Читать книгу Running to the Top - Arthur Lydiard - Страница 12

If we next want to add speed to our endurance, we move from basic running because we now need to use muscle groups against fast resistance, such as in isotonic exercises. We must also give them good rest periods, because the white fibres, the fast-twitch fibres which dictate our speed, lack myoglobin, a red pigment chemically related to the haemoglobin of the blood and probably important as a reserve store of oxygen and iron within the fibre or in the transport of oxygen and iron between cells. This pigment gives its name to the red fibres, which produce slow, powerful contractions and are not easily fatigued. Morehouse and Miller discovered that if the tendon of a red muscle was cut and then sewn to the tendon stump of a white muscle, forcing the red muscle to take over the white muscle’s function, its myoglobin content and resistance to fatigue gradually diminished, indicating that the appearance and endurance of a muscle are largely the results of the type of work it must perform.

If we’re going to develop muscle bulk through the red fibres, we can use weights and resistance exercises, progressively increasing the periods of exercise and the weights and resistance employed. The balance depends on the sporting activity in which we are involved and how we want to go about developing muscular efficiency, strength and power. But it must all be built on that solid foundation of endurance and stamina.

A lot of people sign on at gyms, pay the annual subscription and think, “Now, I’m going to be fit.“ Certainly, some of them are going to sweat a great deal and they will improve their muscular efficiency and strength and physique, but, unless they improve blood vascular efficiency, unless they raise their oxygen uptake levels, they are really not going to be as fit and healthy as they would be if they had climbed into a pair of shorts and running shoes or on to a bicycle, gone out into the fresh air and spent their time on steady aerobic exercise. It is a mistake to think that working out in a gym with weights and other activities is going to give you good cardiac efficiency.

During the 1974 Commonwealth Games in New Zealand, Drs McDonald and McLauchlan, who had a physiological testing laboratory in Wanganui, tested various athletes and came across an Asian weightlifter, who had a huge body and was extremely powerful but an oxygen uptake level that was less than one litre a minute. He was getting barely enough oxygen into his body to keep him alive, let alone healthy, despite his ability to momentarily lift huge weights. He faced the prospect that, unless he did something about it, he could be an early cardiac patient.

A properly fit high school boy or girl would have an uptake level of around four litres a minute, and it is common for top athletes in endurance sports to have an uptake level of around seven litres. Cross-country skiers would be highest because they use all their upper-body muscles as well as their legs against hard resistance.

The use of cyclo-ergometers, treadmills and running machines is becoming popular as a testing ground, but we would make the point here that they don’t always produce accurate results in the individual. Even some very good athletes, once they are wired up and wearing oxygen masks, perform poorly on these machines; they find themselves in an unnatural and uncomfortable environment and can be affected by claustrophobia. The air they are breathing is very dry because the humidity is low, the throat constricts, and the uppermost thought in the runner’s mind is to get the darn mask off, instead of concentrating on running with freedom, particularly when the technician is demanding faster and faster responses.

The researchers, allowing for margins of error, can get significant information from testing programmes but, for the individual, the best way to test for personal fitness levels, quite simply, is to run. Cover a measured distance on a fairly regular basis and you soon will establish a pattern of time and effort that gives a good indication of progress. After-run pulse checks at, say, 30-second or minute intervals will quickly chart whether your recovery rate is improving.

Heart monitors which record as you run are also enjoying a vogue in this age of gimmickry but there is an inherent risk in setting yourself to run consistently at a certain heart rate. Your condition changes day by day, so do the climatic factors, so you could force yourself too much in following the dictates of a piece of equipment. How you run should be governed by how you feel on the day and by the simple catch phrase I invented years ago, “Train, don’t strain.“

We all know during conditioning when we are going too fast and getting beyond our limitations and that’s when we should ease back. For instance, if you are recovering from a previous run and then go out on an extremely hot day or in severely cold or windy conditions and try to keep pace with the inflexible requirements of a monitoring system, you could find yourself straining – and not training. You could push yourself into anaerobic running and that is undesirable on top of a previous day’s hard work, particularly when you are in a conditioning stage of your development.

