Percy Cerutty’s training philosophy for distance runners, 50 years on

Fifty years ago, on August 14, 1975, the great Australian coach Percy Cerutty passed away in Portsea, Australia—the same sandy, windswept coastal town where he trained some of Australia’s top middle distance runners in the 1950s and 1960s.

Cerutty was best-known for the accomplishments of his coaching charges John Landy and Herb Elliott—Landy being the second person to break four minutes in the mile and a bronze medalist at 1500m at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and Herb Elliott being the greatest miler of his day, who at age 22 was Olympic champion, Commonwealth champion, and world-record holder in the mile (3:54.5) and 1500m (3:35.6).

Cerutty also had a longstanding coaching rivalry with New Zealander Arthur Lydiard, whose name would become synonymous with high-mileage training during the 1960s.

Perhaps because Cerutty intentionally eschewed narrowly “systematic” approaches to training, there’s very little discussion of “Cerutty-style” training the way you hear runners discussing “Lydiard-style” training. Cerutty left behind no pre-written workout template, no system of formulas, and little in the way of universal dictums for training.^[1] He did, however, leave behind quite a lot of writing.

I first read Percy Cerutty’s books in college. Carleton College, my alma mater, had an “interlibrary loan” service, where you could request rare or out-of-print books. If any library in the system had the book, they would mail it over.

Cerutty’s books always came from the same place: the United States Library of Congress, known by book enthusiasts as the “library of last resort.” Books from the Library of Congress were a rare treasure: they were only sent out if there was nowhere else the book could be found. And Cerutty’s writing was indeed full of treasure.

The fundamentals of Percy Cerutty’s training philosophy

The word Cerutty used to describe his training philosophy—and “philosophy” was really the correct term—was “Stotan,” a portmanteau from the Stoic philosophy of the Roman thinkers Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius plus the warrior ethos of the Spartans of ancient Greece. Biographer Graem Sims quotes Cerutty’s definition of a “Stotan” as follows:

A Stotan is one who hardens, strengthens, toughens and beautifies the body by consistent habits and regular exercises, which are consciously and irrevocably made part of the life plan of the individual, as well as consciously determining that the mind will be cultivated upon such abstractions as purity, beauty and logic. Erudition, in as complete a degree as possible, shall be the lifelong aim: Truth, in relation to all aspects of life, the unending search.

Why a training “philosophy,” and not just a training approach? Here is Cerutty in his own words, in his 1960 classic Athletics: How to Become a Champion:

I claim no special gifts, other than, perhaps, some ability to observe, digest, analyse, accept, coupled with an abiding enthusiasm for life and living in all its aspects.

I freely admit my debt to all the great minds that have gone before, from Plato and Aristotle, right through to Newton, Hackenschmidt and Hoffman, the fathers of the modern world athletics era.

I have read widely, on all subjects, ranging from Freud to Krishnamurti, Buddha and Jesus, to Carrell, Jeans and Einstein.

What have these hundred or more ‘authorities’, scientists, philosophers, to do with world-class athletic performance? I say everything, if the athlete would be a complete man and not merely a physical exponent of some prowess he may have been gifted with in the first place.

The pure ‘physical’ instructor, coach or athlete—if such could be said to exist—could not imagine the realm of ‘ideas’ that can be applied to high-level athletic performance.

Indeed, the top performances of the future will, increasingly, result from ‘spirit’ and high intelligence (brains of the first order).

All things will be found to be possible—when we understand truly the principles, fundamentals and mysteries.

Percy Cerutty—pronounced like the last three syllables in “sincerity”—belongs to a lineage of coaching whose essence is egalitarian, naturalistic, and even spiritual: he hated the idea of authoritarian coaches dictating workouts with strict paces while athletes labored away on the treadmill or straining to hit a predetermined time on the stopwatch during a track workout.

“The coach can but watch over: suggest; never dictate. Especially without adequate and convincing reasons,” he wrote. “Athletics seems to be the one activity in which authoritarianism fails, at least more than in most fields.”^[2]

Cerutty revered all things “natural”—natural movement, natural terrain, and natural foods. Like the Wright brothers, he studied the movements of animals, watching racehorses, gazelles, antelopes, panthers, apes, and young children walk, run, and jump.

His athletes trained on grass golf links, sand dunes, and dirt roads, keeping their track sessions to an absolute minimum, and opting for grass tracks instead of cinder or rubber surfaces. He insisted on a simple, natural, and unprocessed diet, and tobacco was absolutely forbidden at his training camps—he called nicotine a “heart-kicker” and “cough-coffiner.”^[3]

---

Percy Cerutty’s training approach

When it comes to brass tacks of actual running, Percy Cerutty's writing was sometimes frustratingly vague—in Athletics: How to Become a Champion, the topic of running training only appears after 124 pages of philosophy, diet, and weight training advice. Even then, he focuses primarily on running as a mechanical endeavor, as opposed to a metabolic one—more attention is paid to technique and physical strength than the specifics of workout volumes and paces.

