Training philosophies are everywhere: hiding inside long runs, shaping workouts we get excited about or dread, conversations about efficiency or economy, or why we’re doing strides after an easy run. Our sport is built on a tangled family tree of ideas some recognize by name but many can’t actually explain. I am not entirely sure if pointing this out actually matters, but when someone mentions Lydiard or Daniels or Canova or the Norwegian model, they’re not just flexing trivia, they’re pointing toward ways of understanding what training is.

Different definitions of effort, stress, adaptation, identity. Different paths to the same start line. Yet most of us, many coaches included, are piecing together plans without knowing which branches we’re borrowing from or why they work. So I made this quick guide I wish I read when I started running: a simple, human-sized introduction to some of the major thinkers who built the framework we all train inside. Not to make you pick a camp, but to help you understand the lineage behind the workouts you’re already doing.

The modern story starts on the suburban hills of Auckland, around the 1950s-60s. Arthur Lydiard was a Kiwi shoe-factory worker and milkman who decided, more or less by experiment, that endurance wasn’t about talent or pain tolerance; it was about weeks and months of steady aerobic work. His runners logged about 100 miles/week (160 km), sometimes more, mostly in an “aerobic but not crawling” range. He arranged the year like a layered cake:
– a long aerobic “base” phase with high mileage,
– a hill phase, with bounding and strength,
– an anaerobic phase with harder intervals,
– a coordination/sharpening phase,
– then taper and race.

So if you’ve done a “base block” followed by hills followed by faster work, you’re living in Lydiard’s house. For ultra-trail running, his impact is everywhere. We took his belief that a huge aerobic base is non-negotiable. The idea that you might spend 8–16 weeks building easy and moderate mileage before touching serious speed comes from him. His influence also explains why so many ultra plans still feel like a slow pressure cooker. If you want a deeper nerd-out, Steve Magness’s Arthur Lydiard: The Father of Modern Training is a nice rabbit hole.

Long before GPS watches and lactate meters invaded our running, the Soviets were quietly building the backbone of endurance periodization. Lev Matveyev drew the first real blueprint: the idea that training should unfold in phases (micro cycles), each one stressing a different system, building toward a peak. Yuri Verkhoshansky refined it with concepts like “conjugate training” and “plyometric shock methods,” turning explosive strength and structured loading into an almost mathematical craft. Later, Vladimir Issurin pushed it into the modern era with block periodization, arguing that athletes adapt better when training stimuli are concentrated (strength in one block, threshold in another). Even if today’s ultra plans look looser and friendlier, their secret skeleton (base → strength → specific endurance → taper) is Eastern Bloc architecture.

Mihály Iglói’s runners called his training “the interval school,” but that undersells it. At his peak in the 1950s–60s, the Hungarian coach was essentially inventing modern interval training. His trademark was the principle “fresh-run-fast, tired-run-slow.” Instead of big, formally structured reps with long rests, he assigned endless sequences of short repeats (100s, 200s, 400s) run by feel, with recovery jogs that flowed naturally based on how the athlete felt. What Iglói contributed to today’s training world is the idea that speed can be playful and constant. Many fartlek-style sessions trail runners now use trace directly back to his philosophy. Even the modern love of strides at the end of easy days is an Iglói-like echo.

Jump forward a couple of decades and cross the world to the U.S. Jack Daniels, an exercise physiologist and coach, looked at the messy art of training and tried to give runners a simple, objective tool: a way to match training paces to fitness. Out of his research came VDOT, a number that represents your performance level and, from that, a table of paces for different types of training: easy, marathon pace, threshold, intervals, and repetitions. Where Lydiard had “¼ effort, ½ effort, ¾ effort,” Daniels gave us exact min./km. His book Daniels’ Running Formula put these tables and training structures into the hands of everyday runners. For ultra-trail runners, Daniels’ fingerprints are everywhere.

