Run-Down Forums

[Paul]

What are your favorite books, fiction and non-fiction, training manuals, etc.

This has been touched on in a few other threads, but maybe it's time for books to have a thread of it's own.

Paul

[Dan]

I haven't read a whole lot of books (anyone who knows me well knows how much I hate reading. I have school to blame for that...), so I'll leave it up to some of the other book worms to round things out more fully. A few that I can throw into the ring are:

Once a Runner
Speed Trap (Charlie Francis)
Training for Speed (Charlie Francis)
The New Toughness Training for Sports (James Leohr)

Toughness isn't a running book, per se, but it sure can help runners a ton. The Charlie Francis books are very difficult to get ahold of, but if you run across one, don't let it slip by. Excellent reads, very eye opening, and also quite educational from a training standpoint.

Dan

[Distance_Guru]

Wow Dan and I agree on something!!

Once a Runner.... This is one of my favorite works of fiction, if you run competitively and you haven't read this book, stop whatever it is your wasting you time on and read it.

Running With the Buffaloes.... By Chris Lear. Another good running book that isn't a training manual but is a great book about running

Road To The Top.... By Joe Vigil, in my mind the best book on how to train distance runners. It's a pretty easy read (for a book on training) and it's by one of the best American coaches ever.

Better Training For Distance Runners.... By Peter Coe and David E Martin. A bible of the sport. Probably the most indepth book on the science behind training distance runners. An excellent reference, but it reads like an exercise phys. text book. (I recomend reading chapters 5,6,7,8 which are on training and then going back and reading 1,2,3,4 which are almost exclusively exercise physiology)

Coaching Cross Country Successfully... By Joe Newton. An excellent book by the best high school coach in America. His sections on training programs are based on Martin and Coe's theories for BTFDR and seeing them applied in a entire training plan is enlightening.

Train Hard, Win Easy: The Kenyan Way.... By Toby Tanser. There is a second addition of this book out and it's supposed to be better than the first, which is saying something. It details Kenyan; diet, lifestyle, training methods, tribal affiliation, you name it. It also details the training methods of several of the best Kenyans, past and present.

Lore of Running... By Tim Noakes. If you could only own one book on running and wanted to know as much as possible this is it. It has sections on everything. The only problem is that it is 11 years old so some of the info in terms of athletes and equipment is a little dated but it's still a great book.

Run With The Best... By Tony Benson and Irv Ray. Another good book on training geared towards training young athletes all the way through their running careers. Much easier to read and understand than BTFDR, and my college coach use to call this book the cliff notes for Martin and Coe's text.

Daniel's Running Formula.... By Jack Daniels. I still maintain that Jack Daniels is the most overrated coach in the US, but his book isn't bad. I like the way he lays out his training, although in general I think his training methods are a little soft and his cruise intervals are junk. But it is still an above average book.

Running to the Top.... By Arthur Lydiard. His training techniques have been much debated and this book outlines them. Although it's obvious that Lydiard was about at the end of a long coaching career when he wrote this, and it does ramble a bit it is a descent read and details a training method that has taken athletes to world records and Olympic gold for more than half a century.

High-Performace Training for Track and Field... by Bill Bowerman and William Freeman. This is a book for training every event in track and field (race walking excluded). I mainly focused on the middle distance and long distance sections. They detail what many people call the Oregon system, which isn't exactly my style but is inovative and is yet another way of training distance runners effectivly.
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Time is the fire in which we burn

[Hammer]

Add: Theory and Methodology of Training by Tudor Bompa- Very heavy on theory but it will provide the reader with points to compare.

I advise new coaches to read the following books in the following order:
Jack Daniels Training formula
Run With the Best ****my favorite***
Better Training for Distance Runners
Theory and Methodology of Training

I didn't read them in this order but I wish I had.

[Distance_Guru]

Bompa!!!!!

I can't believe I left out the man that invented periodization.
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Time is the fire in which we burn

[Dan]

I should also add Pre by Tom Jordan. Good information, enjoyable (and fast) read, and not overwhelming hype.

Dan

[Paul]

DG has all my favorite books on his list. Joe Newton's was so good I got a copy for my Pastor at church. He also writes the forward to Vigil's book. For those who may not know, Vigil is the person, now, behind Drossin's training, although he has left Alamosa and retired to Arizona.
Many of the books listed are published by Human Kinetics. They publish a whole slew of books on sports training and methodology, including all of Bompa's works. Lactate training, agility and quickness, Triathlon specific texts, you name it, they publish it. Although you may think many of the books don't pertain to distance running specifically, there is still some information to be gleaned from all of them. For instance, "Training for Speed, Agility, and Quickness" can give you some tips on drills for running. Triathletes seem to have the best handle on Heart Rate Monitor usage.
That said, let me reiterate (going for the DG bonus points for vocab, here) about "Once a Runner" and "Running With the Buffaloes". You gotta have these books in your personal library. You will end up reading them every year. The others? See if your local public library has any of them. Then you can check them out to see if you like them, or if they are worth a one time glance, and thats it.
Dan, would you believe Charlie Francis' "Speed Trap" is available at my library?? If only his other book was, too.

Paul

[Dan]

I've heard of Speed Trap being found in libraries elsewhere, but I figured that was a once in a lifetime happening... A coupld of summers ago, I was up in Vancouver, BC and called literally every new and used bookstore in the lower mainland and could not locate a single copy of it. Took me quite a while to find.

Speaking of Running with the Buffaloes, the author is currently working on a book with the U of Michigan group, specifically the milers (you may have heard of one or two of them ). With recent talk of Webb leaving, it'll be interesting to see how the book plays out, if at all...

Dan

[training2run]

For distance running, in my humble(sic) opinion, there are only two: "The van Aaken Method" and "The Art of Running" (nee "Training to Run the Perfect Marathon."

Almost everything worthwhile in later books was taken, usually without giving credit, from these two. Unfortunately, I believe they are both out of print.

Fortunately, "Training to Run the Perfect Marathon" (nee "The Art of Running") is presently being updated and may again see the light of day.

You may sometimes find the latter book used (my niece did) at Amazon. Mad Dog Mike www.training2run.com

[Dan]

Reviving an old thread here, I just ordered a few books for the collection.

Daniels' Running Formula
Coaching Cross-Country Successfully
Lore of Running
* The New Toughness Training for Sports

Gotta love buy.com and their assorted specials, plus their advertising campaign of beating amazon's prices on everything. $30 shipped for the lot, after various randomly received discounts.

If anyone has copies of Train Hard, Win Easy or Road to the Top, they're both apparently out of print right now and worth $100-150. Might be worth hawking on eBay and buying a new copy when the reprint invariably comes out in a few months. I did that several years back with Once a Runner, and even though I came in at the tail end of the joy ride, I still pocketed something like $50 in the exchange.

* This is my fourth time buying the same book. I've lent it out three times previously and have yet to get a copy returned... Good thing it's not an expensive one.

Dan
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