Peter Snell: Gentleman, Athlete, Scholar

The 3-time Olympic medalist studies to figure out how he did it

Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 12:00 am
To track fans, Peter Snell is a triple Olympic gold medalist. To his native New Zealanders, he's Sir Peter Snell, OBE. In the academic community he's Dr. Snell, Ph.D.,
director of the Human Performance Laboratory at UT Southwestern Medical Center in his hometown of Dallas, Texas. He's co-written three books--one on his running career, another on the mix of science and sport, and the third, titled Use It or Lose It, on adult fitness. At 73 years old, he's put on a few pounds, takes a few more naps, but shows few signs of any desire to rest on his laurels.

Why should a middle-distance runner be doing 22-mile runs? Why is rest and recuperation important? What role does a coach play in a runner's development? What's more important to an athlete, psychology or physiology? Snell's search for answers to these questions has taken much longer than his rather brief athletic career, but the trip has been equally, if not more satisfying for the boy from Opunake, New Zealand, who burst onto the Olympic stage with a surprise gold medal in the 800m in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

"I grew up in a sporting family," says Snell of his athletic roots. His mother played tennis, his father golf. Solidly built and muscular, Snell began his athletic career in "ball games"--rugby, cricket, golf and tennis. He was most successful at tennis, where he won school championships, but also had early indications that he had talent in running. Despite doing only occasional runs and some cycling, he was able to win or place in school competitions.

"I liked being successful," Snell says of his school sports career. "If you're good at something, it's motivating. You do certain sports because of the recognition factor."

Someone who recognized Snell's running talent was, he says, "one of the guys who was beating me in high school," Michael Macky, who was coached by Arthur Lydiard. Macky had put his running on the back burner as he concentrated on his university studies. In 1958, he was watching from the stands as Snell lowered his PR in the 800 to 1:54. Enthused, Macky came down to the track and asked his former rival, "Who's coaching you?" Nobody. "You've got to go and see Arthur [Lydiard]." Macky set up a meeting, and Snell joined the running club coached by Lydiard.

"I decided to drop my other activities and become a runner," says Snell.

An early workout Snell did with the group was 200m repeats, which he ran with, among others, Murray Halberg, a miler then, who would win the gold medal in the 5,000m at the Rome Olympics. "I put just about 5 yards on them for all the repeats," says Snell. The speed was there, but what was missing was the endurance, the foundation of Lydiard's training system.

"Arthur got me involved in endurance running," says Snell. A cornerstone of the endurance program was a regular 22-miler on the legendary Waiatarua Circuit near Lydiard's house in Auckland. Lydiard didn't throw Snell into the 22-milers right away; he built up to it.

"[Lydiard] paired me up with somebody whose pace I could handle," says Snell. One day Snell found himself paired with Halberg, and as they approached the 15-mile mark Snell said he wanted to stop. "Well, if you stop now, you'll miss the whole purpose of the workout," Halberg said. Snell kept going. While he wouldn't learn why those last 7 miles were important until 1980, Snell didn't have to know then. He believed Lydiard knew what he was doing, because under his coach's guidance he continued to improve.

That year he finished near the back of the field in the New Zealand cross country championships, but the work on endurance paid off the next track racing season, when he won the New Zealand championships at 880 yards and 1 mile in March 1959. A year later he improved to fourth in the national 10,000m cross country and set a New Zealand 880-yard record of 1:49.2, making him a contender for the 1960 Olympic team.

"I came to the conclusion that it was all about the conditioning," says Snell. "Spend as much time as you can on the conditioning and you'll eventually get yourself into, as Lydiard liked to say, a 'tireless state.' In practical terms, you could run the Waiatarua course and feel like you could go out the next day and do it again. You recovered rapidly. Once you got there it was a very heady feeling. You could do a great volume of training, get your intervals down to race pace, and do more faster than race pace."

Why did this work?

In 1976, Snell's academic mentor, Washington State University's exercise physiologist Phil Gollnick and colleagues, published a study that was one of a series of groundbreaking research papers on the adaptation of muscle fibers to training. In simple terms, what Gollnick's study showed was that long runs were beneficial because they caused the adaptation (training) of both slow-and fast-twitch fibers. By measuring the glycogen content of the various muscle fibers at intervals of 30 minutes up to two hours of cycling done at a moderate level (60 percent of VO2 max), the researchers discovered that it wasn't until one hour of exercise that fast-twitch fibers--those normally recruited during high-speed running--began to have their energy stores of glycogen depleted, which indicated that they were being activated. Though the pace didn't change, the recruitment of fibers did. So, at the 6:00 per mile pace Snell and Halberg were running, it took about 10 miles to begin the endurance training of the fast-twitch fibers, without the damaging effects of exhausting speed work.

