DANIEL'S RUNNING FORMULA. Jack Daniels Phd.

Member

Jack is obviously disenchanted with the American system where coaches are generally only available to you in school, and as you move through schools, so you move through coaches - the quality of which is, at times, questionable.
The book focuses on Daniels' basic philosophy of training. "You should try and get the maximum benefit out of training with the least amount of discomfort possible" It is written as a basic education for distance runners, taking the mystery out of sports science and how it can best be applied to the athlete.
I like the way Jack has made a determined effort to make sports science concepts easily understood and their application to the athlete. He has also included tables in this book to advise the runner on performance relevance to training loads. This is not so much a book about how champions run, more about how to successfully train to be a champion.

A book for the more serious runner and beginning coaches.

RECOMMENDED.

my boys could swim

I think Sue uses Daniels.

Seems to work for her.

Member

I have this book, and I've read a good bit of it, but I haven't done any sort of consistant training since I've owned it. Neutral

Member

I have that book too and have applied some of his training principles/workouts to my program.

Newbie

It is a very good book, the information is clearly laid out with obvious backing of good research. Reading it, however, makes me form more questions. Most interesting for me is his section on how a specific stress produces a specific result. He explains that at a given training level you will plateau at a matching fitness level. I was wondering if this curve is like other training vs. skill curves in other fields, such as studying, where the resulting graph is actually logarithmic. Can anyone verify if this is the case?

Newbie

Not sure it's wise to try to predict the body's response to training by using math formulas. The body is extremely complex - as Jeff Galloway said, it really isn't possible to "listen to the body" for exactly that reason. The weather, diet, sleep, stress, karma - they can all influence performance "on the day."

The only way I've found to know with any precision exactly what my body's ready to do at the start of a workout (or in the middle) is to get real quiet, and real honest, and listen to what my heart is telling me. Inner feeling is that crossing-point of higher wisdom and physical signals from the body. It's all too easy to override those signals - with personal desire, impatience, etc. But the heart never lies; the trick is being impartial and listening honestly.

I have Jack Daniels' book, and I've used some of its methods. I always feel that written-down schedules, as the book contains, should be taken as starting-points. They're like all running research - they talk about the broad "average of hundreds of bodies" - not the individual body, with its thousand-and-one variations and conditions that may affect it.

As for the body's response to training long-term (cycles of up-and-down performance), nobody has ever gotten it as right as Arthur Lydiard. There's just no better way to go than periodized training. It worked for Lydiard's runners, for the great Africans, and for athletes in other sports. E.g., Mark Allen, seven-time Hawaiian Ironman winner. Allen only started winning the Ironman after he hired Philip Maffetone as his coach. Maffetone had him doing very slow training during the build-up phase. Then - as reported by Tim Noakes in Lore of Running - Allen's training during the speed phase may have been the hardest work any athlete has ever done. The chapter on Allen in "Lore" is entertaining and enlightening.

Newbie

I was asking the question as a general mathematical/scientific interest. I was not looking at predicting my improvement. Don't lecture when you don't have a clue.

Member

This book sounds like a good read, I definitely have to pick up a copy some day. But since I am just at the beginning stages of my training, it may be too soon. Not anywhere near a champion yet..

Trail Running Blog

Newbie

Sounds like a good book. I'll have to check it out.

Its tough with the hundreds of different training regime suggestions out there. Sometimes I try to just look over a few and create my own, a mixture for me.

I definitely like having a plan laid out for the future though, gives me something to look forward to.