The lessons of Steve Ovett's career
How do proven training methods map on to modern ideas about lactate and the traditional U.S. system of athlete development?
Like you, I get e-mails from folks who follow running. Many are longtime coaches; some are quite old, and none are the targets of the predominant contemporary running media. Not coincidentally, as a group, they seem to have an uncanny knack for focusing on the core competitive aspects of the sport at the expense of worrying about the nonsense from malcontents eating away the joggersphere from both the inside and the edges.
One of these stoics forwarded me a link to a July 2020 article by Matt Long for FastRunning.com about Steve Ovett’s long-term development. Ovett, now 66, is the 1980 Olympic gold medalist in the 800 meters who maintained a delightful and mercurial rivalry with fellow Briton Sebastian Coe in the middle distances in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He ran 1:44.09 at a time when Alberto Juantorena’s world record was only 0.65 seconds faster.
In July 1980, heading into those Moscow Olympics, Ovett broke Coe’s 11-1/2-month-old mile world record by 0.15 seconds with a 3:48.8; after Coe reclaimed the record with a 3:48.53 in August 1981, Ovett took it back one week later with a 3:48.40, but only held it for two days before Coe snatched it back with a 3:47.33, a mark that would stand for almost four years. (I recall this binge topping sports-page headlines and being the lead sports story in news programs even though I was then 10 or 11 years old and not a runner.) Ovett also broke the 1,500-meter world record twice, taking it from Coe in 1980 and from Sydney Maree in 1983. As you might expect, none of these record runs involved head-to-head matchups between the two men.
But for all Ovett’s success in two- to four-lap events, he was also an outstanding performer over the longer middle distances, his comparatively blocky build belying his ability to translate plenty of raw speed—Ovett ran 47.5 as an 18-year-old—into useful times between 3,000 meters and 5,000 meters. In fact, Ovett set a world best over two miles in September 1978 with an 8:13.51, worth 7:36.95 for the 3,000 meters at a time when the world record was 7:32.1 and handing the red-hot holder of that record, Henry Rono, a defeat in the process. Ovett also managed a 13:20.06 for 5,000 meters in 1986, toward the tail end of his career, also winning the Commonwealth Games that year in the same event. At the other end of that great career, at age 21, Ovett had run a half-marathon on something of a lark and defeated the British marathon champion at the time, running 1:05:38 on a hot day; two weeks later, he won the 1977 World Cup 1,500 meters in national-record time.
With a muscular physique, a prematurely balding pate, and facial expressions that revealed every bit of the joyous agony he felt in plumbing his deepest reserves even when running ill, Ovett looked more like a brawler than a glider or a distance runner at all—reminiscent of U.S. steeplechaser Henry Marsh. A contemporary of Ovett, the bespectacled Marsh always looked as of his eyes were rolling back in his head after two 65-second laps. Then Marsh would run five and a half more of those, looking just the same way or worse while pulling away from the field. (Marsh is one of the forgotten treasures of the Brigham Young University era that also produced Paul Cummings, Doug Padilla, Ed Eyestone, Paul Pilkington, and Jason Pyrah.)
Long reviews the key elements in Ovett’s progress toward his prime, starting with his exploring several sporting disciplines in his early teenage years before setting on running and the middle distances. Long also raises the important idea that coaching must be athlete-tailored, i.e., even the most knowledgeable coach and the most talented runner on paper may not make an ideal match (see: Alberto Salazar and Mary Cain).
One thing that is certain about Steve Ovett is that he loved to compete. No matter how things were going or how he was feeling, he was eager to find out how much he had. The U.K. press had a habit of being ruthless with Ovett when he didn’t win, but then the U.K. press was at one time raucous and prickly about practically everything. Now it’s as disposable as ours.
As for Ovett’s training philosophy, his foremost mentor, Harry Wilson, drew from a number of well-known sources, among them Mihaly Igloi. But the foremost of these sources appears to have been Percy Cerutty, the Australian who guided Herb Eliott to a 1960 Olympic gold medal in the 1,500 meters along with world records in that event and the mile. Cerutty looks like a whack job in most of his photos, and a lot of ideas about, among other things, weightlifting look as incoherent now as they did in Cerutty’s own time. But in addition to pushing the concept of human-as-24-hour-athlete, Cerutty figured out how to expand human limits through systematic loading-supercompensation cycles before anything about the underlying muscle physiology was evident. In essence, though he broke the calendar year into training periods, he saw overall athletic progress as expanding a person’s total running fitness both within and between seasons. He implemented hard-easy cycles within competitive seasons while adding volume—both aerobic and anaerobic, and in equal proportion—over the years.
