Shsnnss wrote:
The point is not to diminish walmsley s NCAA accomplishment but to put them in their proper place to illustrate how NON competitive the ultras are.
If there are say 50 athletes better than walmsley every year that choose to either stop the sport or go to the roads- whose to say that maybe half have more talent than him in an ultra.
When you stop making money, and collegiate track is a scholarship, and you stop offering money- you have walmsley vs a bunch of non talented athletes.
The problem is that not everyone who is fast at shorter distances are going to be equally fast at longer distances. So the 50 athletes that are "better" (I'll assume you mean faster) than Walmsley at 5k, might not be faster than him at a marathon, and then one step further might not be faster at 50 miles or 100 miles. People do run better at certain distances. You have no way to know if anybody who was faster than him at 5k could beat him at 100 miles.
You are correct, ultra-marathons do not get the sheer number of talent entering the events as compared to the number of college athletes competing in the 5k, for example. Most ultras are much more like a local turkey trot. But what we don't know with any certainty is if all those people who can run 5k faster than Jim could run Western States faster than Jim. Maybe they can, but, until they do it, he's the record holder. Saying that someone else could possibly run faster is just pointless speculation. Maybe there are potentially thousands of really great 100 mile runners... so what? Maybe there isn't.
The same argument applies to any running event. Unless every single person in the world was made to train with the same top coaches, diet, etc. and compete, we don't really know who the fastest person in the world is at any distance. We only know that of the people who we know who have competed, who is the fastest. How many really fast kids who could be great at track chose baseball, or hockey etc. or how many potentially really fast kids just never had the opportunity? Do we put an asterisk beside every world record because it's entirely possibly someone could have run it faster?