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Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Arthur Lydiard

(Please forgive the registration requirements for the NY Times and LA Times).
From The New Zealand Herald Monday,

Master athletics coach Arthur Lydiard, who produced two Olympic champions and inspired generations of New Zealanders to run, has died aged 87.

Lydiard died of a suspected heart attack today in a Texas hotel while on a lecture tour of the United States.

Lydiard was the creator of the "LSD" (long slow distance) philosophy of training and influenced millions of runners, professional and amateur, throughout the world.

Lydiard was a rugby player and distance runner as a young man in New Zealand. "After World War II, when he dropped rugby, he started jogging to stay in shape. He eventually trained 100 miles a week and won several New Zealand marathon championships, largely, he said, because no one else trained hard enough. His fastest marathon was 2 hours 39 minutes 5 seconds." (New York Times) He made his mark as one of the premier running coaches ever, though his methods were not at first appreciated. In 1960, two of his athletes, Peter Snell and Murray Halberg, won gold medals at the Rome Olympics (the 800 and 5,000) - Lydiard had to pay to see it happen. "he was given no credentials, not even a free ticket. His athletes had to leave the Olympic Village to talk to him." (NYT)

In 1964 [Tokyo], when seven of New Zealand's nine Olympic runners were his students, he finally received a Games credential. After those Olympics, he essentially stopped coaching individuals and started coaching coaches.

Runner's world magazine, "Peter Snell and Sir Murray Halberg are his best-known proteges, but Lydiard also inspired a generation of top New Zealand runners through the late-1960s and 1970s, including Dick Tayler, Rod Dixon, Dick Quax and John Walker." He also influenced the great coaches of our era, (LA Times) "One of his converts was Bill Bowerman, track coach at the University of Oregon and a founder of Nike. Bowerman, who had been a believer in interval training, went to New Zealand in the early 1960s to study Lydiard's methods. He returned to Oregon as a convert, and helped spread Lydiard's jogging [running!!] philosophy in the United States."

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