Easy does it....

Everybody knows I'm not a fan of long, slow distance. Me, I'm a died-in-the-wool fan of the Coe-Ovett-Cram British school of training: quality not quantity. And yet...

it was Olympic medallist Lorraine Moller who first suggested I put the Garmin and the stopwatch to one side and focus on running easily, well within my fitness level. It would, she said, help me rediscover the joy of running after a year spent frantically trying to catch up with the level of fitness I thought I "should" be at.

And it's been going well. It's not too slow, and not very long. My average runs seem to work out at either 60 or 90 minutes and at between 9 and 10 minute pace. These are all off-road and hilly.

It's having the profound effect of putting me back in touch with my body instead of trying to thrash it to my will (that'll come later :) ) And gradually I am starting to feel stronger than ever before. Arthur Lydiard always said that one of the points of this exercise was to become "tireless". I makes me laugh when I remember warming up for the Pearl Street Mile in August. I had cut back on my distance work so much in a last-ditch focus on speed, that I realised that if I ran for too long a warm-up I would be too tired to race the mile!

Now it's everywhere I look: confirmation that the "run-easy and wait for the speed to evolve naturally" approach is the "right" way.

First, my man Henry Rono. he's been taking an awful lot of stick on his letsrun, com postings, because he's just not running fast enough in training. It seems a lot of letsrun.com posters know better than a four times world record-holder how he should be training :) Henry is STILL running easy, mostly. he is waiting for the signals from his body that it is time to go faster and get more intense.

Second, in Henry's new book Olympic Dream, he's got an anecdote ab out another all-time hero of mine, the great Lasse Viren, double Olympic champion at 5 and 10,0000m. Henry met him in Kenya, where Viren was training for the '76 Olympics, and was often seen trotting along the road "at a snail's pace".

Writes Henry: "The untraditional methods of some runners, like Viren's very slow, self-absorbed pace during his morning run, made me not only question many traditional training methods, but gave me the confidence I needed to trust my body and mind's lead -- even if this meant doing an exceedingly slow run in which my goal is to focus my mind and relax my body rather than merely push myself toward exhaustion."

Third and last, to Runner's World, which in its current issue (December) has the best article of its year in an extract from John L. Parker's new book. Yes, the John Parker who produced the legendary running story "Once a Runner" and now, only 30 years later, has written the sequel. In it, our hero, Cassidy, is on the comeback trail and submits again to his coach's training system.. "Which called for running hundreds of miles, but many of them at maddeningly slow paces....not a single one of them could believe how slow Denton wanted them to run on that first morning. They thought it was a joke, that they were on some runner's equivalent of a snipe hunt..."

What I'm learning: a) training doesn't have to hurt and b) the body is not interested in the goal races, my mind sets -- it'll be ready when it's ready.