Each of us has countless stories of the times we’ve shared victory and defeat on the road and when one of the gang becomes a dear friend.

THE FRIENDSHIP OF MANY

This past year, my husband was not the only one who shared my greatest running joy, a long-awaited PR for the marathon. What also made this sweet for me was that other running friends were at the finish line jumping up and down, cheering, and hugging us. Dave, Kris, Joe, and Kiki, marathoners themselves, knew how hard I had worked in the past five years to break five hours, and they experienced our joy at a race well run. Dave Coyne, especially, has always encouraged me to keep trying, knowing that when it finally happened, the sub-5:00 would be sweet indeed. It was a joy made greater by the sharing with close friends. A few months later, when I struggled through nausea at Twin Cities, Dave was on the road at mile 24, encouraging me to just forge ahead because it was almost over. He was compassionate when he saw my distress and said just the right thing. Other friends were at that finish line, cheering just as loudly for me, knowing how difficult it is to sometimes fall short of a goal or not have the race you had planned. And Chris’s first words to me, after he himself had run a PR just an hour before, were, “All that matters, Julie, is that you finished this one!”

Knowing and running with Stacey, Chris, Dave, and the rest of my friends encourages me to be the best I can be in all aspects of my life. For them, I’m grateful. In the 1972 Olympic Trials, two fine runners had great races because each pushed the other to places neither probably could have gone on his own. Their story inspires us to turn to our friends to find our own excellence in our running and in our lives.

Because of the Athens Olympics, I was able to reflect on my love of running and the constant striving to achieve success in my own life that mirrors what my ancient Greek friend Aristotle so eloquently talks about. In our own running friendships, whether they be with a new friend just met in the final miles of a marathon, a beloved partner who shares our love for running and knows exactly how we feel, or a competitor who takes us places that we never thought possible, our close friendships with other runners help us flourish and go wonderful places on the road of life that we never imagined.

REFERENCES

Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. 1-53, 207-266.

Cates, Diana Fritz. 1997. Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 5-15, 49-90.

Thanks also to William McDonough, S.T.L., Ph.D., S.T.D.; David Coyne, M.A., i J. D.; and Carol Tauer, Ph.D. ¢

Ernst van Aaken Was a Coach Well Ahead of His Time.

HE MAN

This is a story about a man who began coaching distance runners in the years following World War II. In an era when most elite athletes were training on relatively short, fast, repetitions followed by brief rest periods, this coach was preaching the benefits of slower-paced, endurance-based training. This coach initially trained for middle- and long-distance competitions using himself as a guinea pig before training others along the lines he had used. The coach saw his athletes win national championships and medals at championship games and set world records. Eventually, the coach began to write about his approach to training distance runners and about the problems and limitations he perceived in the more common speed-based approaches other coaches were using.

But his interests went beyond the preparation of championship-caliber runners. This coach came to recognize that running—gentle, aerobic running—was of great value in the prevention of cardiac disease and even in the rehabilitation of heart attack victims. He began promoting slow running as medicine for all and also began writing about the health benefits of easy, aerobic running. His advocacy of running for the masses made him a popular figure in the United States, where he became a popular lecturer as he expounded upon his ideas.

Most amateur sports historians will assume that this story is about Arthur Lydiard, but it’s the story of Ernst van Aaken, a German physician and running coach whose interest in distance running and endurance-based training predates even that of Lydiard.

Born in 1910, van Aaken became a gymnast. At one time, he tried to run away from home and join a circus as a gymnast. Returned home, he turned his attention to the pole vault and became a champion vaulter. Inspired by watching Paavo Nurmi compete in the 1928 Olympics, he became interested in distance running and also began to compete at 1,500 meters. Van Aaken studied medicine in the 1930s and became a physician, then served in the German army in the

Crimea during World War II. By 1947, he settled into the small West German town of Waldniel and opened a medical practice with a specialization in sports medicine, where he also continued to compete as a distance runner. In 1953, he became one of the founders of Waldniel’s Olympische Sport Club (Olympic Sports Club) and began training its athletes according to his methods. Waldniel at the time had a population of 7,000, yet the Olympische Sport Club’s junior athletes had the fastest average times at 600, 1,500, and 3,000 meters of any club in West Germany. His club continued producing a disproportionate number of national and European records.