The fast-twitch fibers that every runner needs to call on during the end of a race, or to keep up a fast pace, are pretty much spectators early in the long run; for Snell, however, those last 7 miles of the 22-miler become prime conditioning for these fibers, developing what could be categorized as "speed endurance." "There are two ways to train fast-twitch fibers," Snell would learn in his exercise physiology studies, "moderate running for long distance or high-intensity training."
Lydiard, who worked in a shoe factory he co-owned and moonlighted as a milkman while not coaching, didn't read this in a book. Long before the scientists proved it,

Lydiard discovered by experimenting on himself what would be essential tools for a distance runner's training kit. While the temptation is to think that coaches merely study the scientific literature in an attempt to find out how to train their runners, the reality is that, for the most part, coaches innovate through trial and error what a scientist later proves is effective.

Lydiard broke the year up into phases, loading the endurance onto the front end, blending in hills and cross country, and finishing off with the speed and sharpening work. It's a formula now used in one form or another by nearly every distance runner. Thus, it's hard to put in perspective how revolutionary it was at the time. In the late '50s and '60s, running was an amateur sport, a hobby at best, not a career. Most athletes did it during their teen years and through college and then had to start earning a living.

Training was based on guesswork and the belief of many of the coaches that speed was king. To run fast, you had to train fast.

There was little, if any, sports science backed up by research, just conjecture derived from examining the training programs of runners who were successful on a national level or at the Olympic Games. Lydiard had approached his coaching as a scientist would, using himself as a human guinea pig, and his athletes as test subjects. Scientists and coaches go through a similar process of trial and error. They start with a theory, test it, and the results of those tests determine if the theory/training method is effective.

"Lydiard did the experimenting on himself," says Snell. Lydiard read the exercise physiology texts that existed and tried to discern what was known, and what needed to be tested, discovered. He came to the conclusion that endurance was the key factor, not speed.

"Arthur used to do a bit of pseudo science stuff," says Snell. "He used to talk about cardiovascular conditioning." But Lydiard was more of a "Braille" coach, monitoring training by feel. His goal, he told his athletes, was to teach them so well they would eventually coach themselves.

Snell said he would occasionally take his resting heart rate, but the metric wasn't used during workouts or to regulate or measure effort.

Another valuable lesson Snell learned from Lydiard was that training, like science, takes time to get results; adaptation isn't an instant process. After his first foray into Lydiard endurance training in 1958, Snell finished third in the 880 at the New Zealand championships. It took another year to climb to the top of the podium. Lydiard gave his athletes valuable advice on patience and peaking, telling them not to worry about results in the buildup phase of their training, that the real rewards would come in the spring and summer track season. "Don't worry about any races before Christmas," Lydiard told them. "Train for the idea of peaking when it's important."

But Snell, like most ambitious people, was driven by success. His accomplishments in 1958 and '59 enticed him to want more. In September 1959, he followed his base training and cross country racing by jumping into road racing. While competing in a road relay event, he felt a pain in his tibia, a stress fracture.

Fortunately it was still early, and he had time to recover. He spent a month on crutches, and the advice he got from New Zealand physicians was to rest. Worried about the inactivity, Snell got a second opinion from a British orthopedic surgeon, Christopher Woodard, who told him, "Don't delay another day." He advised Snell to start running again, on grass with cushioned shoes. Snell did, and over Christmas he went on a beach vacation, running 10 miles every morning and a track workout in the afternoon. By January he PRed again in the 800, running 1:49.2, a New Zealand record and equivalent to 1:48.5 for 800m. He was on the Olympic team. Snell gives Woodard at least partial credit for helping him win his first Olympic gold medal, and years later, when he visited the UK, he made it a point to look up the doctor and thank him.

It was also a valuable lesson in critical thinking. Snell would utilize the same lesson later when he began reading the sports exercise literature: Don't believe everything you read. "I was surprised at the amount of stuff I read that was just plain wrong," Snell says. Just because it's published or comes from an authoritative source doesn't make it gospel, he learned. You have to see if it works for you, Snell says; that's the essence of the training process. Science doesn't lead in this process, Snell adds, it follows.

Other top sports scientists agree. Dave Costill, Ph.D., who developed one of the first human performance labs in the U.S. at Ball State University, was a swim and cross country coach before he became a physiologist, and he says the same thing. Coaches figure out what works, and the scientists tell them what the mechanism is.

Another thing Lydiard discovered was that high-intensity training was something one had to use sparingly and judiciously because it could as easily break down an athlete as build one to a peak. "Arthur was always trying to figure out why [too much] high-intensity training was bad," Snell says. Gollnick was interested in this as well, so he used horses to study the effects of high-intensity training on the mitochondria of muscle cells, the so-called "powerhouses" because they convert the body's available energy supplies into the muscle contractions necessary to allow the athlete to maintain a high rate of speed.

What Gollnick's experiment showed was that when the intense exercise depleted the mitochondria, the affected muscle cells took at least 24 hours to recover. In layman's terms, if you did high-intensity work or work that severely stressed your system, you didn't recover very fast. "High-intensity training does have a negative effect," says Snell, "if you don't allow the body to recover." The increased power from speed work doesn't come during the workout, but rather during recovery. If you don't allow for that recovery, you damage the muscle, not strengthen it.
All this would seem to be common sense, but as Snell discovered, common sense is often ignored by highly motivated individuals, which is an accurate description of the psychological makeup of an elite runner. This is where a coach can play a vital role, says Snell, holding back these human thoroughbreds to save them from self-destruction. Snell learned this the hard way, as even Lydiard couldn't hold him back from the success-fueled rush for more racing rewards and recognition that led to Snell's pre-1960 Olympics stress fracture. The injury may well have been a blessing in disguise, as Snell recognized that it almost cut short his career before it had begun. Having dodged a bullet in that instance, Snell and Lydiard were wise enough not to make the same mistake twice.

