I see an endorsement of Lester from Regis who seemed to do all his best times after training with John Smith.
I take athlete endorsements with a rock rather than a grain of salt as they are often based on personal loyalties. In this case it could be a matter of profit. How many of Lester’s athletes does Regis represent?
Also…Roger Black, was trained by another coach…
“During my final preparations before Sydney when my hurdling wasn’t going well it was Tony that turned it around”
Denise Lewis Olympic Champion
“In 1996 I won a Silver Medal at The OlympicGames in Atlanta in the 400 metres. I would not have won this without the help of Tony Lester”
Roger Black MBE
“Tony Lester ignited my self belief in competing with the best athletes in the world”
John Regis European Champion 200m
“Tony has identified my weaknesses and addressed them in a constructive manner, Tony is a true professional”
Marlon Devonish Olympic Champion
None of them really mention physical training coaching, they all mention he helped.
I wouldn’t be surprised if all he did was help their confidence or mention something about them to make them think and change it.
That’s possibly because it is promoting Lester as a public speaker, not an athletics coach. I wouldn’t read anything into it.
http://www.uka.org.uk/e-inspire/hall-of-fame-athletes/roger-black/
Roger Black Date of Birth:1966
Born: Portsmouth
Club: Southampton & Eastleigh, Team Solent.
Coach(s): Mike Smith, Mike Whittingham.
Black Magic
However… Lester is attributed as Roger’s coach in 1996 and there is no doubt that Tony has had some world class results, one of the more impressive of late being Nicola Sanders who was Osaka 400m flat runner-up, but whose 50.71 for fourth in Beijing semi-final No. 3, was not fast enough to make it to the final.
An IAAF Report stated of Sanders: "But it was only after moving back home and linking up with Tony Lester, the man who coached Roger Black to Olympic 400m silver and Mark Richardson to European 400m bronze, did she start to make real headway.
Sanders thrived on the extra workload and at last started to fulfil her potential.
“It was pretty tough,” Sanders admitted of Lester’s training. “But if you are in a new situation it pushes you more. I just got stuck in and probably did more training than I thought I was capable of. At Loughborough, with hindsight, I perhaps didn’t push myself as much as I thought I could.”
So it looks like if you can survive the Lester program you can run well in the short term but you may be marked down as AWOL a season or two later.
THIS IS AN INTERVIEW IN WHICH TONY LESTER SOUNDS AS REASONABLE AND AS RATIONAL AS ANY GOOD COACH
Tony Lester
Senior Performance Coach, UK Athletics
Duration: 37:03 mins
File Size: 34MB
Estimated Download Time: 5 minutes
Download: MP3 / WMA
Tony Lester, a former warrant officer in the British army, is one of Europe’s top sprint coaches. Currently he is a senior performance coach with UK Athletics, and his resume includes training the likes of Olympic 400m silver medalist Roger Black, Olympic medalist Marlon Devonish, former world junior 200m champion Tim Benjamin and 2007 World 400m silver medalist Nicola Sanders. Although having experienced success in all the sprint events, Coach Lester’s expertise is mainly in the 400m race.
In this interview with Coach Lester, he begins with a discussion on his background and upbringing as a coach in the sport. He then offers his ideas on the training of the 400m, such as the role of maximal speed and speed endurance in this event, the structure of a weekly plan, and the development of strength he employs. He offers his views on planning and periodization, planning for a major competition such as the recent Olympics, and the importance of therapy in his program. Tony also reveals his thoughts on the coaching structure and athlete development system in the UK as we move towards the London 2012 Olympics.
I last talked with Tony Lester four years ago and, judging by the audio interview he has matured. Thankfully. But I would still suggest that if he finds fault in a program or in the progress of an individual, he should best address his inquiries to the coach - not the athlete. Athletes are too often gullible, desperate, always thinking the grass will be greener on the other side of the fence. Maybe it will, but so often it isn’t. What Tony has done in the case of sprint_coach is destablise that coach-athlete relationship. That particular athlete was getting the best support available in his country, given many administrative difficulties with the local national federation. He has also shown himself to be highly unstable, coming and going from the sport. He owes his current long-term coach a massive debt because sprint_coach has treated him like a son. And still he is ungrateful and unaware of how fortunate he has been to have this coach so loyal to him despite his gypsy ways.