The Americans work to a different catch-phrase which is totally wrong – “No gain without pain“ or “No pain, no gain.“ That is not the way to train for steady improvement and it’s one of the reasons why a nation like America, 250 million people capable of producing millions of runners, doesn’t succeed particularly well in Olympic and other international endurance events. They could dominate if they stopped applying so much pressure on their athletes from school age onwards.

Some years after jogging began in New Zealand and William J. Bowerman, the University of Oregon track coach, took it home from here, the American physiologist Dr Kenneth Cooper set up an aerobic testing system in which you ran for twelve minutes and then, according to your age, were given a certain fitness grading. But age doesn’t enter into it. Many fit people in their sixties and seventies would leave a majority of university students behind in a running race. And plenty of evidence exists of people in their twenties and thirties who have collapsed and died, while running, from undetected cardiac disorders.

You cannot classify anyone by age. The fit and the unfit are there in all age groups.

Other factors must be considered when fitness testing. Fat-free body weight is an important one because running requires about 1.7 ml of oxygen per metre for every kilogram of fat-free body weight. So, when we run a mixed bag of people for twelve minutes, without taking that factor into consideration, a lot of the light, skinny runners are going to run farther yet, fundamentally, they may be no fitter then the heavier runners they are leaving behind. They could even be considerably less fit.

So the Cooper test wasn’t accurate in that context, and I believe he deleted the age factor later and used other parameters.

Psychological reaction is another factor. The big runners in fun runs, particularly those over hilly courses, where you have to use more calories and need more oxygen than in level road running, will be mentally deflated when they are beaten by lighter runners, not appreciating that it isn’t an indication that they’re not as fit.

The most valuable way to test your fitness level initially is against yourself, by checking your progress over courses you run regularly, by noting your recovery rate after running. If you begin quite unfit, your rate of improvement could be surprisingly rapid at first, but it will level off gradually as you approach your optimum or maximum oxygen uptake level – not that there is any real maximum because it is a factor still with a measure of infinity. No one can say positively what the limits are in blood vascular or cardiorespiratory efficiency. With regular controlled running, the upper level in any runner can be extended for many years.

The 1984 Olympic marathon produced a classic example. I was lecturing in the US earlier and was asked if I thought Alberto Salazar, who was winning everything at that time, would win. He had just changed his training methods, so I questioned whether anyone thought he would even make the team. I didn’t think the training he was doing, running around with oxygen masks on for simulated altitude training and so on, was correct. That shocked them a bit. (Salazar did eventually make the US Olympic team by finishing second in their national championship.)

When I was asked who would win, if Salazar wouldn’t, I named the Portuguese Carlos Lopez. Their reaction was: He’s too old, he’s 36.

I said that was to his advantage because over the years he had been developing greater and greater cardiac efficiency, better capillary development and finer muscular endurance and, given that all other factors were equal, he would win because he would be able to maintain his knee lift and leg speed best.

That is exactly what happened. Over the final kilometres, Lopez just ran away from the field. Salazar finished eleventh or twelfth. He was, without doubt, a great marathoner, but he changed from a training programme that was successful and the change didn’t pay off.

Lopez was a fine example of self-improvement and that’s the main motivation for many people in fun runs. They know they haven’t a hope of beating the fast runners so what they do is try to improve their own times; in a sense, they run their races against themselves. Fun runs, since they are usually of five or ten kilometres, are good testing runs.

I recommend that an aerobic run over five kilometres or a test of how far you can run aerobically in fifteen minutes are the best for checking fitness progress.

Check your pulse rate when you finish and then every thirty seconds or so and, if you’re getting fit, you will find it is going to come down and recover to normal faster. You may not have run the distance faster, but you will have run more efficiently.

