Arthur Lydiard

Arthur Leslie Lydiard (6 July 1917 – 11 December 2004) was a New Zealand runner and athletics coach.

He has been lauded as one of the outstanding athletics coaches of all time and is credited with popularising the sport of running and making it commonplace across the sporting world.

His training methods are based on a strong endurance base and periodisation.

Lydiard was born in Auckland, growing up in Sandringham.

He attended Edendale School and Mount Albert Grammar School.

He spent much of his early life training to become a shoemaker.

After noticing that his physical fitness was waning in his 20s, Lydiard set up the Owairaka Harriers, becoming the coach of the Owairaka Athletic Club.

Lydiard competed in the Men's Marathon at the 1950 British Empire Games in Auckland, coming twelfth with a time of 2:54:51.

In the 1950s and 1960s, during the base phase of their training the athletes under Lydiard's tutelage would run a 35 km Sunday training route, starting from his famed 5 Wainwright Avenue address in Mt Roskill, through steep and winding roads in the Waitakere mountain ranges.

The total cumulative ascent in the Waitakeres was over 500 metres.

Lydiard presided over New Zealand's golden era in world track and field during the 1960s sending Murray Halberg, Peter Snell and Barry Magee to the podium at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.

After laying such an arduous endurance base Lydiard's athletes—including Murray Halberg, Peter Snell, Barry Magee and John Davies—were ready to challenge the world, winning six Olympic medals amongst them in the 1960 Rome Olympics and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Snell, who after retiring from athletics in the mid-1960s went on to obtain a PhD in exercise physiology, stated in his autobiography No Bugles No Drums that the marathon-conditioning endurance aspect of Lydiard's training was the primary factor in his success as a world-beating middle distance athlete.

The Lydiard system has been challenged since it was formalised and crystallised in the early 1960s.

The two main sources of criticism of Lydiard emanate from the English coach, Frank Horwill, and the US coach, Jack Daniels.

Horwill's Five Tier Training system departs from Lydiard in its claim that the maximum amount of weekly mileage that an athlete requires to achieve maximum aerobic efficiency is 110 km.

Horwill takes the view that Lydiard's insistence on 160 km a week in the base phase is at best superfluous, at worst an unnecessary cause of injuries and staleness.

Horwill also differs from Lydiard in that he believes that all aspects of training must be present in a training programme at any time of the year and periodisation is a matter of simply emphasising one aspect of training such as speed or strength during a particular phase in which all the other training components are present.

Daniels, on the other hand, emphasises the need to train at what he terms threshold pace in order to achieve optimum athletic performance.

In the 1962 New Year Honours, Lydiard was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to sport.

Under Lydiard's tutelage Snell went on to double-gold at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Notable athletes subsequently coached by him or influenced by his coaching methods included Rod Dixon, John Walker, Dick Quax and Dick Tayler.

On 6 February 1990, Lydiard was the 17th appointee to the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civil honour.

He also became a life member of Athletics New Zealand in 2003.

Arthur Lydiard died 11 December 2004 of a suspected heart attack in Texas, while on a lecture tour.

Lydiard's ground-breaking impact on distance running was recognised by Runner's World, which hailed him as All time best running coach.

Lydiard constantly clashed with unimaginative and officious athletics administrators in his native New Zealand and in the countries that called upon his strong personality and coaching expertise to establish national athletics programmes.

The marathon-conditioning phase of Lydiard's system is known as base training, as it creates the foundation for all subsequent training.

Lydiard's emphasis on an endurance base for his athletes, combined with his introduction of periodisation in the training of distance runners, were the decisive elements in the world-beating success of the athletes he coached or influenced.

All of the training elements were already there in the training of Roger Bannister, the first miler who broke the 4-minute barrier for the mile, but Lydiard increased distance and intensity of training and directed the sport periodisation towards the Olympics and not the breaking of records.

Periodisation comprises emphasising different aspects of training in successive phases as an athlete approaches an intended target race.

After the base training phase, Lydiard advocated four to six weeks of strength work.

This included hill running and springing.

This improved running economy under maximal anaerobic conditions without the strain on the achilles tendon, as it was still done in running shoes.

Only after this spikes were put on and a maximum of four weeks of anaerobic training followed.

(Lydiard found through physiological testing that four weeks was the maximum amount of anaerobic development needed—any more caused negative effects such a decrease in aerobic enzymes and increased mental stress, often referred to as burnout, due to lowered blood pH.) Then followed a co-ordination phase of six weeks in which anaerobic work and volume taper off and the athlete races each week, learning from each race to fine-tune himself or herself for the target race.

For Lydiard's greatest athletes the target race was invariably an Olympic final.

Lydiard was renowned for his uncanny knack of ensuring that his athletes peaked for their most important races and, apart from his tremendous charisma and extraordinary ability to inspire and motivate athletes, this was largely a product of the periodisation principle he introduced into running training.

In the base training phase of his system Lydiard insisted, dogmatically, that his athletes—not least 800 metres athlete Peter Snell—must train 100 miles (160 km) a week.

He was completely inflexible on this requirement.