THE ATHLETES

By the early 1960s, van Aaken had begun to work with the athletes who would prove that his methods could produce a world-class athlete. Tall, thin, Harald Norpoth became a sub-four-minute miler, a world record holder at 2,000 meters (in 4:57.8), and a silver medalist at 5,000 meters in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Perhaps Norpoth was best known to American track fans as the athlete the late Steve Prefontaine most loved to hate for his refusal to lead in the early and middle parts of races while Prefontaine went to the front and pushed the pace. A track writer once commented that Norpoth would find a way to avoid leading even if he were the only runner in the race. Never interested in times, Norpoth was interested solely in winning races and stuck to a reliable strategy: stay behind until sometime in the final 600 meters, then go like crazy. Interestingly, Norpoth— trained in the van Aaken method—spent less time working on his speed than the vast majority of his opponents, yet few could match his finish or the length of his career. In the 1972 Olympics, Prefontaine finally beat the West German who had frustrated him so many times, finishing fourth to

» A day at the office: Ernst van Aaken in his library.

Dr. Edward H. Koz

Norpoth’s sixth. But it was the third Olympic 5,000-meter final in three Olympic Games for Norpoth, who would race seriously until the 1974 European Championships.

As van Aaken’s own running career progressed, he became interested in racing at distances longer than 1,500 meters. Eventually, the marathon, the “crown of running events,” as he called it, caught his interest. Van Aaken was heavily muscled in his upper body from his years as a pole vaulter and gymnast, and the event did not come easily to him. Van Aaken required seven tries before finishing a marathon in 3:17 in 1951 at the age of 41. His interest in running the marathon was followed by an interest in coaching marathon runners.

He began coaching a young runner named Manfred Steffny, who would represent West Germany in the 1968 and 1972 Olympic marathons, finishing 17th and 31st, respectively. Steffny would eventually become the publisher and editor of Spiridon magazine, a publication dedicated to distance running that promoted van Aaken’s approach to training. Steffny also became a coach.

In 1970, 47-year-old Meinrad Nagele, a van Aaken-coached marathon runner who had taken up distance running 10 years earlier to reduce his weight and improve his health, finished fourth in the World Association of Veteran Athletes championship marathon in a time of 2:29:45. Nagele was the first finisher among runners over the age of 45.

THE WOMEN

The marathon has traditionally been seen as the most grueling of any regularly contested athletic event, and until the 1970s, women were seen as physically inferior to men and likely to suffer serious physical damage if they competed in any long-distance races at all—and especially if they competed in the marathon.

As aresult, prior to the 1972 Olympics there were no running events for women at distances longer than 800 meters, and even that event was added only in 1968, with the 1,500 meters for women added in 1972. The longest distance women could race internationally was two and a half miles in cross-country races.

Many women found these distances too short and began looking for greater distances to race. Initially they came up empty in such searches. National federations and road races were bound to enforce the rules of the international governing bodies, so there were no official opportunities for women to race long distances.

Van Aaken’s medical research led him to conclude that the official opinions of the endurance capacity of women were wrong. He became interested in women marathoners partly because, according to Joan Ullyot, one of his translators while touring the United States, “He liked being around attractive women.”

Indeed, van Aaken was once discussing women who had traveled to his hometown of Waldniel to compete in the first women’s international marathon

championship. Van Aaken agreed with a reporter who commented on how attractive most of the women were. “And do you know why they are beautiful?” he asked the reporter, who replied that he did not. “They are beautiful,” van Aaken replied, “because they run! And,” he continued to the reporter, “do you know why they run?” Again, the reporter confessed ignorance. “They run,” van Aaken told the reporter, beaming, “because they are beautiful!”

Like nearly all marathon runners, van Aaken knew that the human body could store only enough glycogen, the body’s primary fuel for intense exercise, to allow for roughly two hours of running. At that time, a marathoner must begin metabolizing fat in order to continue running. Van Aaken believed that the higher fat content of a woman’s body meant that women could train themselves to metabolize fat better than men could and were actually better suited for endurance sports than men.

In Waldniel, Anni Pede-Erdkamp, a local woman interested in marathon running, began training under van Aaken. She found no marathons that would allow her to compete. So van Aaken started a marathon in his hometown and allowed entry to either sex. On September 16, 1967, Pede-Erdkamp finished the Waldniel race in 3:07:26, the fastest time by a woman, taking seven minutes and 58 seconds off the time by Canadian Maureen Wilton four months earlier.

