by mphcrawley
Last week I included a few statistics which illustrate the extent to which standards have dropped, but sometimes numbers can be hard to relate to. So here’s an example of what a local road race used to look like:
This is the kind of race where you could run under thirty minutes for 10km and be nowhere. It is, as Hunter S. Thompson would have put it, a race run by men who would rather be shot out of a cannon than squeezed out of a tube. Races don’t tend to look much like this any more – try going down to your local park run if you want to see an extreme example. You just don’t get vests like the one Bernie Ford is wearing today either.
Tim Hutchings, who is in a far better position than I to comment, wrote an article in Athletics Weekly last week in which he lamented the fact that many of today’s better runners are under-raced compared with the runners in the ‘80s. I think this is partly down to a fear of being found out. A lot of people tend to only race when they’re in really good form now, rather than using races as a way of finding form. Charlie Spedding writes about not being scared to race in his book ‘From Last to First’, much of which is concerned with the mental approach to running. Rather than attempting to avoid racing people who are better than you, or being scared to compete, he advocates seeing racing better runners as an opportunity rather than something to be feared.
Sometimes you have to be a bit smart about this, though, as I found out last week. Running a 10km in an extremely windy Grangemouth, it’s probably best not to try to run away from people on a stretch into the wind, no matter how much you’re trying to change the way you approach racing. I found this out last weekend, and was beaten by two of a front group of four as a result. I gave it a decent go, and both of them should have beaten me on paper (one was second in the Scottish Cross Country this year and the other has the Commonwealth Games standard for the marathon already), but I would probably have given them a better race had I been more sensible.
Training can never really quite replicate races if you’re trying to really put out a hard effort. Running is a pretty simple sport – along with boxing it corresponds most closely to the basic ‘fight or flight’ response (some have tried to combine the two, but it is not recommended http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBxlTpkvQuk). I ran the Scottish six stage road relays yesterday, and after the first leg, when teams start to get spread out, runners are left constantly in the position of both hunter and hunted. You can’t replicate the adrenal reaction to this in training. I spent the first half of my leg chasing down the second placed runner and the second half worrying if there was anyone else chasing from behind. Given that the race was in Livingston, a new build town of underpasses, flyover bridges and tight corners between housing estates, you were never entirely certain that you weren’t about to be overtaken. My club, Costorphine, claimed the silver medal, the first time we’ve won a medal in this race, so it was a good day.
For those interested, below is the last week in March for both me and my coach, including the previous Sunday. We both raced twice, once in a relay.
My training:
Sunday: 11 miles including 3rd in Grangemouth 10km (31.03).
Monday: AM 5.5 miles steady PM 5.5 miles steady.
Tuesday: AM 4.5 miles steady PM 9.5 miles including 3km (2 laps jog), 5 x 1km (200 jog) on track with Matt Gunby. Hard work after Sunday.
Wednesday: AM 10 miles steady.
Thursday: AM 4.5 miles steady. PM 7 miles fartlek.
Friday: AM 4.5 miles steady. PM 4.5 miles steady.
Saturday: 4.5 miles easy.
Sunday: 11 miles including long leg in Scottish Road relay championships (29.29, started 3rd, finished 2nd).
Total for week up to Sunday: 72 miles.
My coach’s training:
Sunday: 14 miles inc (illegible) in Kendall Road Race – poor, 50.45
Monday: 6 miles with Barry
Tuesday: AM: 5 miles alone – tired. PM 4 miles 21.30 alone.
Wednesday: 10 miles – good.
Thursday: 10 miles.
Friday: AM 6 miles. PM 7 miles.
Saturday: 16 miles including leg at Gosforth Relays 15.24.
Sunday: AM 16 miles alone, tired. PM 4 miles OK.
Total for week up to Sunday: 78 miles.
Acceptable in the Eighties 
Well done yesterday.
You doing Tom Scott 10 mile race next Sunday?
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Don’t think so – I’m running the 12 stage the week after though…
I am so digging these posts and this blog. Wish I could see the paces in the training posts (I can figure it out of course on some) just to see how this experiment is playing out. Keep up the good work.
Superb road race footage. So different to now. Love the Jarrow 10k on you tube too. Massive field of high quality with a young Steve Cram leading the charge. Great blog. Should be required reading for every club runner – as should Spending’s book. Keep it up. Good to see you’re running well too.
First of all, great blog – it’s been fascinating to read about running attitudes and trends in previous decades, and it’s refreshing to hear your cynicism towards aspects of today’s running culture.
Looking at the severity of your weekly training schedule, I was wondering how you manage to avoid impact/repetitive strain injuries. Do you do anything special before or after your runs to help your muscles and joints recover? Or do you try and run on more forgiving surfaces than concrete for a lot of your sessions?
I ask because I run about 50-60km per week (including a long run, speed and hill training etc), the bulk of which is road running, and that seems to be about my body’s limit. I mean, when I’ve run 70-80km over a week, my knees have started to complain, and I’ve got injured as a result.
I’m aware that 50-60km is a relatively low weekly total, but, that said, I don’t know how many people’s bodies (outside of conditioned top athletes) could take 110+ km per week on a regular basis. Are there innovative eighties training techniques that are somehow better for the legs, or is it all just down to luck with genetics?
From the accounts in ‘British Maraton Running Legends of the 1980s’, a lot of the guys back then seem to have done quite a lot of their running on grass. Most of them also had jobs that were more active than sitting behind a desk, which might have helped with general conditioning, but most of them don’t seem to have done much (if any) stretching, core stability, weights, massage that people do today. I suppose, though, it might be the case that there were a lot more people running and the ones who made it were those who didn’t get injured (the ‘if you throw enough eggs against a wall, some of them probably won’t break’ theory).
As for me, I do the vast majority of my steady running on grass or trails – I couldn’t get away with 80 miles a week on the road. That was the one big thing I took away from training in Ethiopia – they avoid hard surfaces like the plague over there, and usually only do one run (out of fourteen) on tarmac per week, just so it’s not a shock when they race on the road. I think it’s also worth taking a bit of time to get up to that sort of mileage, but your body does gradually get used to it. I go to the gym once a week and do a few light weights, and I’ll get a massage when I can afford it, but that’s not very often!
Loved the video! I am stealing that link…haha.
Regarding the racing side of things and what Tim said last week, Jim Dingwall kind of confirmed this when he said “…and then at a weekend I would race. I raced virtually every Saturday because in those days races were on Saturdays.”
Running was mostly simple to the 80s guys. l always liked two quotations I got. One was from Martin McCarthy: “My view was you just went out and ran as hard as possible. You ran until your legs dropped off. There is nothing scientific about that. Well, not that I could see anyway.” The other was from Steve Brace: “I would suggest that for 40 weeks of the year it is not a difficult sport to plan. Some people make it very complex, but it is really rather simplistic. If you are doing too much, then your body tells you. If you are coping and progressing, then you know. There are no shortcuts. It is all about hard work.” I also agree with your reply comment in that there was a bit of an attitude of “survival of the fittest.”
Keep up the experiment. 🙂
Loving the blog, looking forward to the next update!
I’m not a runner or running enthusiast, so apologies if this question is a bit stupid, but is there anything your coach or other 80’s runners you’ve spoken to would do differently today (with modern/current approaches to training in mind… or just generally)? Or that you might consider doing?