Charles Hicks needs to leave Bowerman

Ding ding ding we have a winner. Jerry can produce results but at a cost.

Majority of Bowerman athletes are injured or toast within 1-3 year’s, doing more to get less.

Overtraining is a slippery slope.

omg is this true

your first year as a pro is hard enough but his happened to come in an Olympic year so there's much more pressure to improve quickly and go to Paris. You just can't do that. he seems aware of this and despite some minor setbacks, increasing training is not gonna help. in fact, in the long run it's the worst thing he can do.

if he doesn't make the GB team it isn't the end of the world. LA in 4 years is more doable.

I really have no clue. Ahmed is still running really well (a little bit behind Grant which has been the case since 2022). It could've been that Hicks was just in over his head. He went through 5k right around 13:30 and started falling off not long after. If you're falling off only halfway through a 10k it's easy to mentally fall off a bit too. especially since he was on his own for a while. He may be closer to 27:20 shape if he'd gone out a bit slower/had someone to stick on for 8k, which would put him much more in line with Fisher after a year at BTC.

Still, I'd rather be with Mike Smith in Flagstaff, living at altitude with seemingly way less of a chance of injury than at BTC. You gotta have faith in your coach though, so if he's not getting injured, I don't think there's a reason to leave yet.

If I'm Charles Hicks...I'm doing something everybody would thinks is crazy. I'd go across the pond and attempt to join Gjert Ingebrigtsen's group. (maybe wait till after the Norwegian trial)

He's an American kid from Florida. He ain't going to Norway. (Yeah, yeah, he runs for UK but he has minimal connections to the UK other than being born there to American parents and holding dual passports).

Lol 😆

i was there - he wasn't jogging - he went out over his head and had to dig super deep from about 3k in

Hicks is a hard worker but he has next to no talent (relatively speaking). He ran 105 miles a week in college and has long since reached the ceiling that a solely strength-based approach like Jerry’s will permit.

OP is right: he needs to get out before his career goes any further down the toilet.

Why do athletes keep joining BTC after what's transpired the last few years? It's been clear for quite a while this training group is dying.

Charles Hicks is not running well for BTC right now. Cooper Teare wasn't running up to expectations after a year either, and look at him now after a year in Jerry's program and another 6 months back in his old coach's program. Teare ran some pr's for Jerry before injury issues. Maybe Hicks will be running great in year two, like Grant Fisher. Still, that program is moribund. I'd get out.

Hicks does go for runs.

He needs to come to LRC everyday for his training & racing critique. And we'll deliver.

Wondering if Charles is update? Looks like a 5k in Heusden ~6.5 weeks ago and then nothing. Does anybody know whether he got hurt or simply called it a season? Disclaimer: I do not watch his youtube vids (I'm sure they're great); the most recent was titled "how to start running" and the one before that was about altitude tents - talk about catering to different audiences lol. But he seems like a swell, thoughtful guy and I wish him success!

He's also from a wealthy family and slept in an altitude tent at home and in his dorm at Stanford. Nothing wrong that, but speaks to him possibly having been pretty close to maxed out on his talent while in college. I'm sounding negative but I'm a fan of his. He way overachieved in college compared to what was expected coming out of high school, and if he didn't run another race from here he'd have a lot to be proud of. But, yeah, I was never convinced he'd make it as a pro because he doesn't have great wheels and I'm skeptical that he'd make it in the marathon.

What's with Tom Ratcliff? Why is he still on the fringes of Bowerman and has not been cut loose? He's done nothing in three years.

What happened to him this season? He barely raced and finished third at the trials but without the standard. He literally raced like 3 times.

Ratcliffe is fairly comparable to his BTC teammate Kieran Tuntivate; Kieran has broken 13:10 but Ratcliffe probably has a better average of his top 3-4 5k races

It bears mention that both Ratcliffe and Tuntivate, as well as many of the golden era BTC athletes, have the same agent...Tom Ratcliffe (Sr.)

To the point of this thread, it's kind of startling how BTC is now a hodgepodge of Olympic-caliber runners (McGorty, Schweizer, Ahmed) and folks who might claim a W just to make the final at Trials. Plus Jager and, somehow, Justyn Knight. Hicks is probably somewhere in between those 2 groups. The fact that they didn't sign anybody out of college this year could lend credence to the idea that they'll disband. On the other hand, maybe next year they'll reboot with Elliott Cook, Maddy Elmore, and maybe the UNC guys (reviving the Milt to Jerry pipeline)