Throughout the 1960s, van Aaken wrote numerous letters, articles, and even books, promoting women’s long-distance running and the benefits of training at submaximal efforts. His interest in women’s distance running paralleled a growing worldwide interest in women’s running. In the United States, women such as Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer ran the Boston Marathon—unofficially, in Gibb’s case—but each finished in fine form and with plenty of attendant publicity. Road race directors, still unable to allow women to enter races officially, were frequently sympathetic to their desire to run and allowed them to run unofficially or in some cases by starting separate women’s races to be run in conjunction with, but separately from, the men’s race. There was a movement afoot, and van Aaken was at the front of it.

But in 1972, van Aaken’s life took a tragic turn. While running after work one evening, he was run over by a car. For days, he hovered near death. He lost both legs but recovered enough to resume his medical practice and coaching as well as his advocacy of women’s long-distance running. In 1974, the world’s first women’s-only marathon was held in Waldniel. The event was staged annually and eventually, in 1983, a women’s 100-mile race was also held in his hometown.

In 1972, the Boston Marathon officially allowed women to enter. In 1975, a van Aaken-trained athlete, Liane Winter, won the race in a world’s-best time of 2:42:24. On the victory stand, she asked race director Will Cloney, “Can someone get me a beer? I’d really like a beer.”

» Liane Winter on her way

to a world marathon best—and a beer—at the 1974 Boston Marathon.

Two weeks later, at a marathon in Diilmen, West Germany, Christa Vahlensieck, coached by van Aaken’s protégé Steffny, improved the world’s-best time to 2:40:16, then two years later in Berlin to 2:34:48.

THE RECOGNITION

By 1970, the running world was changing, especially in the United States. The sport, once the domain of scholastic and collegiate athletes and a few eccentric road racers, was enjoying an unprecedented increase in popularity. Collegiate athletes, who typically left the sport after graduation, were continuing to train and race as adults. Older people, women as well as men, were drawn to the sport for its health benefits but quickly found that they enjoyed competition. Such runners typically were put off by the traditional track-based interval training that had been

Jeff Johnson

the mainstay of most training programs and were drawn to training methods that emphasized more comfortable approaches to training.

In 1960, Track and Field News, the selfproclaimed “Bible of the Sport,” launched a sister publication called Track Technique. The first edition of the new magazine carried an article written by a then little-known Ernst van Aaken, translated by Dr. Nolan Fowler.

The article’s title was “Speed or Endurance Training.” Van Aaken explained his approach to training and his preference for high-volume, endurance-based training. At the end of the decade, Joe Henderson, who had read the van Aaken article years earlier, wrote a book called Long, Slow Distance: The Humane Way to Train. Like van A Joe Henderson’s 1969 book created an Aaken, Henderson advanced the idea that Americanized version of van Aaken’s Pure it was possible to race well while training Endurance Method. at comparatively gentle paces with only a modicum of attention paid to hard, anaerobic work. The book was never a big seller, but its idea spread like wildfire through word of mouth contact, and LSD became an idea much debated among distance runners and their coaches.

van Aaken’s ideas to a wider U.S. audience. In “LSD With a German Flavor,” Henderson introduced new American runners to the “Waldniel Pure Endurance Method.” There was sufficient interest in van Aaken’s method that a speaking tour of the United States was arranged for him. Several articles written either by van Aaken or about his ideas were translated into English and released in a 1976 book titled The van Aaken Method.

THE THEORY

“Since the year 1928,” van Aaken wrote in the opening sentence of Speed or Endurance Training, “when I watched Paavo Nurmi at the Amsterdam Olympics warm up for two hours before a race, it has been clear to me that modern civilized man is not lacking in speed but in endurance. This one thing, then, is necessary for all runners—to acquire the quality of endurance at the outset and then to fight daily to keep it.”

Dr. Edward H. Kozloff Collection

<@ The title says it all: van Aaken’s approach for an English-speaking audience.

VAN AAKEN METHOD

Finding the enctrance to run faster

This was van Aaken’s theory in a nutshell. Endurance was acquired through volume work with the heart beating at about 130 beats per minute. (Van Aaken in other articles suggested a range of 120 to 150 beats per minute, but he used the 130 figure quite frequently.) This sort of work increases the capacity of the body’s muscle fibers and the number of capillaries. Training was supposed to increase the body’s ability to use greater amounts of oxygen rather than through the development of muscle strength as speed-based training did. Heart volume was increased two to six times over the course of many years. Walking breaks were used as a way to allow the athlete to extend the training distance covered without raising the heart rate above the desired limit. The need for race-paced work was acknowledged, but van Aaken wanted his athletes to run anywhere from 20 to 40 miles of endurance work for every mile of fast training.

