me. However, I think the point holds that participation in amateur endurance sport is not necessarily the bed of roses it is sometimes made out to be. What then can we do to increase the chances of it becoming a net positive experience?
Be outstandingly successful and achieve all of your goals (easier said than done!)
Be rather conservative in your goal setting to reduce the chance of continuous goal failure (a sure-fire route to a negative affective state).
Try to keep sport in its place. As a previous coach once said to me – “remember that 99.9% of the population don’t know this race is happening, and of those that do, hardly any will give a shit how you perform”.
Listen to your body and always err on the side of caution in training.
I have always loved the middle-distance running events. Being a Brit, this seems automatic as I grew up watching the exploits of Coe, Ovett, Cram, and Elliot winning titles and setting records over 800 metres and 1500 metres. These athletes seemed equally proficient at both events, so it seemed natural to talk about them both in the same breath.
After the recent Diamond League 1500 metre races, I got the sense that ‘everybody’ seems to be running the distance in under 3 minutes 30 seconds these days. This is obviously a huge exaggeration, but nonetheless I couldn’t escape the feeling that what was once a rarely broken barrier signifying entry to the super elite category was now becoming relatively commonplace. To test my hunch, I used the world’s all time lists to plot the number of athletes breaking the barrier in each calendar year since it was first achieved in 1985 (below). As you can see, such performances remained relatively rare until acceleration in 2014/15 (accounted for largely by the annual Monaco race). However, in the last two seasons they have indeed become more common, and 2023 already leads the way by far. We could discuss the reasons for this, but for now I will just leave things with the fact that more people are running fast than in previous years, something which is not entirely unexpected.
I then wondered how things looked with the 800 metres, as in my head I couldn’t recall many outstanding recent (men’s) performances. I used a performance time of under 1 minute 43 seconds as my criteria for entrance to the super alite category, and again plotted the number of athletes achieving this per calendar year since Sebastian Coe first achieved it in 1979. Here the story is very different – these performances remain very rare, have not been achieved by anybody in the last couple of years, and even the years which look ‘good’ can be accounted for by a single race (eg the Olympic finals of 1996 and 2012).
I must admit that I find this all very puzzling, especially as I had previously considered the events to essentially come as a pair – how could one display such large increases in depth of competition, whilst the other appears largely stagnant?
Perhaps my thresholds for entry to the Super elite category were arbitrary and not of equivalent quality? To assess the progression of the absolute quality of performance progression at the very top level, I calculated the percentage improvement in world record speeds for all championship running events between 1983 and now. 1983 is in itself a rather arbitrary date, but it was the year of the first World Athletics Championships, and as we are soon approaching the 40th anniversary edition of the championships it seems about right! Again, I found the results (below) rather surprising. The 800 metres record has progressed far less than the records for all other events, despite the fact that David Rudisha’s current WR was set more recently than the records for several events, including the 1500 metres which dates back to 1998.
Perhaps this seeming lack of progression since 1983 was simply due to the quality of the existing WR at the time? Sebastian Coe’s time of 1m41.73s set in 1981 was certainly an outstanding performance that would put him at the top of the world today even without the advantages conferred by carbon fibre spike plates, Mondo tracks, and Wavelight technology.
How has the record progressed in the even longer term? To address this question I calculated percentage improvements in world record speed for all track running events since the IAAF came into being in 1912 (I did not include the 200 metres in this as no official WR was listed before the 1950s).
Over this timespan, the degree of progression in the 800 metres is the second smallest, just ‘beaten’ only by the 100 metres. I do not find it particularly surprising that progression is smallest in the 100 metres given the simplicity of the event. However, the 800 metres is far more complex, potentially offering more areas for improvements.
Maybe complexity is the problem, and improvement is limited by the potentially competing adaptations sought in pursuit of maximum performance (see concurrent training)? This is my best guess – however, whatever the reason it seems performance progression has not occurred in the 800 metres to the same extent as in other track events.