This vagueness is likely intentional: Cerutty was a big believer in the individualization of training according to the needs and personality of the athlete. He describes this process as follows:

Personally, I find the greatest difficulty in generalizing so that I meet the need of a particular athlete. My own system involves getting to know each athlete in all departments of his personality. Until I get to know him I feel I can only roughly guess as to how much work he can take: what punishment will or will not break him down, make him a plodder, and each situation is evaluated and decided on its merits, on the day, according to the need of the moment. If the coach cannot come to grips with each athlete, completely and intimately, he must resort to guessing as to the athlete’s needs: or the athlete find out his own needs.

Nevertheless, Cerutty does lay out a general template for a year-long training cycle. Cerutty divides the season into three periods: conditioning, race practice, and competition.

Cerutty’s conditioning period (six months)

For Cerutty, the conditioning period starts from strength, using hard runs up sand dune hills, long runs on steady inclines, and running through deep, soft sand on the beach to build muscular strength. During this period, Cerutty’s athletes used heavy weight training—both upper and lower body—twice per week.

Percy Cerutty’s lifting recommendations

Percy Cerutty’s lifting program during the conditioning period was based around barbell and dumbbell training with heavy weights and low to moderate rep counts. Cerutty highlights the following routine as a regular part of training for his runners:

• Barbell snatch, 10 reps of 0.25x to 0.33x the athlete’s body weight – done mostly as a warm-up for the harder lifts to follow.^[4]
• Barbell row, 3 sets of 6–10 reps targeting a weight around 10RM (ten-rep max), or about 30–50% the athlete’s body weight for beginners.
• Standing press, 3 sets of 6–10 reps at 10RM
• Front and reverse barbell or dumbbell curls,  again 3 sets of 6–10 reps at 10RM
• Deadlift, 3 sets of 10 reps at 20 RM, and occasionally (in some but not all sessions) a few reps at 1–3RM.
• One-handed dumb-bell snatch, swinging a dumbbell held with one arm from between the legs to overhead. 6–10 reps on each arm, no rest in between. Cerutty recommends working up to 0.33–0.5x body weight.^[5]

In addition to formal barbell training, Cerutty’s athletes would do calisthenic exercises, rope climbing, occasional gymnastics training (bars, rings, pommel horse), and swimming on the ocean.

Percy Cerutty’s long runs and mileage recommendations

Cerutty’s conditioning phase also included a regular long run once per month, often on dirt roads. This long run would be up to 20 miles in length, and even the 800m runners would do a hard 20-mile run once or twice per season (showing that Lydiard was not, in fact, the sole originator of the 20-mile long run, even for 800m runners!).^[6]

Mileage-wise, Cerutty provides the following recommendations for the conditioning period:

Event group	Volume (mi/wk)	Volume (km/wk)
400m/800m	20–40 mi/wk	32–64 km/wk
800m/1500m	40–50 mi/wk	64–80 km/wk
1500m/5000m	50–60 mi/wk	80–100 km/wk
5000m/10,000m	60–100 mi/wk	100–160 km/wk
Marathon	no more than 100 mi/wk	no more than 160 km/wk

Cerutty’s athletes would sometimes do cross country races during the conditioning period, mostly as a form of training as opposed to a “focus” race.

Dynamic recovery after workouts

Cerutty’s conditioning period involved very hard workouts, but also a dynamic approach to recovery. In Athletics, he details this process:

We often train to exhaustion in this period. One has to break down to build up. Half-hearted efforts never accomplished much or achieved great objectives. But there must be reason in all things, and each one must find out to what degree the organism can be exhausted or punished without a deleterious effect.

If the effort has been extremely punishing, such as lifting maximum weights for two or three hours, or an hour’s exhausting work on the sand-hill, or a hard exhausting run up to twenty miles, it may take the organism a full forty-eight hours to recover, and severe weariness will indicate little or no training is possible until the organism has responded and recovered.

We must be guided by our own feelings and experiences and remember both the body and the spirit can be broken down by overdoing the ‘will’—or adhering wrongly to some imposed schedule.

Percy Cerutty’s race practice period (three months)

As in modern training systems, Cerutty’s transition into the race practice period is gradual, with less frequent hard sessions on sand dunes and beaches. Weight training, likewise, was dialed back in volume and intensity.

Race practice involved alternating between workouts at goal race pace (for example, repeats of 100–600 yards at goal race pace for 800m or 1500m) alongside workouts at race duration—for example, repeats lasting 1:45 to 2:00 for an 800m runner. These were not always evenly paced, but instead frequently included surges and accelerations to mimic race tactics.