Harder-paced work, in van Aaken’s opinion, was both an inefficient way to train and potentially damaging to health. He believed that raising the heart rate to more than 150 beats per minute resulted in overdevelopment of the muscles and did nothing to enhance the body’s ability to use oxygen. In fact, van Aaken, citing research that normal human cells become cancerous when their oxygen supply is decreased by 30 percent or more, believed that hard anaerobic training might increase the likelihood of contracting cancer. He also felt that large amounts of work done at heart rates around 180 beats per minute increased the likelihood of heart attacks.

In contrast, he came to believe that extended aerobic exercise, done throughout a lifetime, provided extensive protection against cancer and heart attacks. This became a recurrent theme in his writing about running training and about general health.

and tive healthver

i by Ernst van Aaken M.D.

THE INFLUENCE OF ZATOPEK

Prior to Arthur Lydiard, perhaps no individual more influenced the thinking of how distance runners should train than Emil Zatopek, the Czech who won four

gold medals and one silver medal at distances from 5,000 meters to the marathon in the 1948 and 1952 Olympic Games.

Training for middle- and long-distance races at the time commonly consisted of steady runs of 12 to 15 kilometers. But in the years just before World War II, a new approach to training distance runners began to catch on. It had long been a practice for runners to run for short distances at their race pace or faster, take a brief rest, run another short fast distance, and repeat the process. In the 1930s, a German coach named Waldemar Gerschler and a physiologist named Herbert Reindel formatted a system that would be known as Freiburg Interval Training.

The method featured repetitions at fairly short distances, sometimes as short as 100 or 200 meters, with the idea of getting the athlete’s heart rate to 180 beats per minute, followed by a pause until the heart rate dropped to 120.

Zatopek believed the way to race faster was to train faster. He bypassed training on steady runs in favor of the interval approach, but he did it in a different way than Reindel and Gerschler. He trained on repeats of 200 and 400 meters, but in large volumes and without paying attention to his heart rate.

A standard Zatopek session consisted of 5 x 200 meters, 20 x 400 meters, and 5 x 200 meters, all followed by a 200-meter recovery jog. This session covered over 11 miles and Zatopek did such sessions daily—a very high training load for the time. But he would often intensify this session, running 30, 40, or even 60 repetitions of 400 meters.

In 1954, he once did two sessions of 40 x 400 meters in the same day. Because Zatopek lived behind the Iron Curtain, only partial bits of his methods reached most Western countries, despite his personal openness. Repeats of 400 meters or its English equivalent of quarter miles had always been a “hard” session for Western runners. Coaches wanting to imitate Zatopek sent their athletes out for killer sessions of large numbers of 440-yard repeats at high speeds, and Zatopek, despite being held in high regard, was routinely cursed by distance runners as they struggled past their 10th hard quarter mile with no apparent end to the session in sight.

Even behind the Iron Curtain, coaches and athletes became fixated with speed training. Zatopek’s successors as Olympic gold medalists at 10,000 meters, Vladimir Kuts and Pyotr Bolotnikov, were both influenced strongly by Zatopek and trained with frequent repetitions of 200, 300, and 400 meters, though in smaller numbers than Zatopek had done.

Van Aaken, however, had corresponded with Zatopek and was impressed not with how fast Zatopek trained but how far. He also learned that while some of the repeats were run quickly, most of the 400s were done at fairly slow speeds and were followed by an even slower recovery jog. In a 1974 interview, van Aaken claimed that Zatopek frequently ran his 400s in 96 seconds. “So he did 400 meters of jogging followed by 200 meters of less than jogging,” van Aaken concluded.

“Then everybody misunderstood what Zatopek was doing. For instance, here in Germany they said, OK, we’re going to run 200 meters very fast with very short pauses. Everything in Germany went kaput. Performances went down.”

So he set about developing a training system that improved on Zatopek’s by imitating the high volume Zatopek did. In theory, a van Aaken-trained runner would cover enormous distances. He suggested that a 5,000-meter runner optimally would cover 25 kilometers a day in training, a 10,000-meter runner would do 30 kilometers, and a marathon runner should do 40 or even 80 kilometers per day. Most of those kilometers would be covered at very relaxed paces with the athlete’s heart rate in the 120- to 150-beats-per-minute range.

Marathoner Nagele, in the 20 days prior to his 2:29:45, ran 11 miles each morning at about a 9:00 pace and 14 more miles each evening at an 8:30 pace. At other times, he ran 30 to 35 kilometers each day and then 30 to 45 miles at 9:00 pace each Saturday. He also ran sessions of 10 x 500 in 1:40 with 200-meter walking breaks.

