I was getting my overalls off after work today and i overheard some of the road runners from the company running club going on about how 'you've got to get the miles in'; and it got me wondering again about how you reconcile the performance gains with the potentially high degree of joint wear. From what i know of the club, they are basically 10k runners with the odd HM thrown in.
I've always considered this approach to be in line with Lydiard's approach, as he advocated that all under his program should be able to run a marathon regardless of their competing distance. Personally i prefer Seb Coe's method which i believe was known as Speed Endurance. It seems more logical to me to train at and below your competing distance, and there seems to be a good deal of focus on aerobic fitness through intervals of various lengths; though i guess sets of intervals may take you over your competing distance on occasions. It has been proven that interval training gives noticable boosts to V02 Max. Furthermore, i can't see how anyone but a professional athlete can hope to properly execute the complexities and give the required time input to the Lydiard method.
I can see that if you are a regular face in the FRA champs then you're going to need to train for AL races and do some equivalent milage, but for runners in the Bofra champs long slow runs must effectively be junk miles.
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