Runners who run faster as Masters AND ran competitively in Hight School/College

A 4:55 as a 55 year old and a 4:55 as a 45 year old are two

different animals.

That's true, but it still doesn't address the issue or in any way lessen the value of the kind of information I'm interested in.

not sure what he's done since this article was written, but brian pilcher comes to mind--he ran 9:33 and 4:20s in high school off of limited training and then took the sport up again many years later and became among the best masters' runners in the country, with masters bests as of this 2009 article of 4:47(?), 16:24 in his early 50s.

http://www.runnersworld.com/masters-profiles/age-group-ace-brian-pilcher

I'm still grappling with the news that a 10:14 is two 5:07s back to back.

HS/College: 57/2:08/4:42/10:00/16:08/1:15/2:38

Masters (40s): 55/2:05/4:20 (1500)/9:32 (3K)/16:36/1:18

Added 20 lbs of upper body muscle in between.

Sacre Bleu wrote:

I'm still grappling with the news that a 10:14 is two 5:07s back to back.

Most high school kids run 4:57/5:17.

You are closer to your HS PRs than I am but the calculator I use says your 10:14 is equivalent to a 4:48 mile. Given that even future marathoners with 63 sec 440s most likely have more speed than endurance in HS, your 10:14 indicates that in the right race you could have run at least 4:46. If you use Horwell's 4 sec rule you get 63 to 67s for 880 and 71s or 4:44 for the mile.

It seems that you really underperformed in the mile in HS. On the other hand if you are 45, I don't see why you couldn't take another 5 or 10 seconds off... Keep working.

Kewl story brah. Was there a question somewhere in there?

HS: 4:27 1600, 9:30 3200

College: 4:19 mile, 9:04 steeple

Age 51: 4:46 1600

But only raced one 1600 age 51, ran many in HS. Never raced a mile after sophomore indoor in college... not enough speed to race that short at that level.

OP, you are better than the college guys who still run a lot faster than you. You broke 5 minutes, man! Great job. You obviously worked a lot harder than everyone else to get to where you are!

Great job.

If you ran 10:14 in HS for 2M, how did you only run 5:05 for 1M??? Clearly, you must just not have run a competitive mile race at a time when you were most fit. I suspect the same with your 63 400 PR - probably a practice time, right?

So your premise is interesting but I don't think your mile is where you test it. It would be at the two-mile distance, a distance where you apparently actually realized your teenage potential. Now in your 40s, can you match or come close to matching that 10:14 time? That is the question to measure your premise, not on whether you can match the times in races where you never realized your full youth potential.

If there is a question in the OP post the answer is John Campbell, NZ. If yoiur don't know his career, look it up.

xerosaburu wrote:

If someone in High School or College ran a 4:21 and later as a 55 year old ran a 4:54, that would be great, but not so great as if they'd competitively trained and ran in High School or College and their times hadn't degraded as much as would have been the hypothetical case I just mentioned.

The reason I would find this sort of information useful is that it would give you an idea as to their real youthful potential realized vs their degradation over time.

I have no idea what it is you're actually saying, or asking, here.

Are you suggesting that a 4:21 high-school miler who had gone on to run 4:00 in college or as an open runner wouldn't necessarily have slowed to 4:54 by his mid-fifties, as your hypothetical 4:21/no college running/picks it up as a master (?)/runs 4:54 at age 55 did? Because there's no data suggesting that this is true.

Also, how would this information be useful to you now, at age 45 or whatever you are? Do you have a time machine handy so that you can go back and enjoy a great college career and therefore run faster now or a couple of years ago? Why not just go all-out and pick parents with better DNA?