Coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon in 1959
I’ve written three books on the Hard-Easy System. Each was like a doctoral thesis of my understanding of the system at the time: How to Read Your Body (1986), Running by Feeling (1996), and 5K and 10K Training (2006). The recently completed video version presents the system as it evolved between 2006 and the Pandemic.
The video program works as a short, highly condensed version of the system for use in a small group, seminar setting. The video describes the way the system solves four perennial training and racing problems: 1) How to structure exertion to build racing ability; 2) How to increase one’s capacity for exertion; 3) How to establish ability building workouts; and 4) How to race without crashing. The more I teach the course, the better I can help students understand how to solve their personal training and racing problems.
I aim to elucidate the Hard-Easy System in this blog. Perhaps a few interested coaches and athletes will read the articles and join me in thinking deeply about the training and racing process. One of my recent student athletes, Steve Davidson, took the time to understand my ideas. He had started doing marathons and Ironman triathlons in 2002, and has only been injury-free since 2022, though he continues to compete regularly in his mid-seventies. Steve would tell you it wasn’t easy to grasp the principles underpinning the system. Those ideas are still as revolutionary as long ago.
The Hard-Easy System originated with Bill Bowerman (my coach at the University of Oregon in the mid-1960s) and Arthur Lydiard (who coached the New Zealand national Olympic Track Team at the time). They understood the system well enough to coach it successfully at the international level, but neither was able to articulate their training principles in writing. I read their books on training and found them wanting intellectual vigor. Bowerman laid out a bunch of annotated training schedules, assuming readers would figure things out; Lydiard’s book was logically inconsistent, as he hadn’t thought through the implications of his ideas on training effort.
“We think we know how to use it to improve performance, never realizing the importance of its complement: energy.”
Nonetheless, Lydiard and Bowerman were ahead of their time. When I first met Bill in 1964, he had recently returned from visiting Lydiard in Aukland. Bill was soon instrumental in starting the fitness boom in America by introducing jogging to a nation that needed to get off their duffs. Bill’s track teams won the NCAA Track and Field Championship in 1964 and 1965, with strong showings of athletes competing in diverse events, including distance running. Bill’s ideas on training became known as the Oregon System, which is essentially a less-is-more philosophy. Bowerman gave his athletes sort-slow workouts where most coaches and athletes would have trained harder.
Training effort. It’s such a beguiling subject. We think we know how to use it to improve performance, never realizing the importance of its complement: energy. Of course, most coaches and athletes will give lip service to recovery. But can they build recovery into a training schedule and live to talk about it? I aim to talk about it under a System rubric. It’s the same training system I’ve used since I started coaching in 1979.