When a plan says “30–40 minutes at threshold, around your 1-hour race effort,” that’s Daniels. When coaches prescribe easy-pace runs plus a weekly tempo, that’s Daniels. When we talk about running by current fitness, not goal fantasy, that’s him too. Instead of obsessing over exact paces, many now use Daniels-style zones but anchor them to RPE, HR, or uphill power rather than km splits. The underlying logic: each intensity has a purpose, and you shouldn’t mash them all together.

While Lydiard and Daniels were shaping how we should train, Stephen Seiler, an American-born physiologist working in Norway, started asking an awkward question in the 1990s-2000s: What do elite endurance athletes actually do all week? He and others collected data from world-class rowers, cyclists, and XC skiers. What emerged was surprisingly consistent: elites spent ~80% of sessions at low intensity and ~20% at high intensity, with not much in the “gray zone.” Seiler called this polarized training: lots of very easy work, a little truly hard work, and careful avoidance of turning sessions into a grindy medium effort.

You can feel his influence every time one says: “Keep your easy days easy, so your hard days can be hard.” Or when a plan emphasizes that most of your volume should be at a conversational pace. For ultra runners, who lean toward big volume, Seiler’s work gave scientific backing to a simple but uncomfortable truth: most of your running should feel gentle. Modern ultra plans often blend Lydiard’s base idea with Seiler’s intensity distribution: yes, run big volume, but make 80–90% of that genuinely easy. So now we have weeks that are less hard than previous generations’, even if they’re still massive.

Véronique Billat made intensity interesting again. She dissected how runners actually use oxygen at high speeds and found that the most valuable training wasn’t simply “run fast,” but “spend as much cumulative time at vVO₂max as possible.” Her famous 30/30 intervals (30s at vVO₂max, 30s easy) were a practical way to hit max aerobic power without trashing the legs or mind. Short intervals teach the nervous system to fire efficiently and raise the ceiling of aerobic power; slightly longer ones build tolerance and specificity. Her work helped normalize the idea that ultra athletes should touch their top-end speed occasionally, because it makes every lower gear more economical and resilient.

The Oregon program was a lab disguised as a running club. Bill Bowerman blended Lydiard’s high-aerobic volume with a distinctly appetite for tinkering. Runners experimented with longer hill reps, controlled interval cycles, barefoot strides on grass, early biomechanics, and the classic “hard–easy” rhythm. He co-wrote Jogging, helped popularize recreational running in the U.S., and eventually co-founded Nike. Bowerman’s style thus includes: some volume, some speed, some strength, a dash of improvisation, and a belief that if you test something long enough on a track, it’ll eventually tell you the truth.

Meanwhile, Brad Hudson’s signature idea, adaptive training, didn’t offer new workouts so much as a new mindset. He argued that training plans should be living organisms, constantly evolving in response to how the athlete feels. Rather than rigid mileage targets or pace prescriptions, Hudson emphasized assessment: How are you absorbing the work? What does your stride feel like? Are you ready for more today, or do we pivot? This flexibility sits at the heart of modern coaching, even if few people cite Hudson directly.

In Italy and Kenya, Renato Canova was obsessing over a different question: Once you have a big aerobic engine, how do you make it dangerous at race pace? Canova’s trademark is often called extension of quality. Instead of spending months far from race pace and then doing a short sharpening phase, he moves athletes more quickly into long blocks of continuous or nearly continuous work just below, at, or slightly above race pace, then extends the duration of those efforts. Think long runs of 25–40 km at 92–100% of marathon pace. Or “special blocks”: two hard, marathon-specific sessions in a single day. This sounds like road marathon stuff, but the philosophy seeped into ultra. We started to think less in terms of “random long slow distance plus some track” and more in terms of race-specific stress. Modern plans that include big “simulation” efforts, or back-to-back long days around race effort, are often doing a Canova-lite for the mountains.

