Arthur Lydiard: Supreme Champion

“Champions are everywhere, provided they receive the proper training”. This was said by Arthur Lydiard, New Zealand's great Olympic running coach, who through his own trial and error, adapted a new system which turned ordinary runners from his suburb into champion athletes and he himself won the Auckland marathon a few times.

To become a coach, Arthur Lydiard was sparked by going out for a 5 mile run, when he was 27 with his 50 year old friend. Arthur thought of himself as fairly fit, but came back from the run exhausted, whilst his friend, an experienced long distance runner, was in good shape. He began experimenting with the accepted training methods of the time, doing high mileage – up to 250 mile per week. He tried different training methods and was scientific in the way he went about it. By the fifties he had fine tuned the Lydiard system. A training programme involving speed work, hill sprints in conjunction with long runs, and calculating oxygen intake. It has been proven that most successful people in life, have a little bit of talent and combine it with a lot of hard work. Arthur Lydiard’s system is defiantly true to this and recommends running around 160km per week.

Although New Zealand’s history is far from being rich and long dated, Arthur Lydiard to me embodied the true New Zealand spirit. He wasn’t afraid to push the boundaries; he was self-giving, down to earth and daring. Arthur Lydiard also really showed how limitless the human potential is, proving that we are all champions...with a bit of work to do.