Training Distance Runners

Rating:
Summary: The Bible for Long Distance Runners
Review: Even though this book is a few years old, the information hasn't been supplanted, simply because the human body is the same as it was ten years ago, as it was a thousand years ago.

I learned a lot about training and running from this book. I recommend it to anyone who is serious about running or about training runners.

Rating:
Summary: Avoid this at all costs . I'd like to give it a zero.
Review: You'd think that an accomplished physiologist and the father of one of the 1970s greatest middle distance athletes could get together and write THE definitive training manual for runners, right?

Wrong. While Martin's material here is reasonably useful in some respects, Coe's contributions are so over-the-top awful as to defy description (but I'll try).

Coe is guilty of what, for a 'scientist' like himself must be the most heinous fallacy of all: the hasty generalisation from the particular; i.e., he egotistically trots out Seb Coe's workouts, and Seb's ONLY, as a basis for an ENTIRE TRAINING 'PHILOSOPHY' that, in the end, amounts to no more than a pile of pseudo-scientific claptrap and a surfeit of unnecessary hagiography.

If you think that having detailed access to the minutiae of Seb Coe's build-up to the nineteen-seventy-whatever championships of this-or-that will help you be a smarter runner or coach, go ahead and buy this book. Otherwise, get yourself Daniels' Running Formula, by Jack Daniels