If I had an Etsy shop, the catchphrase on all my merch would be “Everything I know about endurance training I learned from the 1964 Olympic 5,000-meter final.” As Mayo Clinic physiologist Michael Joyner pointed out a few years ago, it was a clash of vastly different training approaches:
-Bob Schul trained under Hungarian coach Mihály Iglói, running almost nothing but short intervals on the track, usually twice a day.
-Harald Norpoth was the most famous disciple of German coach Ernst Van Aaken, who advocated a diet of almost exclusively “long slow distance,” or LSD.
-Bill Dellinger was guided by University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman, whose guiding principle was alternating hard days with easy days, a mixed approach that remains overwhelmingly popular today.
-Ron Clarke did what we would think of as threshold training—long, moderately hard runs of between three and 14 miles—up to three times a day, every day. “Any variation,” according to Fred Wilt’s book How They Train, “[was] unintentional.”
So which approach worked best? Schul, Norpoth, and Dellinger took the medals, separated by a mere…