We can argue about the nuances and specifics of things such as intensity distribution, but it seems to be largely generally accepted that endurance athletes require a large volume of ‘base’ training if they are to realise their performance potential. Go back 100 years or so, and athletes trained by doing a few short sprints and the occasional time trial. However, pioneers such as Arthur Newton, Arthur Lydiard, Ernst van Aaken and others discovered through self-experimentation that they achieved far better results by reducing the intensity of their training and doing a lot more of it. These ideas spread, and continue to underpin current paradigms in endurance training.
If you think about it, this all appears very counter intuitive. How can jogging around slowly for most of your training possibly adequately prepare you for racing at much higher speeds? To start with this violates the principal of specificity which essentially says that the nature of the adaptation depends on the nature of the stress imposed. If training far slower than race pace, then your chosen exercise intensity recreates neither the metabolic, biomechanical, neuromuscular, or psychological demands of racing. I have come across various rationalisations for the ‘superiority’ of long relatively low intensity training such as that it stimulates muscle capillarisation and mitochondrial formation, but it only takes a quick search of the scientific literature to discover that HIIT training does this too (and in the short term at least – more effectively). Given that such high intensity work more closely resembles the demands of competition, it is there somewhat surprising that the best athletes do not train on a diet of predominantly high intensity intervals. Why might this be the case?
Training imposes a stress load on the body, and the body responds by adapting so that it is better able to cope should it be faced with the same stress load in the future. The bigger the load imposed, the greater the adaptive response, up to some maximal level beyond which it is harmful. In a previous paper (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15438627.2021.1906672), we described the analogy of the ancient king who decided his son must be punished after committing some misdemeanour. The punishment was to consist of having a large boulder dropped on his head. As the day of the punishment grew closer, the king began to regret his decision, but at the same time wished to avoid being seen as ‘weak’ by his subjects. Eventually the kings advisors suggested a solution to his dilemma – instead of dropping the boulder all in one go, it was first broken into many small pebbles which were dropped one by one. In this way, despite the application of the same total ‘load’, an almost certainly fatal event was turned into one that caused mild discomfort but no lasting damage.
I would argue the performing a high intensity interval session could be considered akin to having large rock drop on your head (a lot of load applied in a short period of time) whereas a long relatively low intensity session is more like having multiple pebbles dropped on your head over a prolonged period. The former is potentially very damaging if not excessive and will require prolonged recovery before further stress can be applied. The latter is more tolerable physiologically, structurally, and psychologically, is safer, requires less recovery, and over time allows accumulation of greater total load. The adaptation achieved in response to this greater load means that the body is in a better position to tolerate the (still necessary) high intensity sessions when they are utilised.
So… is the ‘magic’ in the low intensity work itself, or is it in the avoidance of continued application of very high stress training sessions?
A theme I continually bang on about on this blog is that to understand athletic performance and training for it, we need to realise that the human body represents a complex system:
“All biological systems are complex, and complexity is a characteristic of any system which displays properties that are unpredictable based on knowledge of its components. These unpredictable characteristics which arise from the interactions between the components of the system are termed the ‘emergent’ properties of the system, and it is the presence of these emergent properties that makes a biological system ‘complex’ (Wilkins, 2002). A characteristic of complex biological systems is that self-organization occurs in a way that cannot be explained through examination of constituent components in isolation (Macklem, 2008), meaning that a reductionist approach is unable to explain characteristics of the system as a whole (Mazzocchi, 2008). This suggests even complete knowledge of the components cannot allow prediction of behavior, meaning characteristics displayed by the system are emergent (Mayr, 1982). Emergent phenomena occur at various levels within biology, including the molecular, cellular, organism, ecosystem, and societal (De Haan, 2006). This implies some hierarchical level of organization, as attempts to explain behaviors at one level rely on different mechanisms to explain those at a different level.” (Renfree & Casado 2018)
In addition to complexity, another feature of biological systems is that in order to survive they must maintain homeostasis, meaning certain critical variables (such as glucose or temperature) must be maintained within certain limits. Through the process of training, the system/body adapts so that it is able to absorb progressively greater stresses without loss of homeostasis. In (very) simple terms, the reason a well-trained athlete can beat a poorly trained athlete in a race is because they can sustain a higher (more stressful) speed whilst maintaining homeostasis.