The article is rich in information in specific workouts, and you can see that the idea was basically to do it all: Ovett at times ran 120-mile weeks—yes, as a mid-distance runner—but never strayed from doing “alactic work” (that is, what we Yanks usually call strides or striders) and was of course a workhorse when it came to the bread-and-butter repetition sessions Ovett’s primary distances demanded.
But of more interest to me was the question of why we* don’t have any apparent Steve Ovetts in the United States. After all, none of the workouts he did are secrets anymore, and there is nothing radical about the way his workload was stepped up over the years. The most obvious difference is that the U.K. doesn’t have an NCAA system (although some of its best athletes migrate here and enter that system), and that this allows athletes targeted for greatness to be paired with proper, often lifelong mentors and placed among suitable training partners sooner. In the U.K., Ovett would run cross-country over the winter, which Wilson claimed was all the anaerobic work an athlete needed during that period. Contrast this with the NCAA, where athletes typically transition from a fall of cross-country into three to six-plus months of track racing.
Ovett also raced a variety of races above and below his target distance in close proximity, by design, to goal competitions. This approach requires, among other straits, a sturdy ego, since a runner who embarks on this mission is for obvious reasons almost certain to get his ass pummeled badly a few times en route to the goal race. The only 800/1,500 American man I have seen do anything like this is Clayton Murphy, although my knowledge is admittedly weak concerning U.S. half-milers and their training. Murphy seems to have a wider fluctuation between his great and his bad days than most of his peers; maybe he is striving harder than most to find an Ovett-like mix and just hasn’t perfected the formula yet.
Another thing I noticed was that forty years ago, even biochemists didn’t fully understand the physiological role of lactic acid. Scientists figured that because this by-product of intense exercise built up in muscles as those muscles were failing, the lactic acid (or lactate; these aren’t synonyms in chemistry, but in running parlance they are) must be causing the muscle failure. This idea has, with prejudice, shown to be badly askew.
So, what to make of this from Long’s article?
Steve would sprint 6 x 100m or 8 x 15s with generous walk-back recoveries so he would avoid the build-up of acid in his muscles and not over stress his lactate energy system further more.
Well, this kind of training does lead to better running economy, lower lactate production at a given speed/recovery mix, and hence less of a “build-up of acid.” The question is whether avoiding this build-up, per se, has any value. It really doesn’t, but training lingo has not changed much since the de-villainization of lactic acid simply because this carries few practical implications.
At or beyond a pace corresponding to what is somewhat misleadingly call “lactate threshold,” work capacity becomes limited; if the pace is slowed for a spell, the work can be increased again; and the more of this mucking around with running—and importantly, with changes of pace—near this “threshold,” the better an athlete’s changes at moving that threshold value to a faster pace. That lactate is not like sand in the biological gears of muscle is, while not inconsequential, not vital for most planning purposes.
Long not only captures the essence of Ovett’s training in relatable language, but he also even offers the equivalent of study questions at the end. And it’s just a fun—and, I daresay, motivating—read. I mean:
“He had a white coat with baggy armpits. He was quite broad shouldered and barrel chested. People had never heard of Nike so they saw the back of his jacket and thought it read ‘Mike’—so they’d be shouting ‘Come on Mike’ as he passed them in the streets. He saw the funny side of it by the end of the run you could tell he was fed up!”
A white coat with baggy armpits will leave a runner with many hecklers no matter what country he’s in or what words the coat has printed on it.
Anyway, related to this topic is the direct line connecting the lack of a collegiate system in Japan and that country’s startling preponderance of sub-2:10:00 male marathoners. I don’t know if it’s worth expending a whole blog post about, because I don’t know what good it would do for the U.S. to focus on amassing an army of a couple of hundred 2:08-2:09 guys, because, while this would represent a monumental achievement for most of those individuals, 2:08-2:09 doesn’t win major marathons. And that’s pretty much it.
But I bet we have also a handful occult 1:42 guys in the pipeline, and those guys can win global championships.