Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow

Yeah, I know what you mean about the book I have read it through and through several times. He does make a good point about the number of marathons the elite have run before their best marathon which is ususlly only a handful with the exception of Josiah Thugwane of South Africa. He does have some pretty good data to back things. And according to him the little breaks of inconsistency I've had will be the very thing that keeps me running well into my later years! It's not all bad I guess.

I wrote Tim Noakes an e-mail in the early 2003 in hopes of shedding some light why I was performing relatively better in the half than in the full marathon. His theory was that I had run too many marathons and lost the spring in my legs. A few months after getting his e-mail I PR'ed in TOU, followed by another PR in St. George two weeks later, and my marathon performance have been a better quality than my halves ever since. I think there are two types of approaches to the science, or shall we use the title of his book, the lore of running - that of a scientist and that of a coach. The scientist runs a lab, and studies the numbers like a scientist - if you cannot feel it with your five senses, it is not valid. The coach studies the numbers, and is not opposed to using a lab, but he does not worship it. The coach feels things, and does them if they feel right. I suppose one main difference between a scientist and a coach is that when the data defies the intuition, the coach will question the data, while the scientist will question the intuition. It has been my observation that great runners are being raised by coaches, and not by scientists. Noakes is a very thorough scientist, but he lacks the intuition of a coach.

Still, all said and done if I were given only one book of information to base my training off of, it would be that one. The biggest reason is that the book goes deep into the history of training and competitive running. By that you learn all about the experience and methods of others You learn to discover what works for you and not to follow some blind cookie cutter training formula that everybody else uses.

Yeah, it's a great book. I just devoured the chapter chronicling the great runners of history. It's very interesting reading about what people over the ages have done to train.