But as Snell looks back on his experience, as well as the training and racing patterns of others, he concludes, "It's quite possible that the majority of top level athletes are overtrained." The drive for success, winning, that motivates top athletes and coaches plays into this potentially counterproductive behavior. Coming from a small country that enjoyed great success despite not having all the resources of much more athletically wealthy nations, Snell has continually wondered why the U.S. doesn't win what would seemingly be its share of Olympic or world championship medals in the middle-distance and distance events.

"When I visited the U.S. in 1961," Snell says, "I stopped in Palo Alto and had a conversation with a runner who was in his third year at Stanford. He had run 4:12, 1:54 at 17 in high school. As a junior in college he wasn't much better--he'd run 1:52, 4:08. The U.S. seemed to have a lot of runners who did the same thing, had great times in high school, but then didn't get much better or got worse. I couldn't understand why, but it was apparent that the Stanford runner had to do a lot of racing often with an 880/mile double and then an 880 in the medley relay within a single meet. Free education, good coaches, and the best sports science, which works for technique events but not for middle-distance and distance runners. The U.S. hasn't got its fair share of middle-distance medals."

Why? Snell's views aren't unique. They mirror Lydiard's formula for success of preparation, patience and performance. The U.S. is very much an instant-gratification culture where the best talent is often burnt out at a young age, he says. Talent isn't so much nurtured and developed as it's exploited, marketed and capitalized upon. The values of sport have given way to those of entertainment. Coaches aren't rewarded so much for teaching or nurturing talent, but rather for more wins than losses or riding the coattails of genetically gifted individuals who survive the training they're subjected to, rather than being developed to their full potential.

There's been something of a shift over the last decade with the sprouting of post-collegiate teams, programs and support. What these programs have the potential to do is reinforce the basic elements of success, says Snell, essentially connecting talented, motivated athletes with good coaches in experiments in human performance.

All one has to do is look at the achievements of the Africans, he adds. They've never had all the resources of developed countries to devote to sports programs, so they follow the model that's worked elsewhere: Learn through trial and error. Kip Keino, who won a gold and silver medal at both the 1968 and '72 Olympics, will tell you that he didn't have access to sports science or great coaching, he simply taught himself how to succeed by asking successful coaches and athletes what they did and discovered what worked for him.

"It's a relatively simple formula," says Snell. "Develop endurance as early as possible. Developing endurance is difficult and time consuming. Developing speed is a relatively short process with a fairly strong genetic component.

"Try and understand the need for adequate recovery," he says, "a balance between hard training and recuperation. That's part of the art [of coaching/training]. I still have the thought that the science of training comes primarily from the trial and error of coaches. In 1971–72 through my job I was able to go to England and sit in on college courses, absorb information. I went to coaching camps. I came away with the feeling that psychology was a more important discipline than physiology. If you're interested in finding talent, look into the psychology of the individuals. Look for people who have a high need for achievement. Successful elite athletes might be low on other things, but they want recognition. The high achiever needs to know there is a payoff.

"In my case, I really didn't aim too high. I didn't think I was going to be an Olympian. I found when you have reasonable, attainable objectives, you are more motivated. It's easier to attain more modest goals than to be always reaching too high and falling short. Eventually, you have to aim high, otherwise you'll never get there, but you don't start out like that. The chances of failure when you aim too high are really great. I always worked hard to keep expectations low; even if I believed I could do better, I didn't talk about it."

Political election advisors call it managing expectations, and that psychology works not only in regulating the pressure on results for a given event, but also in race strategy. When a reporter talking with Snell noted that another Olympic 800 champion, Dave Wottle, used to delay his kick and use his quick acceleration to get a lead in the home stretch, Snell said, "I did the same thing. I thought it gave me a great psychological advantage." Patience again had a big pay off. All this doesn't mean exercise physiology or other sports science is irrelevant. Information on nutrition, heat regulation, and other practical knowledge can educate a runner to avoid some of the errors that become the failures in the trial and error process.

Snell remembers his one and only marathon, for example, where he didn't drink at all. This was before the time when physiologists showed the benefit of proper hydration. On pace for a 2:30, he crashed and burned due to lack of fluids, he surmises, and walked and jogged his way to a painful 2:41. He also remembers getting booed for running a 4:15 mile in British Columbia, while suffering the dehydrating effects of diarrhea, and, at the British Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia, being criticized for winning in 4:04, on a day where the temperature was near 100 degrees and much hotter on the track. He still wonders why he could run a 1:47 half-mile at the same games under similar conditions, but could manage only a 4:04 mile when he was in 3:54 shape. Why does heat impact the mile more than the half, he wonders?

Maybe he'll design a research project one day that will give him the definitive answer.