No offense taken. In fact, I greatly admired your post. And I would have admired it even if you had threatened to beat me up, posted under "Living in the past," or referred to me as "Living in my ass."
One thing I admire about your post is your point about how do you prove that Ryun was overtrained in his early years and that the training hindered him in his later years?
I certainly can't prove it; but as Drew said, it's a legitimate question. All I'm just looking at is the evidence. Ryun apparently had a small number of recovery days between hard workouts in high school and college. In 1968, he was training as hard as ever but "without getting any results" (these were his words, as quoted in an article). To me, that's evidence that his body wasn't responding to the amount of work he was doing. He was also suffering from a lot of nagging injuries. Both of these bits of evidence suggest chronic overtraining. His body apparently had not been getting enough recovery for several years and this hindered "regeneration."
One thing that Bowerman was good at was the idea of training judiciously. That means training just enough to get the desired results (an idea that you touched upon). Steve Stageberg was busy with graduate school in 1971, but he finished a close second behind Prefontaine in the AAU three mile championships. Because of his studies, Stageberg didn't have much time to devote to training. But with Bowerman's advice, he combined long, easy runs with a judicious amount of track training and had his best season ever. Stageberg apparently did just enough training to get the best results. If you do more than "just enough," you're wasting your energy and perhaps wearing yourself down.
After the bout with mono, Ryun seemed to be psychologically stale. I wonder if he was suffering from clinical depression at some periods during 1969. Jim says that he was better than ever in 1972, and I'm willing to take his word on that. But his performances don't suggest it.
Jim was still running around 4:10 in some of the races leading up to the 1972 Olympics. It was kind of bizarre to see him win a race one week and then finish in last place the following week. Maybe his on-again-off-again gyrations had nothing to do with mono or to lack of recovery between workouts early in his career. But something was causing this bizarre inconsistency, and I guess we'll never know what that was. We do know that it never happened in 1966 or 1967.