A key feature of most athletic races is variability of speed (although this may be changing at the elite level with the advent of Wavelight technology). The figure below (Casado et al. 2021) from global finals 2008-2017 illustrates that an athlete who is unable to access a variety of different speeds is unlikely to win an Olympic endurance medal on the track.
This observation makes the work of Ross Ashby in the 1950’s relevant. In his Law of Requisite Variety, Ashby explained that for a system to remain stable, and therefore viable, the number of states it’s control system is capable of attaining must be at least equal to the number of states it is required to adopt by the environment in which it operates. To again possibly oversimplify, this implies that the more challenges an athlete can prepare themselves to face, the more behavioural options available to them, and the greater the chance of success.
So, how do we increase the number of states the system is capable of attaining? Quite simply, I suggest exposing the body to as many varied stressors as possible in training. The obvious thing to do is ensure we utilise a wide range of different running speeds, but there is much more we can do – run up and down hills / use soft and uneven ground / train ‘fed’ and fasted / train when fresh and fatigued / hot and cold / utilise a wide range of S&C exercises, etc. The worst thing we can do is restrict ourselves to a limited range of running speeds on the road (or worse, treadmill). If you do you will find yourself ‘fit’, but ill prepared for all that competition throws at you.
Ashby, W., An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman and Hall, London, England, 1956
Casado, A., Hanley, B., Jiménez-Reyes, P. and Renfree, A., 2021. Pacing profiles and tactical behaviors of elite runners. Journal of sport and health science, 10(5), pp.537-549.
Renfree, A. and Casado, A., 2018. Athletic races represent complex systems, and pacing behavior should be viewed as an emergent phenomenon. Frontiers in physiology, 9, p.1432.
Emil Zatopek is one of the greatest distance runners of all time. After winning Olympic gold over 10,000 metres in London in 1948, in Helsinki in 1952 he completed an unprecedented treble by winning the 5000 metres, 10,000 metres, and marathon events, the latter in is first ever attempt at the distance. As one of the pioneers of high volume training his exploits have become legendary.
Zatopek’s training consisted entirely of interval work. There are reports of absolutely enormous sessions of repeated 400 m runs (in the region of 100 per session) at very high speeds, although I suspect these have become increasingly exaggerated with the passing of time.
In a 1955 Masters thesis, the author William Smith reports on an interview conducted with Zatopek that explored his training in great detail. Starting in 1945, 3 basic sessions were used:
-10 x 200 m and 10 x 100 m with 100 to 150 m slow jog recovery.
-10 x 100 m and 20 x 50 m with similar jogs.
-6 x 400 m and 10 x 200 m with 100 to 150 m slow jog recovery.
By 1947 he had progressed to the following:
-5 x 100 m (150 m jog), 20 x 400 m (150 m jog), 5 x 100 m. 400 m run times were in the range of 67 to 77 seconds, with the 100 m runs being slightly faster.
-5 x 150 m, 20 x 250 m (150 jog), 5 x 150 m.
In 1948 most of the work was 5 x 200 m, 20 x 400 m, 5 x 200 m.
He continued to increase the volume of the training until 1950-1953 when a typical day was 5 x 200 m, 40 x 400 m, 5 x 200 m (more than 18 miles a day).
Finally, in 1954 he started experimenting with 2 sessions a day and ENORMOUS volumes of intervals (e.g. 5 x 200 m, 50 x 400 m, 5 x 200 m). The speed of the runs was variable with fast runs being in the region of 65s, but others being practically ‘walks’. He stated that the primary goal was to cover the distance, with the speed of the runs being of secondary importance.
