David Power attended our “Run injury free” workshop in August 2012 and completed his last marathon, amidst the tragedy in Boston, in 2:46, a four minute PB on his previous time wearing only his VivoBarefoot Aqua Lite shoes. A few months prior, he wrote this barefoot feature, parts of which featured in Irish Runner Magazine,…
Arthur Lydiard first popularised the term “LSD” meaning “Long STEADY distance” as one of the mainstays of a successful athletic development programme. Unfortunately, over the years the concept came to mean “Long SLOW distance” which combined with the often misused phrase “miles make champions” started the descent into “logging miles for the sake of it”…
Chronic Cardio. Where did that term come from? Browse websites supporting the fitness system CrossFit, fitness writer Mark Sisson’s “Primal BluePrint” site and other Paleo-inspired exercise sites (Paleo Sprint, Paleo Hack, Primal North, the list is long) and you’ll find warnings about ”Chronic Cardio” The concept of “Chronic Cardio”seems to be used to help distinguish new training…
When Arthur Lydiard published his first running book, he was reluctant to post any training plans in them. Word has it that he worried about runners reading the plans without understanding the underlying principles and would go out and either 1) get hurt or 2) under perform. I have heard many coaches say “Arthur Lydiard…
When rehabilitating yourself from shod-running back to your natural running style, bare foot running is an essential part of your training (as this, of course, was the human body’s default running condition). However, years of atrophy and feet encapsulated in narrow and cushy running shoes means that you will perceive it as quite extreme to…
Arthur Hamilton Newton is not a name that would be recognised as easily today as “Rudisha” or “Bolt” but he’s nevertheless one of the great heroes of the sport and his exploits puts a welcome perspective on much of what has happened to athletics since his heyday. Arthur Newton was a prolific runner and coach…
There is no one set definition of “old school running” but in our coaching model we wrote up this list of ten principles that we teach as the essence of what the old masters (such as Newton, Cerutty, Pilates, Georges Hébert and Lydiard) taught. Each principle loosely precedes the principle before it and they should…
You may have a question of whether there’s an ideal way to run and how it looks like. The answer is “there is” and that this ideal way can be coached into all runners and the elements of this running style is seen in most of the world’s elites but is largely absent from recreational…
We all want to know the secret to becoming champions so in this article we’ll have a closer look at the long run employed by the runners of famous New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard. Every Sunday, Arthur and “his boys” would start from the front of his house to complete the hilly 22 mile course…
We’re hosting a unique event on Thursday evening the 25th of October from 8pm: Keith Livingstone, author of “Healthy Intelligent Training“, and one of the athletes who grew up in “Lydiard’s backyard” will be “talking Lydiard” in an informal atmosphere at Toner’s pub in Dublin city centre. There’s no mandatory payment for this event, but…
