Where have our runners gone?

How can Kiwis win on the track again? RICHARD BOOCK asks the experts.

You can see Arthur Lydiard's blood rising as we chew the fat. Old Father Time might have slipped a chunk of kryptonite down his shorts some time ago, but the 83-year-old running coach still bristles at our topic of conversation.

His response to the query about what has happened to New Zealand middle-distance running begins with a groan born of years of frustration, and is followed by a sigh which suggests a lifetime of banging his head up against something stubborn and hard.

The man who coached, among others, Olympic champions Murray Halberg and Peter Snell, developed a training philosophy which for 30 years gave a leading edge to not only the country's runners but also the many New Zealand track coaches.

His simple gospel of hard work and enthusiasm placed a group of apparently ordinary Auckland runners at the forefront of world middle-distance running in the 1950s and 60s, and the momentum was continued through the 1970s as Dick Quax, Rod Dixon and superstar John Walker kept the Kiwi running legend alive.

But since then pickings have been lean and medals scarce.

Just two New Zealand distance runners will attend the Sydney Olympics - women's 800m and 1500m athlete Toni Hodgkinson, and last-minute 10,000m qualifier Michael Aish.

"They're still out there," Lydiard says of New Zealand's budding track stars. "We've still got the talent, they're just not being trained right." Lydiardism, as it is known by runners, preaches that the better the athlete's aerobic fitness or stamina, the better the platform on which they can base their speed-work or anaerobic training.

He has refined the theory over the past 50 years or so, but is astonished that so many sports people have failed to heed the lessons.

"I hear of a top New Zealand rugby official who - after an observation stint at the Australian Institute of Sport - is making a big thing of the relationship between good aerobic conditioning and more effective anaerobic work.

"Well, if people had been listening to what I'd been saying for the past 50 years, they wouldn't need to go to Australia to find that out. It pisses me off, quite frankly."

Lydiard reckons that if New Zealand had been anywhere near as good at fostering and teaching coaches as some of our European rivals, there probably wouldn't be the same concerns over our distance running future.

He has a strong ally in John Davies, Tokyo bronze medallist, coach of Hodgkinson and the incoming president of the New Zealand Olympic Committee.

If Davies has to sum up his feelings about New Zealand's distance running performance over the past 20 years, it is frustration at the failure to recognise what made our top runners great.

Davies trained under Lydiard and promoted the same philosophy while coaching former distance runners such as Peter O'Donoghue and Peter Pearless, both of whom were quicker than anything on the Kiwi track scene today.

"The most annoying thing is that Arthur's recipe for success has been there all the time," Davies said. "But for some reason, people consider it a bit old-fashioned ... "

Davies believes many of today's New Zealand athletes spend too much time working on anaerobic performance at the track, and not enough time on the streets, the hills and the parks, grinding out a solid aerobic base. He says there are no short-cuts, and that today's sports science merely confirms what Lydiard recognised in the 1950s while coaching the likes of Bill Baillie, Barry Magee, Halberg and Snell.

"In fact, Peter [Snell] once told me that if he had known then what he does now about sports science, he wouldn't have changed a thing."

One doubts Walker would either. The former world mile record-holder was trained by another highly regarded running coach, Arch Jelley, who had his own style, but a similar philosophy to Lydiard's.

In the week before his stunning world mile record in Gothenburg 25 years ago, Walker ran 160 training kilometres, unheard of these days.

"There's no secret to running," he says. "Running's so simple it's not funny. You just lace on some running shoes, jump into a singlet and shorts, and run. The more often you do it, the harder you work, and the faster you go."

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