The resting pulse rate can be unreliable as a guide because it’s subject to emotional variations and so on. I was once asked by a man at a seminar in Pennsylvania whether, if he took his pulse every morning when he woke up, he would build a good indication of his fitness level. I said, jokingly, that it all depended on who he was sleeping with. I was trying to impress on him that, even in bed, the pulse rate is subject to varying factors – hot night, cold night, deep sleep, restless sleep and so on.

One woman runner in New Zealand told me that every time her doctor took her pulse it was much higher than she believed it should be. I took it and it wasn’t high at all. Then I remembered that the doctor she was talking about was a very handsome young man. There was the difference.

Every sportsman and sportswoman needs stamina, by which I mean the highest possible uptake level and muscular endurance, the ability to keep the muscles contracting consistently. Once those muscles begin to tie up, performance drops. Very few runners, for example, can maintain a good knee lift throughout a race because they lack the muscular endurance which comes from well-developed capillary beds in the upper leg muscles. Once the knees go down, stride length shortens and leg speed dwindles. That was the factor that Lopez demonstrated so well; he maintained his knee lift all the way to the tape.

This applies in any sport. When the Olympic canoeist Ian Ferguson came to me in 1983 and asked me to look at his training programme because he wasn’t succeeding as well as he should, I found he was a well-built man with large, powerful muscles – partly developed in the high surf of New Zealand as a lifesaver – but without endurance. I set out a programme which required him to do a great deal of steady, long-distance aerobic paddling.

When he went to the next world championship against the East Germans, who had never been beaten, he won the world title. He knew more about rowing than I did but I knew more about training for it.

After Ferguson came back to New Zealand, the seven class canoeists we had in New Zealand worked on a refined programme of mine, went to the 1984 Olympics and won seven gold medals between them. They now had their technical skills founded on a strong aerobic base so they could come out day after day through the heats and the semis, row right up to their optimum and recover rapidly in time for the next race. The schedule was perfect in the sense that we got the aerobic and anaerobic sections right at the right time. Everything was coordinated and balanced to produce top form on the day of competition.

I did the same in San Antonio, Texas, with Greg Lousey, who, at 32, was the fencing champion of the US but had been told he was too old for the LA Olympics and wouldn’t make the team. He was a big man but he went out and ran 100 miles a week to my schedule, rode his horses, did his cross-country work, swimming, shooting and fencing, and not only forced his way into the team but won a silver medal in the modern pentathlon. He was a perfect example of what a good foundation of endurance can do.

Dr Uhlenbruck, from the West German Sports School, made a study of ultramarathoners, people of all ages who could run 50, 60 and 100 miles a day for day after day. Max Telford, of New Zealand, comfortably ran 240 miles without stopping. Siegfried Bauer, an ex-patriate German who then lived in New Zealand, never put his shoes on without going for a run of 40 to 100 miles.

Dr Uhlenbruck came to the conclusion that if you use muscle groups continuously for long periods, even at the low levels adopted by some ultra runners in training, you very quickly develop the dormant capillary beds and also establish new ones and, as well, a mitochondria that will be likely to remain indefinitely. This, he said, was unquestionably the secret of muscular endurance.

If a boxer punches a bag steadily for two hours, without stopping – not fast but fast enough to keep the blood flowing through the muscles at an elevated rate – he will build the muscular endurance which will enable him to throw those punches hard and fast for the length of a 15-round bout.

Lionel Spinks, who won the heavyweight championship of the world, was trained on a tape I made for the coach and physiologist who controlled his training. This required him to punch the bag for long, steady periods. When he went into the ring, he was still throwing effective punches when his opponents were tiring to the point where they not only couldn’t match his punching ability, they couldn’t get out of the way of his blows.

Of course, when he met Tyson, he didn’t get the chance to throw a punch but the point had been made – he won his other fights with a continuous barrage of punches because his arms, trained for endurance and with highly developed capillary beds, didn’t tire.Whatever the event, physiology and mechanics don’t change. The fundamentals must be followed.