These sorts of numbers perhaps presented the van Aaken system as one of almost nothing but long, slow runs done over enormous distances. But van Aaken knew that not all athletes had the time or ability to cover such distances and trained other athletes at considerably less volume. One of his athletes, Eva Marie Westphall, ran a 3:23 marathon when she was 56 years old despite never having time to train more than five or 10 kilometers a day—and Harald Norpoth’s volume rarely approached

More impressed with how far he ran than how fast. Van Aaken’s inspiration—Emil Zatopek.

Dr. Edward H, Kozloff Collection

the 25 daily kilometers that he theoretically should have done. Manfred Steffny wrote that van Aaken expected his athletes to make a commitment to an hour of training a day. Van Aaken himself prepared for his 1951 marathon by running 10 kilometers in an hour, with walking breaks, after work each night.

BUT WHAT ABOUT RACE-PACED RUNNING?

But you don’t win silver medals in the Olympic 5,000 meters or finish first in the Boston Marathon on nothing but slow, steady runs, no matter how long. The van Aaken method, as many U.S. runners came to understand it, was often seen as almost nothing but slow runs. There had to be some attention paid to faster runs.

Indeed, slow, steady runs were the basis of van Aaken’s training, but he did mix in faster runs. He was fond of having his athletes do short tempo runs, perhaps one to five repeats of 400 to 600 meters at the speed of their shortest racing distance. Impressed with Arthur Lydiard’s training system, by the early 1960s, he had borrowed from Lydiard the idea of using sprints of 60 to 80 meters.

But van Aaken also used what might be called slow interval work, or perhaps in his view, “classic” interval work. He was fond of claiming that running was “child’s play” and that children were natural distance runners. “The play of children,” he wrote, “is a primal form of interval training.” In play, he said, children will run for hours, covering many kilometers while taking many pauses. But those children rarely run to exhaustion. The running is faster than a jog, but not all out.

It seems as though van Aaken saw a systematized form of the primal interval training in the training of Emil Zatopek, with its high volume of moderate-paced runs separated by very slow recovery running. So while American runners in the 1970s thought of van Aaken’s training as consisting largely of slow-paced, steady tuns, it seems that his German athletes, at least those running the standard track races, did some form of interval training fairly frequently. But it was not the sort of interval work that most of us would conceive.

Unlike Lydiard, van Aaken seems not to have written up sample training schedules, or if he had, they seem to have vanished. But there are bits and pieces of the work that some of his runners did. In a 1974 interview, he described a session done by Harald Norpoth consisting of 10 x 350-meter repeats run fairly easily, with each 350 repeat followed by a 50-meter walk. Next came a 2K run done in about six minutes—quick, but not exhausting for a man able to run better than five minutes for that distance. Then another 10 x 350 with 50-meter walks, then another six-minute 2K. This went on until Norpoth had run for a total of 17 or 18 kilometers.

Another Norpoth session was to run five repeats of 2K in 71/2 minutes, a six-minute-per-mile pace, followed by a 400-meter jog. Yet another session run by Norpoth was what van Aaken called a “crescendo run.” In Norpoth’s case, this was commonly a 15K session in which the first 5K was run quite easily, the second 5K was run at a moderate pace, and the last 5K was done at a hard pace.

Another of van Aaken’s early runners, Roland Watschke, who ran a bit above 14:00 for SK and 29:00 for 10K in the late 1950s and early ’60s, would do sessions of 20 x 1,000 meters in 3:10 to 3:20 (about 5:04- to 5:20-mile pace) with a 200-meter walking recovery. Or he would run 20 x 600 meters in 1:45 (a 4:40mile pace) with a 200-meter walk or later in Watschke’s career, 5 x 3K in 11:00 to 13:00. While some of these sessions sound fast, it’s worth noting that none of this training was faster than race pace in either Norpoth’s or Watschke’s case and that van Aaken claimed that the basic training for these athletes was slow runs totaling 10 or 20 daily kilometers.

Marathon runners seemed to do even less work at or near race pace, but even van Aaken’s marathon training was not purely long, slow, steady runs. Liane Winter alternated slow runs of 20K with 30K crescendo runs, doing the first 10K very easily, the middle 10K moderately, and the final 10K hard. Christa Vahlensieck, trained by van Aaken’s protégé Manfred Steffny, did sessions of three to five 1K repeats, tempo runs at 10K, and several races at distances of less than the marathon as she prepared to break Winter’s world-best time.

