Jim Ryun: High School Training Methods in 1960's

On January 26,2013 Jim Ryun spoke at LA84 Foundation Advanced Track & Field Clinic at Mt. San Antonio College. In this video he speaks about the High School training methods his coaches utilized in the mid-60's.

He also discusses his secret breakfast formula for morning runs - Eat a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup and a thick Peanut Butter Sandwich with Honey.

Some think Ryan was over-trained. Great dialogue on letsrun.com
Here's an excerpt from jtupper:
Drew I can second most of what you have said and I guess I got to see much of it first hand. I also knew Timmy before he was Jim's coach (we coached against each other with our age-group swim clubs, and could he get the most out of his kids). He did apply swim-type workouts to the runners in many cases, but who is to say what he was doing was not the best thing for that one (or even another) athlete. I have a file of Jim's workouts from his Junior year in HS (given to me by Timmons), and a good example was the week in which Wednesday was 50 X 400 in 69, with a 3-minute send-off (swim terminology). A lot of work, but not so fast (I am sure many could run a lot of 400s if each was 10 seconds slower than mile race pace). Interestingly, the next day was 18X800 -- guess what the speed was -- 2:45. Now that is slower than threshold pace and I am sure Jim could have run a steady 9 miles at 5:30 a mile, but it's another swim thing - just do a lot of them and feel good about the pace you are doing...build confidence so when you line up at the start and see Snell on the line with you, you might be thinking, he isn't used to that amount of intervals, repeats or whatever you want to call them. I tested Jim many times leading up to the 72 games and his numbers were definitely up to where they were at any time in his career. I knew that and he knew that and it's anybody's guess why things went the way they did, and anyone can try to guess how the final may have gone with Jim in the race, but I sure was quite certain who would have won.

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