These race practice sessions took place on parklands, golf courses, and sometimes grass tracks (though never on cinder tracks.

The race practice period focused intently on developing the athlete’s “inner time recorder,” or sense of effort—workouts were only seldom timed with a stopwatch, and splits were only used as confirmation that training was having the intended effect.

Percy Cerutty’s racing period

The final phase of training has a very old-school character to it: racing twice per week, with only short 20–30 minute training sessions in between to stay “tuned-up” for competition. Reading about this period, I’m reminded quite a lot of what many American high schools do later on in the track season: frequent races and a few token interval efforts in between, with very low volume overall.^[7]

---

Percy Cerutty’s coaching legacy

Percy Cerutty’s legacy is clear to see in coach-philosophers like Joe Vigil, Joe Newton, and Renato Canova, and athlete-philosophers like Anthony Famiglietti, Khadevis Robinson, and Eliud Kipchoge. From a Cerutty-inspired perspective, training certainly matters, but only in the context of the athlete, their mental orientation, and their development as an individual.

As far as training itself, Cerutty deserves a place of honor in the pantheon of “heart runners”—those who love running by effort, ignoring the watch, doing Swedish fartlek training, charging up hills, and running tough courses. His emphasis on building conditioning through the use of intensity foreshadows the modern approach of full-spectrum training, which includes the full range of speeds throughout all phases of training.

At the same time, it’s also clear to see why Cerutty’s actual training practices had less staying power than Lydiard’s strict, prescriptive methods: nowhere in Athletics does Cerutty provide an actual workout, in the modern sense of “do this warmup, then do this session at these paces, then do this cool-down.”

This was, of course, by design:

Such concepts as the rigid schedule, the worked-out and laid-down day-by-day training routines, find no place in this book, or my ideas as to the fitness of things athletically. Despite the efforts of the industrialist, we are still 'humans', not machines.

Likewise, from a modern perspective it’s also clear why “run hard through hills on the golf course” can’t be a winning strategy anymore: while tyrannical coaching and strict schedules have their downsides, any modern training approach does need to be systematic about controlling workout volume, intensity, and difficulty.

When it comes to strength work, Cerutty has to be considered the most important pioneer in the use of weight lifting for distance runners. In his time, Cerutty was ridiculed by Arthur Lydiard and others for his belief in the importance of lifting heavy weights—but in the end, Cerutty was proven right: lifting heavy can improve running economy.

Cerutty also foresaw a level of athletic performance far beyond what athletes were achieving in the 1950s. For him, it was only a matter of time before athletes with high intelligence, intrinsic self-worth, natural talent, and effective coaching would run a sub-3:30 1500m, a sub-3:50 mile, a sub-28:00 10k, or a sub-2:11 marathon.

Indeed, it was Ron Clarke, an Australian, who would first achieve a sub-28:00 10k, nine years after having witnessed Cerutty’s athlete Dave Stephens set the six-mile world record at a meet in Melbourne.

Cerutty considered as the ultimate fitness influencer

On health and wellness overall, Percy Cerutty was a man several decades ahead of his time—so much so that I sometimes like to imagine him as a modern-day fitness influencer on Instagram or TikTok. I have no doubt that he would be one of the most famous social media personalities in all of Australia.

How else can you envision dietary advice like this, if not delivered via an impassioned selfie-cam video?

We believe that the closer to Nature our food is, the better it is for us. Closer to Nature means—as we find it in Nature—out in the gardens, fields, the woods and the sea.

That means raw, unadulterated, unrefined, unprocessed. I would say that if we were consistent—which we are not—we would eat all our food raw, and be better for it—if we were not poisoned in the process!

With beef measles, hydatids in animals, tuberculosis in milk, poisonous sprays on our lentils and crops, we have perforce to act carefully and kill our microbes and bacteria before consumption by submitting them to the heat of cooking. In doing so we destroy many of the vitamins; we know this and try to make up for this wasteful deficiency in other ways.

But what we can eat raw we reasonably do—we prefer our vegetables raw in salad forms, our carrots, tender cabbage leaves, onions and the like.

We prefer our fruits as we find them, in the garden and orchard, ripe and raw—rather than in preserves and jams—although we eat jam as well as honey, treacle, etc., on occasion.

Even our grains we prefer raw. In our country wheat is the main cereal, but it is a notoriously poor one, due to soil deficiencies. It is milled and refined until the resulting flour is almost useless, nothing but the starch being left.

This is made into a white bread loaf, surely the poorest manufactured anywhere in the wide world. We avoid it. We eat it only under duress: fancied starvation. Indeed, we are not big bread-eaters—and what bread we do eat we try to ensure is the best type of wholemeal and rye breads.

