I’m irritated with my lack of prep for this race, but unable to find fault with snatches. I think they helped...it’s the lack of mileage that hurt me.
I think you answered your own question here... running 21km is going to be hard on your frame and needs adequate specific preparation, which snatches will not provide. There is just no way to simulate or train the shocks that your structures endure while running, other than running. Your cardiovascular conditioning was fine but ahead of the conditioning of the rest of your body hence a less than stellar experience. Everything needs to come together for performance, snatches trained only one piece of the puzzle
The only question is if you’ve shown that your snatch protocol would have helped me more than mine did. One of the things that’s drawn me to SF’s methodology is testing...I just wondered if this was one of the tests.
Unfortunately that is hard to test... only way would be to sacrifice another race (and accept injury risk), doing the same (lack of?) preparation for running, but Al's protocol for snatches instead of yours.
Honestly, think it would not have made a difference, as your weak link was running prep, not cardiovascular conditioning. Al's snatch protocol, while slightly different, will still not train the tissue adaptations required.
BTW, Al's program (I have some experience with it) is NOT based around a snatch protocol, but actually a snatch protocol combined with extensive amounts of locomotion training (running for a runner, biking swimming and running in my case), which is the very big difference.
Train the cardiovascular system to higher performance without the risk of injury through pure running, run a lot but way below race pace to generate the specific distance adaptations in the rest of the structures and minimize injury risk