Graham Blanks on crutches at BU meet

It’s not a ploy. He is hurt for real

What?

G Blanks coach looks like he wears sweatpants everyday and smokes cigs on his lunch break.

Cool no

If his coach's responsible for his injury, he's also responsible for his NCAA title and his then-#1 all-time in-season 5000m. Injury happens in the NCAA and elsewhere all the time to runners. Don't blame the coach for every injury. Blame them for bad decision-making that tends to lead to injuries.

Very fair point but I think that type of training can get you into monster shape (which we saw), which is great and the hardware is even greater. But at some point, breaking down with that type of load seemed inevitable. Hope he recovers quickly, I love watching him race.

Gibby has the same approach as half the coaches in the NCAA - throw a dozen eggs at the wall and see which ones don't break. He had that kid running 100+ mpw at under 6:00 pace week after week. Yeah if you can handle that training, no sh*t you're gonna run fast. But very few people can actually handle that training, and even the ones that can will break eventually. Professional malpractice IMO

Not the only Ivy League coach to lay waste to talented runners.

...oh well, at least they get a fancy degree.

on 6 days no less

I'd trade my All-American certificate and 4 years of non-injury in college for Graham Blanks' NCAA title, runner-up award, and NCAA 5K record. And that's not counting what he does with the rest of his career.

For the record, I'm not saying more aggressive coaching would have got me to that level--it wouldn't have. But I am saying that risk is part of sport and in this case, the risk/reward calculation doesn't seem out of whack to me. Lots of reward for the risk.

Also, 100% of elite distance runners suffer injury at some point during their careers. So that means that 100% of coaches "get" their athletes' injured.

Jakob was just injured, Fisher was just injured, it just comes with the territory. It is always a fine line between too much and not enough. Nobody has a crystal ball and this is not “malpractice.”

Agree. And Nico was injured last year. Bosley too. It’s 100% part of the sport and especially at this elite level. Sucks that hes not running the NCAAs that are down the street from his dorm but the plan all along was to peak for June

i listened to gibby's interview on letsrun, maybe a month or two ago. it was a decent listen. the one thing i didn't really agree with was his idea that there shouldn't be EASY days. Just REGULAR days...or something to that degree. I'm sure there are many others out there with this philosophy, I just disagree. If Jakob can do easy runs at slower than 6:00 pace, college kids can certainly run at 6:30-7:00 pace and still make improvements.

The Ingebrigtsens (and Nordas) all do their easy runs at 6min/mile. They used to do it at 6:25min/mile but switched it up.

Gibby Tax

Again, Blanks is not running all his miles at 6 flat or under. In addition to doing six flat on easy days, he does recovery miles at over 7 minute pace, as he did and discussed with the Harvard Crimson reporter. Moreover, if you are able to run 13:03 for 5000m indoors, 6 flat is just not that fast per mile. His 5k pace is 4:12/M. That means his "easy" pace is 42.6% slower than 5000m pace. For a 16:00 5k runner, the same percentage slowdown would make easy pace 7:20.5/M, which is actually slower than many at that level run their easy miles (6:45-7 is what Daniels says, I think). For his injury, you could look to all sorts of other reasons than this, such as running everything on indoor tracks and asphalt/concrete, not enough injury prevention exercise (who knows?), not enough sleep, too rapid an increase in mileage after the xc taper, ill-fitting shoes, too much speedwork, not enough rest after the 13:03, .... None of us knows.

He doesn't do any runs of significant length at 7 min. pace. Sometimes instead of taking a full day off, he'll do a 20 minute shakeout at a slow pace upwards of 7:00/mi, which I assume is what the Crimson article referred to, but other than that, all of his easy mileage is at 6:00/mi.

The only issue here is, why is 6:00 per mile the number they have to hit? Why not run the way you feel? Some days it is , some days slower, some days faster? Why have some random number? If you hit the 6:00 on a day when you are tired, not recovered, you become more tired and take longer to recover. Recipe for disaster.

Sad thing is, he does not have enough time to get back to where he was before the injury, 2028 is only 4 years away.

That is to be determined. I don’t think this was severe (not a fracture) and was mainly precautionary in order to be ready for June. But who knows.