Perhaps the use of walking breaks is the most notable feature of the van Aaken system. It is difficult, in the absence of direct conversation or a huge number of examples of how his athletes trained, to know exactly how the breaks were employed, but they seem to have had two functions. They allowed beginning runners to cover more distance sooner in their careers than the runners would be able to otherwise. At some point, as the runner progressed, walking breaks would allow runners to cover distance at a faster pace with less fatigue. For example, trying to run 10 kilometers at a six-minute-per-mile pace without interruption will generate more fatigue than running five repeats of two kilometers in 7:30 with a brief walk after each 2K. Van Aaken seemed to find 10 to 20 kilometers daily an optimal distance for most runners, though he certainly didn’t object to a runner doing more, and he seemed to see value to covering that distance both as steady, uninterrupted runs or as runs done with walking breaks.

THE HEALTH BENEFITS

Like Lydiard and Bill Bowerman, van Aaken was as interested in the applications of running for people who wanted to improve their health as he was in the training of competitive athletes. Perhaps this was an even greater interest of van Aaken, who was a medical doctor. Like Lydiard and Bowerman, van Aaken recognized that those who ran purely for improved fitness need not, perhaps should not, approach their running as a serious, competitive runner would.

For health running, van Aaken recommended that someone do between four and 15 kilometers daily at an easy pace, done either as a steady run or with walking breaks. He made, in his writings, some fairly dramatic claims for the health benefits of aerobic running. He claimed that of all of his patients who took his recommendation and began running for their health, perhaps a few hundred, only two had died from heart attacks. And, he noted, neither of these patients followed his advice for health running perfectly. Both had become interested in competitive athletics and were competing seriously in masters track races, which involved hard, anaerobic running.

He also studied a group of nearly 500 middle-aged to elderly runners, most of whom had taken up running late in life, many after experiencing health problems, with a group of nearly 500 sedentary people in the same age group. While several nonrunners had died of cancer, there were only two or three tumors among the runners, none of which were fatal. He concluded that by flooding the system with increased amounts of oxygen every day, you could attain about 99 percent protection against cancer. But he was adamant that the health benefits of running were conferred by aerobic runs. He believed that anaerobic running did not confer the same health benefits and might even be harmful.

Medicine, for Dr. van Aaken, was an active process. Sedentary patients were advised to become athletes. Injured athletes were rarely allowed to rest. They were frequently given a shot of a powerful anti-inflammatory medicine mixed with B vitamins. He called this mixture the “Tiibingen bomb.” Then the injured athlete was often sent to a track with instructions to jog 350 meters followed by a 50-meter walk.

Van Aaken published numerous articles and at least two books, Brutal Medicine and Programmed for One Hundred, advancing his active view of medicine, though the vast majority of his writing was in German.

Another feature of his medical and athletic thinking involved maintaining the lowest possible body weight by eating very little. He noted that after World War IL, the German population lived under tremendous stress and was eating only about 1,000 calories per day. But, he claimed, heart attacks were very rare. He recommended that runners fast periodically, eating fewer than 1,000 calories on a fasting day.

THE END

At the age of 61, van Aaken was still a serious competitive runner. He had not run a marathon since finishing 49th at the 1951 German championships in 3:52 on a hot day, but he was able to run 10K in 46 minutes at age 61.

Regrettably, van Aaken was deprived of the chance to prove personally the validity of his theories about the medical applications of his ideas about aerobic training and its ability to extend life to 100 years. The car that struck him in November 1972—while he was out running after work on a cold, wet night, and driven by an Englishman who was on his way to the hospital where his wife was about to have a baby—put an end to van Aaken’s running days. He remained active after his release from the hospital, but he had run his final race only a few days earlier.

He became an advocate of long-distance running for women, organizing the first women’s international marathon championship in 1974. Eventually he also organized a 100K race for women in Waldniel. He continued to write about the benefits of the “Waldniel Pure Endurance Method” and toured the United States and Japan as well as Germany, speaking about his training ideas. His work to include a women’s marathon in the Olympics was finally rewarded when the event was added to the Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1984.

But van Aaken never got to see that race. After a speaking tour of West Germany in the late winter and early spring of 1984, he began to experience cardiac problems that were a direct result of the injuries he had suffered when struck by the car 12 years earlier. He suffered at least two heart attacks and died in early April 1984.

THE METHOD TODAY

What becomes of a legendary coach’s training methods when that coach is no longer around? In van Aaken’s case, at least one of his athletes, Manfred Steffny,