Zatopek’s training was clearly of its time, and I would be surprised if any world-class endurance athletes train similarly today. However, I think it’s interesting and there are things that can be learned from it. Firstly, interval training does not necessarily imply HIIT even if some people seem to use the terms synonymously these days (see: https://andrewrenfree.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/interval-training-doesnt-necessarily-imply-hiit/). Rather, the sessions allowed completion of big volumes of relatively quick running with minimal fatigue. Even though 65-77s per 400 m is not that fast, I suspect he would be hard pushed to do over half his normal 100+ miles per week at the same speeds in a continuous format!
As for the rationale, Zatopek has been quoted as saying “Why should I practice running slow? I already know how to run slow. I want to learn to run fast”. Intuitively, this makes perfect sense, but the physiological basis is sound too. By running at higher speeds he is training more motor units than would be the case if he had run more slowly. Furthermore, as demonstrated by Astrand and Chritiansen in the 1960’s, and Billat and Ronnestad et al more recently, by keeping the recoveries short and active, short intervals can achieve superior adaptive responses to intensity matched long intervals by allowing accumulation of a greater overall training volume with less fatigue.
Having just explained what I think was ‘good’ about this approach, I also can’t quite escape the feeling that it appears quite inefficient. ‘Only’ 13m57s, 28m54s, and 2h23m04s seem quite poor returns for ~140 miles per week of training. However, you can only beat your contemporaries, and put him on a Mondo track in the latest shoe technology combined with modern approaches to sports medicine and nutrition, and I suspect we would be looking at something MUCH faster.
Although I have some reservations about such an ‘all intervals all the time’ approach, I think there is much we can learn from Zatopek’s training. Short Intervals can be a very potent aerobic endurance Stimulus provided volume is high, recovery is short and active, and intensity is not inappropriately high.
Training schedules are of great interest to endurance ‘nerds’ such as myself who like to dissect them in order to identify the recipe that has resulted in success (or otherwise) for the athlete in question. With this in mind, this post describes in some detail the training performed by my old training partner that resulted in a 3m55s mile at 21 years of age and times of comparable quality in the 800 m to 3000 m range, as well as on the country. 3m55s is not at the top of world-class, but it is fast enough to be of interest, and certainly faster than Sir Roger Bannister whose training has been analysed in great detail. I present this information partly because I think it is interesting in its own right, but also because I think it provides evidence that the ‘magic ‘does not lie in the ‘schedule’.
When I was 13 years old, I entered the 6-mile fun run organised by the local rugby club in my hometown of Penzance (purely because I had recently acquired a pair of red, white and blue new balance running shoes that I thought should be put to use). After a far from impressive slog, I was recovering the clubhouse with my parents when I was approached by my school rural science (‘gardening ‘) teacher, Mr Penberthy (Ben), who told me he was trying to put together a team for the schools country cup competition and wondered if I would be interested in joining. After agreeing, I was instructed to come to his classroom after school the next day to join the rest of the team. There from the start were Neil Caddy, Chris Harvey, Gavin Henderson and Carl Garner. The group would soon be joined by Chris Coleman and Charlie Low who would regularly travel from North Cornwall to train.
For the next five years until some of us went to university, almost without fail, every night after school we would all pile into one of our parent’s cars for the journey to the beach and dunes at Gwithian, about 10 miles away. During this time, we all progressed enormously and, as well as various individual achievements (Including several English schools titles, and on one occasion a 1/2 for Neil and Charlie) we won numerous National team titles at both cross country and the relays.
Ben’s approach to training was relatively simple, and the core principles were as follows:
‘Jogging’ Is useless for developing endurance. you need to push the pace a bit.
There is nothing better than running on sand and hills for developing specific strength.
The best preparation for racing is racing.
interval training on the track is to be avoided at all costs.
