Another thing not remarked upon nearly enough; Snell managed to run his world mile record of 3:54.4 on grass 6 weeks and 6 days after completing his first and only competitive marathon, the local Owairaka marathon, run on on a warm Auckland day on Dec 9th, 1961.Then, only another 7 days after that world record, he ran the sensational 1:44.3 world record 800m on grass, which is still the New Zealand record despite synthetic tracks, John Walker and Nick Willis having emerged in the 59 years since.

Being the ultimate competitor, but definitely not being a ‘natural’ distance runner by inclination, with no great love of the very long runs until he was ‘endurance conditioned’, Snell and Lydiard deliberately targeted a marathon race in mid-summer, knowing full well that unless he had a full marathon race in his immediate sights, he would be unlikely to stick to the high mileage aerobic training schedule required to amass the necessary aerobic conditioning. All of the regular training partners of Peter Snell alive today could affirm that Snell had an intense dislike for the long hilly run, but despite this intense dislike of the distance, he knew that it was extremely good for his eventual anaerobic performance capacity, and very rarely did he ever miss a scheduled long Sunday run.

Barry Magee, who ran the long Waiatarua course with Peter Snell more than all the other athletes, said that in his first few weeks of aerobic conditioning, Peter would be ‘struggling’ to keep up with the regular long-run pack, but after persisting for a few more weeks, Peter’s aerobic endurance capacity started to kick in, and he started to “be hard to hold onto” in the long runs. (Physiologically, constant exposure to moderate intensity aerobic running for about 10 or more hours of easy running a week would stimulate VEGF, or vascular endothelial growth factor, which in turn promoted angiogenesis, or the formation of entirely new capillaries deep into the running muscles exercised, and the same process engendered mitochondrial biogenesis deep into the same muscle fibres as well, by stimulating the enzyme cytochrome C.)

Aerobic enzyme levels would’ve increased almost exponentially with several months of this sort of running.

Despite correctly citing Snell’s own words regarding his aerobic training volumes from his autobiography in this article,(where Snell maintained that his best block of aerobic conditioning volume totalled 1012 miles in ten weeks), a less than helpful additional quote from Arthur Lydiard himself muddies the waters considerably. In fact, Lydiard is quoted from one of his own training books as saying: “My middle-distance men, Snell and John Davies, were running the lowest total weekly mileages but even they were covering about 250 kilometres a week”. There’s a world off difference between 100 miles a week (161 km/wk) of running, and 250 km/wk. in terms of potential for long-term joint damage and total glycogen depletion.

Unfortunately, as absolutely great as he was, Arthur still had a garrulous way of saying things on frequent occasions to simply emphasize a point. That was Arthur’s way, and I don’t believe that simple throwaway statement served his cause well, because from Peter Snell’s own highly detailed account he never claimed to run that much volume, and would probably have been quite annoyed to see claims like that made in such an off-hand manner. Certainly this tendency of Arthur’s to say things ‘off the cuff’ or ‘exaggerate’ was a source of conseiderable friction to the more self-effacing Peter Snell.

On that specific matter, I was discussing this exact claim by Arthur with Bruce Milne, a former New Zealand Olympic team distance coach, who was a very good friend of Arthur Lydiard,and also a very good friend and coaching colleague of the late John Davies, a couple of years ago during a visit to Christchurch. Bruce told me he had asked John Davies if this particular claim by Arthur was true a number of years ago, and John went to the trouble of digging out his old training diaries and totalling up his training volumes, because he wasn’t sure himself. To make a long saga short, Davies’s best recorded volume of aerobic training in a long aerobic training block totalled an average of about 85 miles a week, but like every other Lydiard athlete that 85 miles each week religiously included the weekly long run of 22 miles. Runs of that duration at moderate aerobic intensity have been shown to increase mitochondrial density significantly.

Snell’s autobiography is quite self-effacing to an extent; he glossed over what were arguably his most phenomenal running performances ever, done well away from the track, in winning the Auckland 10000m cross-country title over the very hilly Cornwall Park course, outkicking multiple national distance and cross-country running champion, 3:59 miler and Olympian Bill Baillie in the last few metres, as well as Olympic medalists Halberg and Magee; then repeating the dose a month later in the national title where he won by about 40 seconds from another top national field. What would we make of it today if we had a young 800m runner who was able to run like that against top-level national competitors within months of running world middle-distance records?