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.