Team before individual.
Other than a few eccentric ideas about nutrition, that is about it.
The resulting ‘schedule’ was incredibly simple. From the start of the cross-country season in September until the new year, every day was the same. We would set off from the car park over the sand dunes until the designated turn around, at which point we would drop down onto the beach for the return run using one of two routes depending on whether the tide was in or out. Most weekends would be a race if available or else we would do our own thing. From the turn of the year, alternate evenings were spent doing ‘speedwork’. In practise, this would involve jogging to some big hill or sand dune, running up and down it a few times, then jogging over to some other hill and repeating the process. If we were not doing hills, then we would do three or four fast runs over courses of approximately two or three kilometres that Ben had established. The summer training was very similar and commenced after a couple weeks rest following the major cross-country races. The only real difference being that we used slightly shallower hills and would often use a circuit of approximately 1 km for fast runs instead of the longer circuits we used in the winter.
In the format of the ‘typical week’ so beloved of running magazines, the training performed could be presented as follows:
conditioning (September-January and March-April)
MON
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
TUE
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
WED
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
THU
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
FRI
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
SAT
Run (35-40 minutes) / Race
SUN
Run (35-40 minutes) / Race
Return leg on the cliff run (hard work when pitch black and into a howling gale)
Racing season
MON
Hills / Speedwork
TUE
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
WED
Hills / Speedwork
THU
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
FRI
Cliff run (35-40 minutes)
SAT
Run (35-40 minutes) / Race
SUN
Run (35-40 minutes) / Race
Typical hill reps
These schedules present an accurate representation of ‘what’ was actually done. However, my point is that on their own they present an overly simplified picture, and most importantly, fail to capture the important components of the training that led to relatively successful outcomes. You could retrospectively calculate things such as training intensity distribution (there certainly wasn’t much zone 2!), or load, monotony and strain, but I don’t think you will find much information of value here.
So, if I don’t think the magic lay in the details of the training, then where was it? My own interpretation is that it was based in the social dynamics of the group. We were all close friends with shared goals, and the training had a certain intensity that cannot be captured through presentation of typical sessions or weeks. Runs had a certain edge to them and were certainly not steady-state affairs. The terrain was extremely challenging, as was the weather in winter. At times in December and January it was often almost pitch black as well. As a group we worked together taking turns to act as a windbreak running into a south-westerly gale, or else establishing footsteps for others to run in when the sand on the beach was particularly heavy going.
Training was also FUN! It was something to be looked forward to each day rather than some necessary routine. Every session was different in some way even if the schedules above suggest otherwise. It wasn’t just the training that was fun-living so far away from the centre meant that hundreds of hours were spent travelling around the country crammed into cars or minibuses, as well as staying in grotty YMCA’s or youth hostels.
Finally, there was Ben’s coaching. It would be fair to say that he was not an expert physiologist (although he knew the basics). However, despite being a man of few words, he knew what to say and when to say it. If Ben said “you’re going well”, then you knew you must be in really good shape. He also seemed to be able to intuitively know what was needed on any given day. Apart from continuous runs, sessions were designed on the hoof depending on how we were going.
Eventually, like all good things this came to an end and people started moving away, although for several years we continued training together when back in the area. None of us ‘made it’ at the international level, but we did okay for a bunch of schoolfriends from a rural backwater. Although our ‘heyday’ as a group occurred when we were still juniors, a number of us still competed at good national level as seniors and achieved some notable individual performances (the highlight being the 3m55s mile by Neil).
In hindsight I can attempt to rationalise the results achieved through reference to physiological principles, but I’m inclined to believe that this is a waste of time. Although now I would do a few things differently, the training had all the basics in place. I believe the ‘how’ is at least as important as the ‘what’, and although analysis of various training schedules is of interest and gives us clues as to how training should be approached, relying too heavily on this as a guide for practice leads to underestimation of the role of the social context in which the training is performed.
