Peter Snell

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from January 1990.)

RIGHT FROM THE START. We can’t let the 1989 slip away without marking an anniversary. Twenty-five years have passed since the last great Olympics for English-speaking distance men.

They won four of the five longest track races at Tokyo. Americans remember this as the Billy Mills Olympics for his shocking win in the 10,000, but tend to forget that later, in the 5000, Bob Schul became the country’s last gold medalist on the track at a distance above 800 meters.

Local biases aside, Tokyo really was the Peter Snell Olympics. The New Zealander became the first man in 44 years to win both the 800 and 1500 in the same Games, and no man has doubled that way since 1964.

Snell’s success abruptly altered the way runners everywhere trained, and little has changed since then. Most of the best athletes still train along the lines he made popular: a high-mileage and low-intensity buildup period, a high-quality sharpening period, then a brief period of peak racing.

This was the system devised by Snell’s coach, Arthur Lydiard. He may be the greatest coach ever.

You often can’t separate the man from the method. A charismatic coach such as Lydiard’s contemporary Percy Cerutty of Australia could make any system work if runners had enough confidence in him, but Cerutty’s way only worked well in his presence.

Lydiard’s system worked well all over the world, and still does even though he has done little direct coaching since the 1960s. In his words, Lydiard now “advises athletes and coaches coaches” as a roving lecturer.

“For a long time,” he says, “I have not personally controlled the workouts of my pupils but have acted more the role of adviser. Frankly, once these runners have absorbed the elements of my system, and gained the maturity to understand them and their own reactions to them, they haven’t needed my constant presence.”

Peter Snell parted with Lydiard before the 1964 Games but continued to train as before. Snell then retired less than a year after his twin wins in Japan.

He went to work in public relations for a cigarette company. Then his conscience began to bother him about representing that product and about having no college education.

In his 30s Snell enrolled as a freshman at the University of California in Davis. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in exercise science.

Now 51, Snell works in the Human Performance Laboratory at Dallas’s Southwestern Medical School. He still runs but does his competing mainly in triathlons.

Last summer Arthur Lydiard came to Dallas on one of his frequent trips to this country, He visited Dr. Snell at the lab, and Peter took the opportunity to run tests on his former coach.

“It was an opportunity to exact a measure of revenge for all those rigorous workouts he put us through,” Snell tells Robert Vernon, running writer for the Dallas Morning News.

The verdict was that the 72-year-old Lydiard “is in great shape for a man his age. Remarkably fit.”

Vernon recalls, “Several years ago I asked Peter, now that he’s an exercise scientist, if he would change anything about the way Lydiard had trained him. He said he would.”

The reporter recently asked that same question again. “Knowing what I know now,” said Snell, “I wouldn’t change much of anything.

“Previously I thought there were reasons he should or shouldn’t have done certain things. But the more I study the subject, the more research data I gather, the more I realize that what he did was right.”

Today’s scientists who attend Lydiard’s lectures come away shaking their heads at his sometimes garbled descriptions of the science behind his methods. But Snell defends the coach by saying, “Basically I think he had done all the tests on himself and had come up with a program that was – and is – scientifically sound.

“What’s more, he knew what worked. What we, as scientists, have been doing for the past 20 years is finding out why it works – essentially validating what Arthur already knew.”

UPDATE. Now 77, Dr. Peter Snell continues to live and work in Dallas. No other man has won both the 800 and 1500 in the same Olympics since Snell did it 50 years ago.

Sebastian Coe of Britain came closest with a gold (1500) and a silver (800) in both 1980 and 1984. Coe’s low-mileage, high-intensity training contrasted sharply with the Snell/Lydiard emphasis on long runs.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]