Footprints: Remembering Arthur
The Coach, Issue 27, 2005
Letter from Auckland
With the death last year of Arthur Lydiard, the sport of track and field athletics lost one of its most charismatic and successful coaches. Scott Winton, one of Lydiard’s athletes, offers these final reflections on a great coach:
It’s hard to quantify how many people have been affected by Arthur Lydiard during his lifetime. I can say with certainty that he has impacted my life profoundly. People come around periodically that alter or deviate the course of a given sport. Lydiard’s revolutionary ideas did more than that, they turned the theory of distance running of its head. It takes a special personality to do that and it’s been my pleasure to have been coached and mentored by Arthur, since I was 13 years old. … … “The talent is all around us, we’ve just got to give them the belief in themselves, the right training and anything’s possible”. His confidence in himself is common to all top sports people. … …
Arthur Lydiard was launched into the limelight one day in Tokyo when, within two hours of each other, two of his boys claimed unexpected gold medals in the 1960 Olympic Games. The whole world wanted to know more about New Zealand’s Murray Halberg and Peter Snell, and what they discovered changed the theory of distance running. Up until that time the majority of middle distance athletes, like the great Roger Bannister, trained predominantly on a diet of repetition work all year round. Lydiard theorised that it was the aerobic fitness, or the endurance of an athlete, which was the limiting factor; after all it is not always the quickest person who finishes fastest but the strongest or best conditioned athlete. After reading various studies on physiology and experimenting on himself, Lydiard devised a training schedule, which had heavy emphasis on endurance. So for all his athletes, even the 800 m runners like Snell, he prescribed a lot of marathon type work. This was the initial phase of their training, then came hill-work for strength, finally a phase of anaerobic training and they were ready to race. Being highly periodised, by and large this format has been adopted to most endurance sports from kayaking to cycling.
The notoriety of Lydiard’s methods and the success that came with it led him to coaching stints all over the world including the United States, Mexico and Finland, which resulted in success in the seventies with Olympic glory for Pekka Vasala and Lasse Viren. … …
He has a forceful and charismatic personality, and he oozes enthusiasm for a sport that he’s given a lot to, but one that has given him even more. Arthur shouldn’t be doubted which I learned early on in out relationship. One days when he was explaining something to me, I replied “Do you think so?”. This stopped him in his tracks. Then he looked at me with a disbelieving glare and said, “I don’t think so. I bloody know so!”. … … he never asked us for a cent. His reward was in seeing us achieve our goals. “How I can take money from these guys who want to run, when other young people are hanging around drinking and smoking”. … … but it was his people skills that made him the coach he was, as Olympic bronze medallist Barry McGee laments. “He was like a father figure to me. Arthur had that special ability to motivate athletes when they were down. If you went to see him feeling down, you would leave believing you would be the next Olympic champion”.
One of the most important things I learnt from Arthur was that there is a purpose to everything you do and it is important to know why you are doing every session. Only then do you get an understanding of the sport. … …Another time he told us how one of the coaches he was helping in America was waxing lyrical about an athlete he thought was going to be the next big thing. The guy was doing some amazing times for some 400 m reps and Arthur told us how he had said to the coach “As far as I know there is no Olympic title for a session of 400 m reps”. … it crystallises his point that repetitions are only one part of a complete programme. Arthur talked about it a lot, as he believed that us non-Africans sometimes put too much of an emphasis on anaerobic training. People wanting to emulate the Africans examine their training and see that there is a large speed component, but it is with some frustration the Lydiard explained that this wasn’t the whole picture. “Before these athletes are put into their training camps they have done a veritable lifetime of aerobic training as youngsters. So if you look solely at the work they do now, it looks like they do a lot of anaerobic work. When people try to copy this without having done the necessary endurance training they can burn-out or become injured”. … …
I remember one particular training session we did because it changed my attitude to the sport forever. We had a 10,000 m time trial planned, which we did around the local track. I wasn’t feeling that good trying to keep up with the others and at 6,000 m I simply walked off the track. After the warm down I received a wall of silence from Arthur and once he knew I wasn’t injured he let me have it. “No athlete of mine stops like that. Your competitors identify a weakness, knowing that they just have to put you under pressure and you’ll submit. Also, it gives you an option for the next time you’re feeling fatigued”. I’ve never stopped in a race since and at last yea’s London marathon Arthur’s sentiments came flooding back to me when I was feeling it in the last few miles. … …
Lydiard was not always embraced by New Zealand’s national body and because of this uneasy relationship, we have under-utilised one of the greatest minds in athletics. It all stemmed from his treatment in the 1960’s when “Arthur’s boys” were dominating distance running in New Zealand and the world, which helped athletics to enjoy unprecedented success and exposure. Crowds of twenty to thirty thousand people were going through the turnstiles to see Kiwis take on the record books and the pick of the world’s elite. For some reason, Lydiard was not given and official role at the Olympic Games in 1964 and it took a national appeal to raise his fare so he was able to attend and watch Peter Snell take the 800 m, 1500 m double. Feeling disenfranchised by the sport’s ruling body, he soon left his country-of-birth to further his coaching career. Thankfully that frostiness eventually thawed and in 2003 he was awarded a life membership into New Zealand Athletics. … … In his final years Lydiard was taken into the heart of the general public as well. Three years ago he was asked to be the starter of a mile race at the half-time break of a cricket international at Auckland’s Eden Park and he was humbled as the capacity crowd game him a rousing standing ovation. … He appreciated his accolades, but sadly he was in his ninth decade before he was given the recognition he so richly deserved. … …
Arthur was present at the Athens Olympics, but it wasn’t Athletics that held the biggest interest for him. New Zealand’s current sportsperson of the year is kayaking’s Ben Fouhy, who is coached by our most successful Olympian of all time, Ian Ferguson. Lydiard is personally connected here, as he advised Ferguson through his success in the 80’s applying his theories in physiology and adapting them to kayaking. In athletics, Lydiard isn’t surprised at how the Africans and England’s Paula Radcliffe have re-written the record books over recent years. “In the 1960’s we determined that performance was chiefly limited by your aerobic capacity. The limit of an athlete’s aerobic capacity is unknown”. … … he (Peter Snell) now works as an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas. Snell left for the United States soon after he retired from athletics and he has since distinguished himself in the academic world. It is the one subject Lydiard talks of with a slight hint of disappointment. “He retired too young at only twenty six. We never saw the best of Peter Snell”. That is saying something because in his relatively short career he won three Olympic gold medals, claimed several world records and his best 800 m of 1:44.3 on grass would still be competitive today. … …
… another point that he regularly made: “You must always run the second half of a race faster then the first”. … …
Texas was where Arthur passed away peacefully in his hotel room while on tour promoting his new autobiography and how fitting it was that he had lunch with his most famous athlete, Peter Snell, only two days before he died. They chatted about old times, but mostly talked about the future with optimism. Sitting face to face were two of New Zealand’s favourite sons and highest achievers, who changed each other’s lives forever. I am sure Arthur Lydiard will be remembered by many People in numerous different ways, but what will the history books say? It’s easy to look back and see how many records and champions Lydiard can lay claim to, but maybe this isn’t the best way to quantify the affect he has had. I prefer to look around the parks and streets and see joggers enjoying the simple pleasure of running. This will be has lasting legacy. I will miss him.
Scott Winton (author) was brought up in the Auckland suburb of Beachlands, just under a mile from where Arthur Lydiard lived. He began running when he was 13 and doesn’t plan on ever stopping.
