Luke - 3.25

3.25mi, 24:01 (7:23)

Mile loops of 7:38 and 7:23. Zack was heading out at 8:30pm for a short easy one and I decided to join him even though my previous run was about four hours before.

Also I finished making my running schedule for the next three months. When I was looking through my Lydiard book, I happened upon a story he told which I found hilarious. I will type the whole thing out for you here--it's the first page of the chapter "The Athlete and the Coach - the Vital Relationship":

Motivation is the important factor in the relationship between the athlete and the coach and hope is the key word in motivation. We all have hopes. The coach, the athlete, everyone. But the goals on which hope is based have to be realistic. It's no good a coach telling an athlete he can run a four-minute mile when he knows damn well he's not going to do it.

You do not want to build up hopes unnecessarily. So we've got to use realism, otherwise both athlete and coach can be upset. The aim should be a minimum realisation rather than a maximum one. A coach should never tell an athlete he can perform better than a true evaluation of his current development shows.

I had this problem when I took a team to Europe which included one runner I had never trained but who had been trained by a coach who told him, more or less, that he could beat everyone.

The first race was an 800 m in White City and this guy, who had never run a big international race before, went out in front and led until he turned into the straight. He was a good runner but, when he ran into the straight, the whole pack went past him. Peter Snell, who I did train, won the race.

When I saw this runner after the race, he was walking off the track with his running shoes in his hands and his head down. I asked him where he was going and he said he was going back to the hotel.

"No you're not", I said, "just wait a while."

I had met the manager of the meet and his twenty-one-year-old secretary and I asked the young woman what she was doing that night.

"Nothing", she said. "Why?"

"See that guy", I said, "I'd like you to take him out to a night club tonight. Give him a good time and I'll pay for it."

I went back to the athlete and said, "See that girl over there? She's going to take you out for a nice evening."

I introduced them and I didn't see him again until about 10 o'clock the next morning when he was racing out of the hotel.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm going out with that girl."
"Good on you", I said. And from then on, I never had any problems.

He'd got rid of his immediate dejection and he'd realised the world was full of very good runners - there weren't just a couple in New Zealand - and that when you get up against the best in the world you can't set yourself up to run it all from the front.

He ran very well for the rest of that tour, very well indeed.