Phil Maffetone pushed back against the grind culture long before it was fashionable. His MAF Method, built around training at a low HR, emphasized long-term health, aerobic development, and protection from chronic overtraining. The idea was to develop a deep aerobic base without creating hormonal chaos or burnout. But the method comes with caveats. The 180-Formula is not physiologically individualized, and many argue it can hold athletes back. Critics also point out that MAF training can become a trap: runners drift into “forever easy” training without ever challenging the mechanical and neuromuscular qualities that make running fast, strong, or efficient.

When Kilian Jornet became the defining figure of modern sky- and mountain ultrarunning, his approach looked almost alien: huge volume, massive vert, a range of speeds and sports, and a loose relationship with tidy periodization. For our sport, he brought a simple but disruptive idea: you also train terrain. Kilian’s dominance forced us to think about eccentric load of long descents, proprioception and footwork, the value of skimo, cycling, and other modes in mountain fitness, that “long day in the mountains” can be a valid high-quality session. He later co-authored Training for the Uphill Athlete with Scott Johnston and Steve House, helping translate his practice-based mountain intuition into something approaching a system.

They brought Seiler-style intensity distribution (lots of low intensity, a little high) into a mountain context, emphasizing a clear distinction between aerobic threshold (AeT) and anaerobic threshold (AnT). AeT became the line below which athletes could accumulate huge volume without frying themselves. They formalized event-specific muscular endurance for the uphill: long climbs in Zone 3, heavy strength circuits, and grinding hill reps designed to mimic the sustained demands of long ascents. They treated alpinism, skimo, and trail running as cousins, not separate species, and used a shared language of zones, thresholds, and periodization. This all has not been without success: current Western States winner, and both current female and male winners of UTMB, are trained by Scot Johnston.

The Norwegian school, made famous by Olympians Jakob and Filip Ingebrigtsen and coaches Gjert Ingebrigtsen, Marius Bakken, and other physiologists, reshaped modern training with one central idea: intensity must be controlled with the precision of a lab experiment. Instead of hammering thresholds by feel or grinding into the red, athletes run two threshold sessions per day, with lactate meters to keep effort between ~2.0–4.0 mmol/L. The goal isn’t to suffer; it’s to accumulate enormous amounts of work just below the metabolic redline. Do that day after day, and you lift your AnT skyward.

The last thread in this little history brings us back to people. David and Megan Roche started their coaching group Some Work, All Play (SWAP) in 2013 and have since become some of the most influential ultra-trail coaches in North America. They rearranged the emphasis of these old ideas, with psychology and joy at the center: keep most running easy, but add frequent, low-cost speed (strides, short intervals); fuel generously (high carbs, high energy availability); protect the nervous system from stress, and; treat mental health and self-talk as training variables.

If you strip the names off and just look at your own training, chances are you’ll see the layers. We like to argue on the internet (full stop). About which system is “best.” But in the real world, every good ultra plan is a collage. The question isn’t, “Who is right?” It’s: What are you actually training when you do this workout? Once you start seeing the roots, you can play with them more deliberately. You can choose when you need Lydiard-style patience, or when you might borrow a little Canova specificity.

In the end, you don’t need to become a Lydiard disciple or wear a tiny Norwegian flag on your singlet. You don’t even need to remember all these names once you close this tab. What matters is noticing that every session you do is saying something about what you believe: about patience or urgency, about precision or play, about whether you treat your body like a lab, a temple, or a crash-test dummy. Once you see the scaffolding, you can stop sleepwalking through whatever plan showed up first on Google and start choosing stress on purpose.

Maybe that’s the quiet superpower here. Not a perfect system, but a bit of lineage literacy. Enough to recognize when your “base phase” is Lydiard or when your tempo is Daniels. Enough to ask: does this fit my life, my terrain, my nervous system, my reasons for running? Training will always be partly a collage and partly a mess. But if you can name the ghosts in your workouts, you’re already coaching yourself with more honesty than most plans ever will.