In New Zealand, we have seen the effect in rugby football, our national winter game. Years ago, I lectured in Hawke’s Bay and the flanker Kel Tremain, who was in the audience, was fired up to run 100 miles a week to see what happend. He found it was too much for him, so we refined a programme which had him running an hour every morning as part of a conditioning system. The effect was that he not only improved his endurance, he got into the All Blacks, the New Zealand national team, because, at the end of a game, he would be running as fast as he had been at the start. He established himself as a leading try-scorer.

Des Christian, a friend who was an All Black many years ago, once challenged, “Arthur, all this running is no good to an All Black. Rugby is sprint, sprint, sprint.“

Trying to make him understand the point he was missing, I asked him how many times he could sprint the length of a football field. He said ten. I doubted if he could do six one after the other, but I explained that, if he could do ten and then set out to develop a higher oxygen uptake level, he could probably do twenty. He could never understand that but Tremain proved it. Tremain also had a wonderful effect on the Hawke’s Bay team of that time. They used a friend of mine, who was also a physical education teacher, to refine the Tremain programme for the whole team and quite soon won the Ranfurly Shield, New Zealand’s premier rugby trophy. They were not a team of internationals but a collection of run-of-the-mill footballers who, collectively superfit, could play their best football all the time when other teams were falling apart with fatigue.

Most people never realise what their potential is or understand the simple truth that it is based on their ability to assimilate, transport and use oxyen. If we can appreciate that and then improve that ability, we lay a better foundation on which to build the technical skills and reach a tireless physical and mental state in which we can employ those skills and techniques much better and for much longer.

If, for instance, you are a skillful soccer player but too tired to get to the loose ball, you cannot make use of these skills efficiently.

The first group of joggers we had in this country, more than fifty years ago, were mainly obese businessmen. Many had had coronary attacks. Their recreation was usually golf. The interesting outcome with most of them, after they had been jogging for some months, was that, not only were they feeling physically and mentally better, they were beginning to reduce their golf handicaps. It was an unexpected bonus for them but it was perfectly logical – their concentration and co-ordination over the closing holes of a round were much better than they had ever been. They were no longer finishing in a state of tiredness.

Blood toning and diet play a part in the ultimate conditioning. When I was in Finland, exercise physiologists were keeping a close eye on their top marathon runner and testing him regularly because he had an abnormally low blood count and they thought he might have some blood disease. They gave him B12 and iron and liver injections to try to improve his condition. They never succeeded but the guy went on beating everyone. This had them confused but the fact was that, because he did all this long running as a marathoner, the improvement in his cardiorespiratory efficiency was so great that he could pump huge quantities of blood between his heart and his lungs and gather in a lot of the oxygen that other people just breathe out. Even though his blood wasn’t what everyone thought it should be, he transported and used all that oxygen with complete efficiency.

I was involved in an unusual experiment in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on one of my trips to the United States. A number of schizophrenic patients of the University of Wisconsin Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic, most of them suffering from depression, were started on a jogging programme and, at the end of ten weeks, seventy-five per cent of them had recovered from their depression.

The goal of their therapy was simple: They were taught stretching before and after running and then filled 30 to 45 minutes with comfortable movement – not to cover a particular distance at a set pace, just to jog. The researchers, two associate professors of psychiatry at the university, John Greist and Marjorie Klein, a running therapist, Roger Eischens, and a Madison doctor, John Faris, were all joggers who had noted that their own momentary blues virtually always disappeared while they were running.

One of their conclusions: “If there is any secret to the success our patients have had in treating their depression with running, it is that they have tried to run each day in such a way that they would want to run again the next day.“

As an exposition of training, not straining, it’s an excellent vision.

We had already seen similar results in New Zealand because many of the people who joined the jogging movement were inclined to be neurotic. They were self-centred, disinclined to be outgoing and largely treated their neuroses with nicotine and liquor. This all changed once we got them interested in the routines of simple jogging. The smoking and drinking, the outward effects of their neuroses, were either drastically reduced or stopped altogether. They became more confident and self-reliant, they began to enjoy meeting new people and throwing off their inhibitions.