His first regular training partner was Lawrie King, a young novice who worked alongside Lydiard at the shoe factory. In his first year of low-intensity, high-volume training, King struggled to a fifty-sixth place finish in the Auckland junior cross-country championship. A year later, he won the same race by seventy yards. A pattern was thus established that never changed: Lydiard’s mostly-slow approach did not work overnight, but runners who stuck with it improved steadily year after year. King went on to win the senior New Zealand cross-country championship and even set a national record for
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