Running to the Top. Arthur Lydiard

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      CHAPTER 3

      THE BASICS OF YOUTH

      The great Swedish coach Gosta Holmer, head Olympic coach in 1948, said that if you can get an athlete in his teens to train but not race until he is mature, you will have laid the foundation for an Olympic champion. It’s an ideal I’ve always agreed with, the reason why I’ve always insisted on taking the long view with athletes who want to become champions in a hurry. There are no safe shortcuts.

      When I was in Kenya, I was reminded once more of the lesson the African athletes have given us since they began dominating middle and distance running around the world. Part of their way of life has been doing exactly what Holmer preached.

      In Kenya, as in other African nations, many youth run to and from school every day of the school year. No cars, no buses, just their own legs. One youth called Biwott, for instance, ran ten miles to school and ten miles home again five days a week – one hundred miles a week. He became an Olympic champion at the 1968 Games in Mexico, which illustrates how long the message of this great potential for success has been around. These kids run because it’s the only way for them to go. They run with no pressure on them, no racing except in fun, and all the time they are laying a wonderful foundation of high oxygen uptake and endurance so that, when they finally turn out in a race somewhere, many of them produce fantastic times. We saw this in the 1988 world cross-country championships when the junior Kenyans proved far superior to anyone else. Now the Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians and others who are moving into the international scene are also running fast times because they, too, have done so much aerobic running as young kids that they have a huge natural base on which to build speed and proper technique.

      In the US, when young kids show any form at high school, the tendency is to put them on the track and pile the anaerobic work into them. Consequently, they don’t develop.

      We know that young people, before they reach puberty and go through that fast growth spurt, have the ability to use oxygen more efficiently for their body weight than adults. They also have highly sensitive nervous systems so they are protected by nature to be able to continue activity for a long time at the aerobic level. But they cannot stand heavy doses of anaerobic training and pressure from coaching regimens to race a lot. This occurs in many of the affluent countries, usually because sporting success is as good for an educational institute as academic success, and success means better funding. These youngsters, therefore, don’t develop their aerobic capacity sufficiently so when, as adults – if they’re still interested in running – they come up against the Africans, and their relatively low oxygen uptake level is no match for their opponents’ high level. When the pressure goes on in a race, they lose knee lift, they experience neuromuscular breakdown, they can’t sprint at the end – and the Africans can.

      It’s an anthropomorphic fact, of course, that the Africans have the advantage over Caucasians of larger gluteal muscles. They can do things to get more power that white people can’t. They can actually lean forward and still get their knees up; the Caucasian has to stay much more upright.

      But the American publication, Running Research News cast new light on Kenyan supremacy by reporting the results of a study by Swedish exercise physiologist Bengt Saltin, of the famed Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He compared seven elite Swedish runners with students from Kenya’s St. Parick’s high school, which, with a roll of about 500 students, has produced six world cross-country champions, four sub-2.10 marathoners and more than a dozen Olympians.

      Saltin, reported RRN’s Owen Anderson, PhD, reckoned that thousands of Kenyan runners were just as good as the top seven Swedes but discovered that St. Patrick’s athletes followed incredibly simple training plans, which included a considerable mileage run as fast as possible on six days of the week. Running to and from school added some 10- to 30-km slower running to the plan.

      Saltin found the Kenyans had a small advantage over the Swedes in total anaerobic capacity (about three per cent). The Swedes’ VO2 max ranged from 76 to 81 ml/kg/m; the Kenyans’ from 79 to 87. Each group had equal slow-twitch to fast-twitch fibre ratios but then Saltin found a significant difference in what lay inside and around the Kenyans’ muscles.

      They tended to have more mitochondria per muscle cell and more capillaries draped round their fibres. The Swedish runners had four to five capillaries per muscle cell in their quadriceps but the Kenyans had seven to eight, quite similar, Saltin found, to the world’s best cross-country skiers, giving them a greater capacity to use oxygen and a greater resistance to fatigue.

      Inside their muscle cells, the Kenyans had a higher concentration of the enzymes which break down fat and greater quantities of citrate synthase, a critical enzyme needed to provide muscles with energy aerobically. Reverting to Biwott for a moment, Sports Illustrated magazine ran a big article on him when he won his Olympic medal, showing him in his home village, which was largely mud and straw huts. Here, the magazine said, was an athlete who had never had a coach, wasn’t trained properly and didn’t even have the right food but won an Olympic gold medal.

      If we look at the situation sensibly, Biwott didn’t need a coach. He was better without one. He laid the basis for his success with all that running between home and school with no more pressure on him than the weight of his schoolbag. He trotted along at his own pace, playing as he went, as kids will do when left to their own devices – and there was the best training he could get. None of the American way: The guy with ‘Coach’ on his back, a clipboard СКАЧАТЬ