Jesse Owens and Training

zico10

Does anybody have any info on the training regime of Jesse Owens and other athletes, whether professional or amateur, of his era? How does it compare to athletes of today?

To be honest I'd be more interested in the training of middle/long distance runners, it's just not being a huge athletics fan, I don't know what other athlete's name I could use in my title.

Thanks

Pisco Sour

Herb Elliot, the great 1500m runner from Australia in the late 1950's, trained by running barefoot up sand dunes (or so I think anyway!).

BobMac104

if your just interested in middle distance training, jack daniels book is definately worth the investment,

ecoli

Hopefully these will give you a bit of insight into sprinting/ MD training:

http://img.runningwarehouse.com/pdf/middle_distance_guide.pdf

http://www.brianmac.co.uk/index.htm

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=308471

http://www.usatf.org/groups/Coaches/library/2007/Sprint%20Training/Clyde_Hart3.pdf

Should be enough to get you started and keep you occupied for a while but if you looking for more a few good books are:

Daniels Running Formula (Jack Daniels)
Winning Running (Peter Coe)
Healthy Intelligent Training (Ken Livingstone)

This should be enough material to give you a general understanding to start you off after that its about application and trial error to see what works and through this you can start to get your own opinions and can look at different approaches critically.

Main advice I would give you is always question why. Too many people see a schedule and emulate in an attempt to improve by questioning why each days training is done in the way that it is (periodization, paces/ recovery etc) you will gain an understanding of what works to develop certain aspects of a runner and as such can use this knowledge to specifiy training to suit an athletes needs

RoyMcC

I think the OP is looking for information on the training regimes of old timers. Could be interesting. For example Zatopek used to run insane amounts of 400m reps at top pace with short intervals, and ran in the snow in his army boots during the winter. He didn't do too bad on it.

ecoli

RoyMcC wrote: »

I think the OP is looking for information on the training regimes of old timers. Could be interesting. For example Zatopek used to run insane amounts of 400m reps at top pace with short intervals, and ran in the snow in his army boots during the winter. He didn't do too bad on it.

Here is something along the lines of what I think might be more towards what the OP is looking for (though it only goes back as far as the 50s)

http://magstraining.tripod.com/Learning_From_The_Past.html

RoyMcC

Great stuff ecoli, I'll be looking through that lot.

I gather Bertie Messit of Donore was one of the first athletes in Ireland to use the new-fangled intervals training method