Trends in training practices change frequently. In the distant past when I was young the mantra was ‘quality over quantity’, and the dominant training model was the 5-pace method as developed by Frank Horwill and advocated by Sebastian and Peter Coe. Rather than completing high volumes of work, this method centred on regular track sessions performed at paces corresponding to race speeds for various events, the rationale being that the under-distance sessions developed speed and the over-distance sessions developed endurance. The logic behind this method seemed impeccable, and there were no shortage of magazine articles explaining how to implement it. It was also not too difficult to find articles in the scientific literature demonstrating the apparent superiority of high-intensity training, thereby giving this method some apparent legitimacy.
Interestingly, my early coach was not a big fan of this method, having himself been an active athlete in the 1960s and 70’s when he had trained with some of the leading athletes of the day. In that era, volume was King and 100-mile weeks were the norm as inspired by the highly successful New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard who had achieved great success with athletes from numerous countries. Several books on this method were published, and again these referred to scientific studies lending support to the method. Currently the pendulum seems to have swung back towards the high-volume approach, and in particular the importance of ‘Zone 2’ and ‘polarised’ training. Once more, it is no great challenge to find scientific literature supporting these approaches.
Despite these swings of the training pendulum, it is clear that performances continue to improve across the range of athletic events. This raises the question of whether or not these advances are primarily due to changes in training practices, or whether something else has been going on. Perhaps the specific details of training are not that important in the whole grand scheme of things provided that the key principles are adhered to?
Prescribing training is essentially a decision-making process, both in terms of the short-term (what should be done at the track tonight?), and the long term (how will we structure the upcoming year?). These are very complex decision to make involving consideration of numerous variables and many unknowns. When making complex decisions, humans will look for information to simplify that decision, and the most obvious source of information is what everyone else is doing. Abhijit Bannerjee developed a simple model of herd behaviour in a 1992 paper (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/107/3/797/1873520) whereby decision-makers looked at decisions made by previous decision-makers before making their own decision, based on the rationale that the other decision-makers had access to important information that they did not. This also sounds perfectly rational, but the end result is that everybody ends up doing the same thing! In reality this is exactly what happens in a whole host of human and animal environments, as evidenced by collective behaviours apparent in fields as diverse as pedestrian movements, investing, voting intentions and, as we have previously argued, athletic pacing (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2015.00373/full). I see no reason why this should not also be the case with regards to athletic training, and it is easy to see how things would unfold:
athlete is successful using method > articles are written about this method > other people start using this method based on the belief that the originators knew something they didn’t > some of these people are also successful > more articles are written > etc etc
hey presto! In no time at all, this new method has become the dominant practice and found its way into the coaching literature.
Now, if I was to adopt a new conditioning practice, I would want good evidence that it was likely to be effective. The easy way to find out what is the effective is to look at what the top athletes are doing – surely they would not be so successful if their training was ’wrong’? So, if I see (for example) that the best are training for 10 hours per week, mostly at low intensity, then the obvious conclusion is that I should do the same (see herd principle above). The problem comes though when you start to wonder how many athletes also train for 10 hours per week yet fail to achieve any success at all, or worse still fail to even make it to the start line due to illness or injury. No one writes books about sporting failures that nobody has heard of, but I would bet that the vast majority of athletes attempting to succeed at the top-level fail to do so, despite trying very hard and doing everything ‘right’. It may be the case these athletes simply do not have the necessary ‘talent’ to succeed at the elite level and that they have still achieved their own personal potential. However, it is also possible that they may have succeeded had they trained differently and not simply followed the herd. Either way, the end result is that our understanding of what needs to be done to achieve success (at whatever level) is clouded by survivorship bias-we look to the survivors and ignore the collateral damage.
There are no easy solutions to these issues, but we should all wary of allowing herd behaviour and survivorship bias to weigh too heavily in our decision-making processes.
andrewrenfree 