Van Aaken Method
unconfigured
people to olympic methods using his technique of mostly long runs,
interspersed with walks, and then an occasional fast workout -- something
to the ratio of 20:1, distance to speed.
does anybody know about these theories? what is the current thought on
his methods? has anybody used them? I would like to get some sort of
dialogue going on his philosophies as they intrigued me.
peace,
alex accetta
"...LIVING ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS, PHYSICALLY ACTIVE, AND DEEPLY
ALIVE."
Thomas Cotner
Ernst Van Aaken was one of the first coaches to espouse and promote
endurance training, first for a select set of national class runners and
then later for the masses(ie, us.) Well, not you Alex, but the rest of
us. Like many coaches, his recommendations for training varied, depending on
the audience he wanted to reach. He coached a number of men and women
distance runners back in the 1960s and 1970s. Most notably, several women
marathoners rose to prominence under his guidance, both direct and indirect.
He coached two W.German marathoners who held the women's world marathon
record--Liane Winter, 1975 winner of the Boston marathon and Christa
Vahlensieck, who ran 2:34 in 1977. Even American Gayle Barron, who won Boston
in 1978, was coached by Ernst by mail.
Van Aaken was a doctor and he always attempted to practice, well ahead of
his time, "scientific training methods". His focus was the heart, and
he relished demonstrated the dramatic changes in heart size as a result
of his aerobic training methods. We now know that aerobic training
has many other additional benefits beyon simply enlarging the heart,
but by and large his methods were right and he knew empirically that
they worked and worked well for endurance runners. Revisionist
history can pick at his reasons and have since improved upon his
methods but it's a valuable lesson that occassionally you can be right for
the wrong reasons and still succeed.
He believed in doing long endurance runs in idyllic settings and his
"workouts" often specified "20-25 miles on forest paths"! He also was one
of the first coaches to promote children's running. He believed that, to
encourage new runners in the sport, that we should first teach them to
run like children. This meant to run both joyously and discontinuously,
with frequent breaks.
Van Aaken was also pretty flexible (and coached a long time) and midway in
his career as a coach he went to Australia and observed and
adopted some of the speed training methods of Arthur Lydiard. His elite
runners, however, seldom did any hard speed workouts--most speed sessions
were conducted at 5K race pace or slower, frequently much slower. Nowdays
most runners train emphasizing long runs over the winter to establish their
aerobic base. This part of the package is not much of a departure from what
van Aaken was promoting 35 years ago. Today, however, it is common to
establish your base and later add on hills and speed sessions to
train your muscles to be able to run faster. Van Aaken's runners did a
lot of distance. Therefore, you should be advised that when van Aaken says
"only 1/20th" of your weekly training distance should be speed, he may
have been actually recommending 6-8 miles of "true speed" per week.
That's not a lot, but most modern coaches would recommend more total speed
and greater frequency. Mind you, his methods are not in disrepute so
much as they been "superceded" by training that places greater emphasis on
speed development. It should be noted that the athletes that achieved the
greatest success under his tutelage were marathoners, NOT middle distance
runners. In summary, though Van Aaken is long dead and mostly forgotten, he
was strongly influential on all the coaches of his time (including Lydiard)
and his methods live on, most notably in the writings of Joe Henderson and
other popularizers of long distance training. And in the thousands of us
that never got fast.
Tom Cotner
U. of Washington
Parker Reed
regarding the use of heart rate monitors, there isn't a lot of difference
between the two. And Mark Allen & Mike Pigg are good examples of what
this type of training will produce.
Rich Stiller
(in mass).
Unfortunately I don't have the book anymore but I remember the
specifics because "in part" I practised them. I also have a book that
has a chapter reprising Van Aaken's theories.
The key point was that mass speedwork deadened a runner's legs.
Van Aaken recommeded the following:
All daily run be at an easy pace. I was a 33 minute 10K runner and he
recommended that runners at my ability keep to a 7:30-8 minute pace.
This was strange because I was easily able to run along at distances of
8-15 miles at under a seven minute pace.
Speedwork should be practised daily. He believed that repetions at race
pace be added to daily runs. An example was running a 16 kilometer run
the running 1-3 500 meter at 5K goal race pace (in my case this was 75
seconds per 400 meter).
Speedwork should not exceed 5% of weekly milage. I ran around 60 miles
per week so I would (under his pan) dono more than 3 miles toatl
speedwork in a given week.
I was fairly successful using his methods. I found that as long as I
kept my daily runs slow (7-7:30 pace) and kept weekly speedwork at 5%
or under, I improved.
I did not tadd daily speedwork to my every day runs. Rather, I did my
speedwork in the form of a fast race or a time trial or intervals once
a week. The other days (all 6 of them) were slow.
Off of this running I did a 4:31 mile, 9:44 2 mile, 15:46 5k and 33:01
10K. I also ran a 10 mile race in 54:45. My problem was that success
bred arrogance and eventually I would slip and begin to run my daily
runs too fast (6:30 pace). This would lead to general overall
tiredness.
As an after note: Van Aaken's earliest recruits were women runners for
the most part an many of these ladies dominated the early 1970
marathon scene. But they were all eventually blown away by young track
trained college women runners who trained like men.
Van Aaken's great succes wasGunther Norpath (or something like that) who was
a world calss 5K runner in the late 60's and early 70's. He regularly beat
Prefontain and Pre hated it. Pre trained so hard and Norpath trained so easily
in comparison.
Rich