rate after running. If you begin quite unfit, your rate of improvement could be surprisingly rapid at first, but it will level off gradually as you approach your optimum or maximum oxygen uptake level – not that there is any real maximum because it is a factor still with a measure of infinity. No one can say positively what the limits are in blood vascular or cardiorespiratory efficiency. With regular controlled running, the upper level in any runner can be extended for many years.
The 1984 Olympic marathon produced a classic example. I was lecturing in the US earlier and was asked if I thought Alberto Salazar, who was winning everything at that time, would win. He had just changed his training methods, so I questioned whether anyone thought he would even make the team. I didn’t think the training he was doing, running around with oxygen masks on for simulated altitude training and so on, was correct. That shocked them a bit. (Salazar did eventually make the US Olympic team by finishing second in their national championship.)
When I was asked who would win, if Salazar wouldn’t, I named the Portuguese Carlos Lopez. Their reaction was: He’s too old, he’s 36.
I said that was to his advantage because over the years he had been developing greater and greater cardiac efficiency, better capillary development and finer muscular endurance and, given that all other factors were equal, he would win because he would be able to maintain his knee lift and leg speed best.
That is exactly what happened. Over the final kilometres, Lopez just ran away from the field. Salazar finished eleventh or twelfth. He was, without doubt, a great marathoner, but he changed from a training programme that was successful and the change didn’t pay off.
Lopez was a fine example of self-improvement and that’s the main motivation for many people in fun runs. They know they haven’t a hope of beating the fast runners so what they do is try to improve their own times; in a sense, they run their races against themselves. Fun runs, since they are usually of five or ten kilometres, are good testing runs.
I recommend that an aerobic run over five kilometres or a test of how far you can run aerobically in fifteen minutes are the best for checking fitness progress.
Check your pulse rate when you finish and then every thirty seconds or so and, if you’re getting fit, you will find it is going to come down and recover to normal faster. You may not have run the distance faster, but you will have run more efficiently.
The resting pulse rate can be unreliable as a guide because it’s subject to emotional variations and so on. I was once asked by a man at a seminar in Pennsylvania whether, if he took his pulse every morning when he woke up, he would build a good indication of his fitness level. I said, jokingly, that it all depended on who he was sleeping with. I was trying to impress on him that, even in bed, the pulse rate is subject to varying factors – hot night, cold night, deep sleep, restless sleep and so on.
One woman runner in New Zealand told me that every time her doctor took her pulse it was much higher than she believed it should be. I took it and it wasn’t high at all. Then I remembered that the doctor she was talking about was a very handsome young man. There was the difference.
Every sportsman and sportswoman needs stamina, by which I mean the highest possible uptake level and muscular endurance, the ability to keep the muscles contracting consistently. Once those muscles begin to tie up, performance drops. Very few runners, for example, can maintain a good knee lift throughout a race because they lack the muscular endurance which comes from well-developed capillary beds in the upper leg muscles. Once the knees go down, stride length shortens and leg speed dwindles. That was the factor that Lopez demonstrated so well; he maintained his knee lift all the way to the tape.
This applies in any sport. When the Olympic canoeist Ian Ferguson came to me in 1983 and asked me to look at his training programme because he wasn’t succeeding as well as he should, I found he was a well-built man with large, powerful muscles – partly developed in the high surf of New Zealand as a lifesaver – but without endurance. I set out a programme which required him to do a great deal of steady, long-distance aerobic paddling.
When he went to the next world championship against the East Germans, who had never been beaten, he won the world title. He knew more about rowing than I did but I knew more about training for it.
After Ferguson came back to New Zealand, the seven class canoeists we had in New Zealand worked on a refined programme of mine, went to the 1984 Olympics and won seven gold medals between them. They now had their technical skills founded on a strong aerobic base so they could come out day after day through the heats and the semis, row right up to their optimum and recover rapidly in time for the next race. The schedule was perfect in the sense that we got the aerobic and anaerobic sections right at the right time. Everything was coordinated and balanced to produce top form on the day of competition.
I did the same in San Antonio, Texas, with Greg Lousey, who, at 32, was the fencing champion of the US but had been told he was too old for the LA Olympics and wouldn’t make the team. He was a big man but he went out and ran 100 miles a week to my schedule, rode his horses, did his cross-country work, swimming, shooting and fencing, and not only forced his way into the team but won a silver medal in the modern pentathlon. He was a perfect example of what a good foundation of endurance can do.
Dr Uhlenbruck, from the West German Sports School, made a study of ultramarathoners, people of all ages who could run 50, 60 and 100 miles a day for day after day. Max Telford, of New Zealand, comfortably ran 240 miles without stopping. Siegfried Bauer, an ex-patriate German who then lived in New Zealand, never put his shoes on without going for a run of 40 to 100 miles.
Dr Uhlenbruck came to the conclusion that if you use muscle groups continuously for long periods, even at the low levels adopted by some ultra runners in training, you very quickly develop the dormant capillary beds and also establish new ones and, as well, a mitochondria that will be likely to remain indefinitely. This, he said, was unquestionably the secret of muscular endurance.
If a boxer punches a bag steadily for two hours, without stopping – not fast but fast enough to keep the blood flowing through the muscles at an elevated rate – he will build the muscular endurance which will enable him to throw those punches hard and fast for the length of a 15-round bout.
Lionel Spinks, who won the heavyweight championship of the world, was trained on a tape I made for the coach and physiologist who controlled his training. This required him to punch the bag for long, steady periods. When he went into the ring, he was still throwing effective punches when his opponents were tiring to the point where they not only couldn’t match his punching ability, they couldn’t get out of the way of his blows.
Of course, when he met Tyson, he didn’t get the chance to throw a punch but the point had been made – he won his other fights with a continuous barrage of punches because his arms, trained for endurance and with highly developed capillary beds, didn’t tire.Whatever the event, physiology and mechanics don’t change. The fundamentals must be followed.
In New Zealand, we have seen the effect in rugby football, our national winter game. Years ago, I lectured in Hawke’s Bay and the flanker Kel Tremain, who was in the audience, was fired up to run 100 miles a week to see what happend. He found it was too much for him, so we refined a programme which had him running an hour every morning as part of a conditioning system. The effect was that he not only improved his endurance, he got into the All Blacks, the New Zealand national team, because, at the end of a game, he would be running as fast as he had been at the start. He established himself as a leading try-scorer.
Des Christian, a friend who was an All Black many years ago, once challenged, “Arthur, all this running is no good to an All Black. Rugby is sprint, sprint, sprint.“
Trying to make him understand the point he was missing,
