Hidrociclón

if Percy Duncan gave me my first real education in sprinting, Gerard Mach provided a master's course. Gerard's English was poor; when he lectured groups of athletes, the kids would put on their earphones and tune him out. And because he was careful to avoid any appearance of poaching on other coaches' turf, I had to pursue him for advice. But if you asked the right questions, Gerard was a tremendous resource-a brilliant person in his field. Not everything he said made sense to me at first, but I was ready to consider it. When a coach produced top- level athletes as consistently as Gerard had, he had to be doing something right.

Gerard was the first coach I'd known to differentiate between muscular fatigue and central nervous system fatigue. In his view, the muscles were affected by both high- and low-intensity training, but they also bounced back quickly, within 24 hours. The central nervous system, by contrast, was affected primarily by highintensity work (maximum or near-maximum-speed sprinting or heavy weightlifting), but it also required more time to recover, a full 48 hours.

The concept was simple enough, but it had revolutionary implications in North America, where the vast majority of sprinters

50 Speed Trap

laboured in a chronic state of nervous system exhaustion. They displayed, as I had at Stanford, all the telltale symptoms: flickering eyelids, twitching muscles, cramps, sleeplessness, irritability. Because of this syndrome, American runners often ran their best immediately after an injury, when they'd been forced to take some overdue rest.

Gerard understood that the only way to keep runners fresh-and able to run their best, in both training and competition-was to schedule speed work every

other day. (Taking this principle further, Gerard would prescribe JO days of rest

from speed work to recharge an overtrained runner. The fatigued athlete would maintain fitness with daily bouts of slower-tempo running and calisthenics.)

As Gerard settled into his new job, coaches would usher their young prodigies to him and ask the master for guidance. Billy's 12 years old, they would say, and he wants to run the 200 metres, so what should I do with him today, tomorrow, the next day? More often than not Gerard would reply, "I don't know," to the distress of his would-be disciples. Gerard shied away from dictating work assignments unless he knew all the variables at play. In training, no one size could fit all. How strong was Billy? How many years had he trained? What were his deficiencies?

Gerard's greatest influence on my own future coaching lay in his programming: his ability to construct an annual plan of training and competitions for athletes to run their best when it counted most, and to progress from one year to the next. This might sound like simple common sense, but in North America it was rarely practised. The United States could succeed through trial and error because it overwhelmed the world with sheer numbers. If you have thousands of sprinters on college scholarships, ten are bound to develop into good ones no matter how they're trained, and one or two of those will peak precisely at the World Championships or the Olympics. But Canada confronted these legions with a single platoon. At most, we might support 20 sprinters with minimal government subsidies. We couldn't afford to waste a single one.

(According to a Sport Canada policy born in 1973, these subsidized competitors-known as "carded" athletes-were classified

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according to their best performances of the past year: A-cards went to athletes ranking among the top 8 in the world in their event; B-cards to those among the top 16; and C-cards to those among the top 50, or for less developed athletes with strong potential. At the time, all carded athletes received $250 a month. These stipends were later raised to $650 a month for A-cards, $550 a month for B-cards, and $450 a month for C-cards.)

Gerard believed in "double periodization," with two distinct segments: a winter indoor season and a summer outdoor season. Within each segment there were three phases: a preparatory phase, a main work phase, and a competition phase, each of which emphasized different training components and varied the proportion of work to rest. Without periodization, an athlete works at the same level year-round and inevitably grows stale, since he will stop improving after six to eight weeks at a given task. Gerard understood the need to vary the stress on the organism-to increase the work demand, or cut it, or shift to a different component-if you wanted to keep expanding an athlete's capacity.

Gerard had been a bear about such details in Poland, and he tried to instill the same meticulous approach in Canada. He was dismayed to find resistance in his adopted country's track world-to his ideas, and to the extra effort they would entail. He was confronted with the mumbo-jumbo then making the rounds among Canadian coaches: that runners must be psychologically strong, above all else, to win at the top. Exhibit A was Valery Borzov, whose success in Munich was attributed to hypnosis. As the story went, Borzov had raised his hands in triumph after winning both the 100 and 200 metres. Then, after running the final leg in the Soviets'

4x100 relay team in a losing performance, Borzov raised his hands a third time-a programmed response, according to the theory.

In fact, the Soviet relay team had overachieved by winning the silver with only two top runners-a feat that Borzov naturally celebrated with his gesture. In Munich he had been a man among boys, for he knew that no one could touch him. (He set sea-level world records in both the 100 and 200 despite easing off at the end

52 Speed Trap

in both events.) He didn't get his confidence from a psychologist's couch. He got it from being physically ready.

At the 1976 Olympics, Borzov finished a disappointing third in the 100 metres after being injured beforehand. The Russian held second place late in the race behind Hasely Crawford, but began struggling to catch the leader and tightened up, allowing Don Quarrie to pass him on the other side. "Where was the hypnosis then?" Gerard would ask. "When you're prepared you can do whatever you want, but when you're not prepared you'll run like a beginner. Preparation is number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, number six-and when you get to number 97, we'll talk about psychology."

In the summer of 1974 Gerard arranged a European tour for our national team, the athletes who represent Canada in international competition. (The trip was subsidized by the newly created Sport Canada.) My physical problems had worsened, and I could run no better than 10.5, but I decided to make the best of it and enjoy myself. The highlight was our stay at the Polish national training centre in Warsaw, the Stadium Skra~erard's old stomping grounds. The stadium was heaven for an athlete, a place where utility was all. Our dorm rooms, for example, had been constructed under the second-level stands. In the morning we'd get up, go for breakfast at a stadium cafeteria, work out on the track, return to our rooms for a nap, and go back out for more work-as often as we wanted.

We also saw how much stature Gerard retained in Poland, as the nation's press gathered in his room each night. One day Gerard strolled into the cafeteria and asked us how we liked the food. I said that the food was fine, but that we had wearied of mineral water and wanted some Coca-Cola. He made a single phone call-and twenty minutes later a truck arrived and dropped off 80 cases of Coke. This explained why Gerard couldn't understand Canada's sluggish bureaucracy; he'd never had to deal with one before. In Poland, bureaucrats had been assigned to fulfill his wishes, rather than impede them. When Gerard wanted to take people to a training camp, he'd simply say the word-and the next day he had the visas,

Graduate School 53 the plane tickets, the spending money in hand. He never had to run bake-athons or bingos. He made people run faster, and that was enough.

I spent my spare time with the team's throwers, among them shot-putter Bishop Dolegiewicz and discus thrower Am Roost, who loved to rib one another about their steroid consumption. All of the throwers claimed they were taking less than their teammates, but it was mostly a big joke, and everyone recognized that drugs were an essential part of their game. In England we heard the British shot-put champion, Geoff Capes, tell us he'd taken to feeding Dianabol tablets to his parakeet. He'd tried to teach his musclebound bird to say, "Polly want a cracker-now."

Back in Canada, the next 18 months passed unremarkably. Each weekday morning I donned my jacket and tie and went to work. Each evening I would throw on my sweats and work out. But I knew my running career was over; and my training was dispirited. My favourite times were my talks with Gerard, when I'd pocket every nugget of information I could mine, or my informal sessions at the Pig Palace, when I'd advise younger sprinters about their technique.

I was not oblivious to the irony of my circumstances. The more I learned, the less I was able to use that knowledge for myself. It was a contradiction with only one solution: a turn toward coaching.

And so in the spring of 1976, when Peter Cross of the Scarborough Optimists called me with an opportunity-no pay, no perks, no established talents-it was an offer I couldn't refuse.