We prefer oats in the form of rolled oats. Nothing is removed from the oat but the outer husk. Grown in Australia, I can well imagine it to be somewhat deficient in nutrients, as is our wheat—but, in this matter, beggars, or Australians, must be content with what the farmer and the Government give us.

We grow our wheat for profit, not for food; and, truly, if we could get by with a poorer quality than what it is—and a bigger profit come out of it—that’s us! The oats we usually grow for horses, and insist upon a better quality! We even import our best oats for our best horses!

Who cares two hoots about quality—or dying, or athletes, or children—as long as the national trade balance is favourable? No, sir! Not we Australians, anyhow!

So we munch our oats hopefully, knowing that they are, even if not 100 per cent, at least 90 per cent, superior to what I call the manufactured monstrosities packed, and publicly consumed, under the name of breakfast cereals.

Fortunes have been made by the manufacturers of these cereals—and the undertakers—but we do not care to assist either. Indeed, our object is to cheat the latter of his job as long as we possibly can—and would walk, or run, to our own funerals if that feat were humanly possible.

Ultra-processed food, the profit-hungry agro-industrial complex, contaminants in the crops, probiotic foods, raw vegetable recipes? Get this man a podcast!

---

Modern takeaways from Percy Cerutty’s training philosophy

What can an athlete training in the 21st century take away from Percy Cerutty’s approach to training? Here are my practical takeaways:

• When building up general fitness, focus more on effort and less on pace. If you can manage it, try doing some workouts without looking at your watch at all.
• Not every workout should be precisely timed on a flat, fast course. You should incorporate effort-based sessions on grass, dirt, and cross-country terrain into your training too.
• Evaluate your training in the context of your overall life philosophy and personality. If you are a spirited, spontaneous person, some of your training should likewise be spirited and spontaneous.
• Be skeptical of “authoritarian” schedules and approaches. You are a living organism, so your training must be organic also.
• Do not fear intensity. There is a time and a place for very tough sessions—though that time and place is not “every workout all of the time.”
• After hard sessions, dynamically adjust your recovery based on how you feel; don’t just mindlessly run your next workout two days later.
• Don’t neglect general strength. Lift if you can, and do body-weight strength and hill repeats as well.
• Don’t neglect your general health, either. Eat plenty of natural, healthy foods, with an emphasis on plants, fruits, nuts, seeds, and unprocessed whole grains.
• Study philosophy, appreciate art, educate yourself, climb mountains, swim in the ocean, and develop your body and mind to make the most of your time on earth.

Read Cerutty’s work yourself

Percy Cerutty’s books were nigh-impossible to find for a long time, but I’m very happy to report that many of them are back in print thanks to PMA Books.

On Amazon, you can find the following four books:

• Athletics: How to Become a Champion (my favorite!)
• Middle Distance Running
• Be Fit! Or Be Damned!
• Success in Sports & Life

For a more even-handed biographer’s perspective on Percy Cerutty, I can also recommend Graem Sims’ excellent Why Die? The Extraordinary Percy Cerutty, Maker of Champions. Print copies are rare and expensive but the eBook is available on Amazon.

Learn more about training

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to my email list! It’s the best way to find out when I’ve got a new article on training, exercise science, or when I have a new tool ready like my pace percentage calculator.

I also have a book, Modern Training and Physiology for Middle and Long-Distance Runners, that focuses on the science of performance and training for events from 800m to the 10k. Check it out!

Footnotes

---

^[1] In contrast, in the 1967 edition of Run to the Top, Arthur Lydiard boldly claims at the beginning of one of the first chapters, “The key to my conditioning program is 100 miles a week.” Even if this pronouncement was not actually followed by all of his athletes, the hundred-mile week became a quick shorthand—a meme, essentially—that communicated a broader idea about the importance of volume.

^[2] The historical context behind Cerutty’s sharp words about “authoritarian” coaches and training—a word he uses often—is impossible to ignore. Cerutty’s rise as a coach happened as Australia, and the rest of the world, was emerging from the horrors of World War II, and the strict, scientific, by-the-stopwatch interval training popular in the 1950s and 1960s originated in Germany during the late 1930s.

^[3] Cerutty’s opposition to tobacco in the 1950s on grounds of heart and lung health was especially remarkable given that the foundational epidemiological research on tobacco’s role in lung cancer and heart disease was in its infancy. Tobacco companies were recruiting doctors to endorse their products up until the mid-1950s!

^[4] Presumably you would not start with these weight guidelines, but would work up to them over time

^[5] Kettlebells were not widely used for fitness outside of the USSR in the 1950s but I am 100% certain Cerutty would approve of any number of kettlebell swing variants instead of the dumbbell snatch if he were alive today.

^[6] You do have to give Lydiard credit for the weekly long run, though.

^[7] I don’t think this extremely low-volume approach to the racing season is very effective for most runners, but this article is about Percy Cerutty’s training philosophy, not mine!