Great posts KK and Robin.
I may have something to add to this discussion.
Once the Olympic cycle is taken into account and removed (using a centered moving average), a trend in the eighth ranked athlete emerges, showing that the times are getting faster. Because just taking the eighth best time is fairly arbitrary I don’t think we can read too much into this. Using some form of average over the top 16 times and performing a time series on this, may allow you to draw stronger theories about the progression of the event over recent history.
The other is, that the move to the three round format does not appear to have had a significant effect on the time required to qualify for the final. It does appear to have made the range of times required to get in to become narrower. This may not be so much to do with the number of rounds themselves, as much as it has to do with the fact that instead of the top four in each semi qualifying, the seventh and eighth athletes progress on the basis of times. For instance this may mean that the third and fourth placed athletes cannot afford to back off as much as they had previously been able to get away with.
CHANGE OF TOPIC HERE.
This should have been pre-comp work but a six weeks setback due to a silly hammy injury has meant that he is only just now ready to do this set fast enough to be somewhat specific to his 400m intentions. So he is doing this set during the competition period, but his next 400m race will not come until next Saturday afternnoon. This guy has run only two 400m races to date.
Today’s session:
400m training
350m in 41sec
8mins rest
320m in 41sec
8min rest
300m in 41sec
“Can’t feel my butt” direct quote post set by the 400m sprinter whose best time is 48.0sec. But I think he looked on course to run well into the 47sec zone today, at worst 47.8
He ran this set solo.
The 41sec has a few 10ths here or there, but interesting the coincidence of times. The poor guy looked like he was treading water on that last rep. We’ll get blood lactate and bicarbonate readings for the same set next Sunday (if the physiologist gets to the track on time)
is 40m correct? 
That session was done on the Sunday prior to this coming Saturday’s 400m?
all better now. 400m would be correct )
That is incredibly coincidental that they were all 41s. Did you ever get blood lactate readings from the next session?
No unfortunately. But the next session finished with a 38sec 300m.
400 Meter Training: Blending Short-to-Long and Long-to-Short Methods – Part I
Darren Clark gets vertical: NB - this image is reversed, but shows Clark mid stride down the backstraight during a 400m race. Although not a tall man, he was maybe 5ft 10in tall, Clark had a huge stride which came “effortlessly” due to his superior mechanics and relation as seen here. His best time is 44.38. He was fourth in two Olympic finals (84 & 88) and won Commonwealth gold in 1990.
I met Darren a few times in 94 and 95 he appeared to have gained a lot of muscle mass compared to above pic. ??
Possibly due to stint with Balmain…?
Yes, Balmain doing mindless and endless weight training and various other “strength endurance”
training. Oddly, during the season, weights was optional for the individual players.
But when Darren came out of the league season in late 1991, he trained for six weeks for sprints and went to time trial over 100m and clocked 11.5sec. Little wonder Balmain didn’t fare well that season if that’s how slow the rest of their players were. But I suppose they would argue they were only preparing them to sprint for 40 metres at tops.
Anyway, Clarky was in poor condition and huge, as Sharmer recalls correctly. He then needed achilles surgery in 1992 and missed Barcelona, but he trained very well and was in very good shape by 1993 when he finished a dominant domestic season and then went on holidays to Toronto and snagged the bronze medal at the world indoors.
In 94 his other achilles needed surgery and he hung on just long enough to give Capobianco a run in the Sydney meet, losing for the first time over 400m off the blocks to another Aussie for 11 years in open competition. A week or two later he had the surgery but never came back in a seriously sustained manner.
Then again by 95 he had gone to Souths as a strength and conditioning coach and was obsessing with brench pressing 300 lbs. I think he topped that, lifting around 130kg-plus. Why? Who knows? But he was well done as an elite athlete by then. Maybe he was the only one who didn’t realise that because he tried to train up for Atlanta 96 and ran some sessions with Cathy Freeman in Melbourne. He couldn’t keep up with her, throwing up after a couple of 300s or so Nic Bideau told me.
was the last of the set, the 300m, from a 3point?