What's the reason/s that high schoolers and collegiates are running so fast in the last couple of years.

They used to run 2 miles, now they run 3200m, add 3.5 sec. to their times and it looks a little different. Also, more kids are traveling to certain races stacking the fields.

The answer to “why couldn’t I do that?” Is not enough talent. If a runner tried to keep up with the Newbury Park brothers he would crash and burn. Oxygen deficit will be beat positive thinking every single time. A HS runner with exceptional aerobic capacity, and the top end speed to break 4:00, is a rare human being.

It’s just human progress. We get better at everything we do. Always have.

Better shoes, tracks, training, etc.

Evolution, baby!

1. Shoes. It is not just races, they help much more with training. You can do more and harder in training and still recover. They also help runners with poor mechanics be more competitive than they would be otherwise. Increasing the effective talent pool. Shoes are the number one reason.

2. Gps watches and Strava. Not only can you see what it takes to run at a certain level, you can see if you are training too hard, or doing the wrong things. You know what people on your team are doing and those you are competing against. This aspect of modern running at the lower levels is greatly under appreciated.

3. Better coaching is more widespread. Coaching information is more accessible. This casts a much wider net on the talent pool in high school than before. Coaches can also have a real time view in to your training with gps watches and Strava. It is much easier for a coach to see you are running too hard on an easy run.

Those are the main reasons. Other minor reasons might include cost of education going up, less appeal of football as a sport due to understanding the risk of brain damage, and even social aspects like being skinny doesn’t have the same stigma as it once did.

What will be the excuse when there are even more running fast in five more years? It's not like they're all running faster than old records. We don't have people beating what Alan Webb did decades ago. We just have a lot more people running what used to be fastest in the country types of times. There was often an 8:40-8:45 runner somewhere in the United States, now there are more of them. And they show up to the same race with each other, and one of them with the extra competition runs sub 8:40. Before the new shoes in 2016-2018 we had as many sub 4's in high school as we did from 1960-2009. It was already starting to happen before new spikes, it's not the spikes.

And you read every one of them.

If we get better at everything we do that must include doping.

And from 2020 on we have more sub 4 milers in 1 year than you did in all of 2016-2018. Basically the same thing with sub 8:45s. Better training helped all those 4:02 kids run 3:59. Better training and shoes let the 4:05 kids break 3:59.

A guy like Kessler was a clearly different level of talent being like 4s faster than all the 3:39 guys. What isn’t clear is if was a Webb/Ryun fitness or more like Drew Hunter in HS. I sort of expect it is the later. I expect in the next 20-30 years we will have some other outlier dropping some 3:50 type mile in HS. See the other various 17 years running fast.

And we can’t discount kids being held back (3:59 as a high schooler was epic. Probably something like 10x as many do it when you add in freshman year of college).

Training wise I get the feeling that we have a combo of more kids starting in middle school and more kids being exposed to hard core soccer/swim training at a young age. If your norm for sports training is what travel soccer does, you aren’t going to question things like 2/days. The time commitment in some of those sports is nuts.

So what constitutes "better training" than what we knew 8 years ago? What are kids doing today that El G and Bekele didn't? What is the recent breakthrough in knowledge?

Eight years ago at the high school level and younger, many fewer coaches knew about lactate threshold training and fewer were testing blood lactate levels. That's kind of a big deal, if not bigger.

Super shoes.

It’s more a breakthrough in knowledge. Runners get faster and share the training information with others. The past 8 years have probably had the greatest transparency in training regimens in the sports’s history. Even pros are on Strava or otherwise sharing training logs.

I’ve seen detailed training info on Jacob, Eliud, Karsten… so many others. You have faster runners sharing more info about stuff we didn’t used to do. Double thresholds!?!

This and the shoes. Bigger talent pool with more kids starting early.

Exactly

i guarantee Jakob would run faster that 3:49 in the

or all the pre-2010 runners where doped to the gills but they all stopped now

would el g be at 3:37 today?

It's not the knowledge, it's the application of knowledge by a growing number of coaches that have kept up with the times. In my area, COVID was the turning point. A lot of longtime coaching fixtures retired and were replaced with younger minds. Those new coaches, now unencumbered by silly state federation rules, started training kids year-round with "clubs" that skirted the rules. With no club soccer, basketball, and volleyball going on, a lot of kids that were track middle distance only started doing XC. A lot of kids got together during the shutdown to run miles together to pass the time since it was deemed a safe outdoor activity. When competition resumed again, times that would have won state in 2017-2018 now failed to make it out of districts. Youngsters were simply in better running shape and coaches were now working with them full-time.

Of course, shoes also changed the game, but I wasn't seeing mass wearing of Dragonfly and Avanti locally until 2022.

All the stuff plus selective breeding of runner/athletic parents.

Your posts insult people’s intelligence. We’re all aware of the existence of PEDs in sports, and we can make our own assumptions as to who is cheating, without your mindless comments.

What does what El G and Bekele did have to do with HSers? We are talking HS where running 50mpw with 2 reasonable workouts is putting you up in the top 5%..

I am sure it is somewhat selection bias but I have seen a general trend to more miles (kids running 50-60 instead of 40-50), more hard aerobic work (tempos, cv, vo2) and less anaerobic early in the season , and a bit more emphasis on speed (40s hill sprints,plyos, and strength) than the early 00s. Nothing radical but as I said we are talking a couple seconds.

All else being equal just going from 40-50 to 50-60 is good for a few seconds.