vomiting because the oxygen debts they are incurring are so great their central nervous systems are being attacked. Many of them, who got their college education only because they won sporting scholarships, have told me since that they dropped running as soon as they graduated although they slowly drifted back to jogging and social running with friends and family. They had all had the competitive edge drilled out of them.
There have been many examples in New Zealand of top high school boys who, on natural ability, could beat everyone in the distance races, the road races and the cross-country events, but then, at twenty or so, were no longer champions. With maturity, people lose the high oxygen uptake which is natural in children, and these top runners hadn‘t trained to develop or maintain that level as they grew older. But the boys they had been beating, who didn’t have the natural talent but had worked harder and more sensibly at developing their running, and maintained a high oxygen uptake capability as a consequence, went on to be the champions.
Peter Snell was only the third best 800 metres runner at Mt Albert Grammar School in Auckland. The best broke Murray Halberg’s national junior mile record, the second best was the national 800 metre junior champion but Snell went on to beat the world. The others dropped out and disappeared.
And, as far as food was concerned, Biwott never went to a supermarket and loaded up with processed grains from which the producers had taken out about 18 minerals and vitamins and put only three back. Sports Illustrated pictured him surrounded by beautiful fields of grain. When they cropped that grain, they didn’t process it. They broke it up and beat it up and cooked everything. And it’s another fact that Africa is possibly one of the last places on earth where most of the soil is still properly balanced.
So Biwott had the best training and the best diet. That’s why he won a gold medal, contrary to what Sports Illustrated was trying to establish.
So, if we are going to train children, we‘ve got to encourage them to see how far they can run, not how fast. We’ve got to get them trotting along and enjoying it, using the parks and roads, enjoying running as a pleasant exercise within their limitations. Setting them out to beat the other kids is contrary to the development of future champions.
Children are better equipped than adults to run distances. They love to run, to jump, to throw things … it’s all a natural release of energy. If you went into a street and said to all the kids there, “Come on, let’s all go for a jog“, they’d probably all follow along. In most cases, kids who seem idle and lazy only need someone to motivate them. If they have nothing to do, they’ll probably get into trouble; if someone can give them a goal like going running or a game of football or cricket, they won’t.
Years ago, the kids at the Owairaka Club in Auckland would turn up on Saturday afternoons with the harriers, go out and run two or three miles across country, come back to the club but, instead of lying around, they’d immediately start playing chasing games around the shed. They wouldn’t be tired from the run; when they did get tired or, more likely, too hot, then they eased down or stopped until they were ready to go again. The endurance of children is a huge natural resource.
Girls can run just as easily as boys; when they’re young, they can often run better. But as they develop and, as many of them do, get wider hips, they can’t run as well because their physical changes prevent them from bringing their legs through as easily or as straight. They start to get knock-kneed and throw themselves around a bit. The tall, willowy build, what we might call the Swedish type, is physically best equipped for running. This is no hard and fast rule – I’ve seen girls with markedly wide hips develop into excellent runners – but it’s common.
Another fact, of course, is that women, again as a general rule, have more subcutaneous fat in the muscles than men and, when it comes to real endurance, they seem to have an advantage. It’s a natural storehouse of energy which they can use before running into deficit.
In 1971 in Copenhagen, two doctors specialising in cardiology put on a 100-km run which drew about a hundred starters. It was the first ultra I had seen so I was keenly interested in the outcome. And it was most interesting to observe that, at the end of that race, most of the men were lying down and relaxing and the women were still standing up talking.
They still don’t run as fast as men, of course, because they don’t have the same muscle power – probably about thirty to forty per cent less – although there are the inevitable exceptions of weak men and strong women. I would say, too, that their oxygen uptake level isn’t as high, so cardiorespiratory efficiency isn’t as great although their cardiovascular efficiency could be. I could be wrong in this, but the evidence seems fairly convincing.
This means they don’t have the ability to run marathons as fast as men because they cannot generate power, drive and speed as economically as a man with his greater oxygen uptake capability. There is no reason why a woman will not, sooner or later, run a 2:18 marathon, but they have the same limitations that I predicted over 30 years ago for men. I said then that, at this stage of human evolution, it wasn’t physically possible for a man to run under two hours for a marathon; 2:05 would be about as fast as they would go. I think we’re stuck around about there now.
The best marathon times for women have improved faster than men’s best times in recent years because, until ten or twenty years ago, not many women ran marathons. Now, many women run marathons and they are training as hard as men, which is bringing their times down rapidly in comparison with men. Not that you can always go by times in marathons.
I always quote the Boston marathon as an example of a point-to-point race fashioned to produce fast times, because runners fall two hundred feet in elevation and invariably have a following westerly wind to help them along. Some years ago, I took a girl, Maria Moran, to Boston to help me with some seminars. Maria came from a place called Taiko at the foot of a South Island mountain range, and I had trained her to be the New Zealand junior secondary schools cross-country champion. She’d followed that with four years on a physical education course at Otago University in Dunedin, most of which is built on steep hills. So, while we were in the US, I suggested she should run the Boston.
“I’ve never run a marathon“, she said.
“Well“, I said, “I’ve trained you so you can run a marathon. Just get in there and run it.“
So Maria ran it. She wasn’t a heel-to-toe runner, she ran on the balls of her feet, but she still finished in around 3:12. She just jogged through and didn’t look as if she’d run around the block.
That evening, at the after-race function, someone asked her: “This is your first time in Boston?“
“Yes“, she said.
“Well, what did you think of Heartbreak Hill?“ the guy asked.
She said, “I never saw any hills.“
They make a big thing in Boston about that hill but to Maria, with her background in hill training, it was just a bit of a rise.
Children can be started as runners as young as five or six, around the parks, jogging with their parents and so on, and there’s no reason why they can’t go into short sprints at school or with track clubs. Sixty or seventy metres is the desired distance; the sustained sprints, from 200 to 400 metres, are unwise. Most kids have strong hearts and they love to win, and, over the longer distances, they run fine and hard until they get to the straight and it starts to hurt. The risk then is that they’ll push themselves to please their parents on the side or to beat someone in front of them.
Anaerobic training is what destroys young runners. I’ve had people complain to me that kids shouldn’t do all the running that I prescribe, but what I have them doing is all aerobic
