Interview - Keith Brantly,1996 U.S. Olympian: PRs of 2:12:31, 28:02 & 13:36

Especially when it's obvious that his ADD could easily lead him to forget that he was married.

Er... wrote:

Don't worry. It's okay for "DownUnderFish" to be a smug, anonymous, self-righteous @sshole, since he's never made a mistake in his life. I'm sure he can show us the engraved invitation from God to judge others on a public message board. Makes up for the fact that he's completely d^ckless.

DownUnderFish wrote:

yeah a class act that cheated on his wife at races

Lots and lots of people used to come to the U of F track to watch his workouts after he graduated college. He was a good guy and a serious ass hound that got as much as he ever wanted anytime he wanted.

Awesome stuff!

Cheers Gary.

Thanks, Monk. It was interesting to delve back into high school racing, college racing, what he learned from different coaches and favorite workouts. Lots of this stuff is lost in the sands of time. Happy running!

Back in the day we worshiped Keith for his runninng and his womanizing. We were all jealous of his lifestyle. 15 years later I view his personal life as pathetic. I will always respect him as a runner but never again as a human being.

Nice to read some of the training and racing details. Too bad he was so aggressive that year at Boston when he was in top form. A more conservative approach may have resulted in a top five or ten finish and PR.

Brevard guy wrote:

Back in the day we worshiped Keith for his runninng and his womanizing. We were all jealous of his lifestyle. 15 years later I view his personal life as pathetic. I will always respect him as a runner but never again as a human being.

You respected him before as a human being for his womanizing?

Brevard guy wrote:

Back in the day we worshiped Keith for his runninng and his womanizing. We were all jealous of his lifestyle. 15 years later I view his personal life as pathetic. I will always respect him as a runner but never again as a human being.

explain please wrote:

You respected him before as a human being for his womanizing?

That's not that hard to understand. As a youngster he was impressing by womanizers, as he grew older he realized how shallow, insecure and dishonest that lifestyle is.

Any more questions, junior?

My pleasure!

You have a really great website and thank you so much for making it available to us.

So he ran for money... why do you think there are so many Kenyan runners excelling worldwide? If there was no appearance money or prize money, road racing and marathons would be a small sport with few top notch competitors.

I was just pointing out that was his main focus, unlike Porter, Bickford, Plasencia who focused more on track and had better PR's. Brantly probably had the potential to run 13:20 27:40 or faster had he not raced on the roads so frequently. He only usually ran around 70 mpw to enable this before he moved to the marathon.

Arguably he may have just benefited from better runners avoiding the roads. Plus the Kenyans racing the roads up until 1992 or so were not in the same leauge as what follows (WIlliam Musyioki comes to mind).

nothing wrong with hound dogging on the rr circuit. same as any other pro sport. keith had the swag, but not quite the talent that our new cop has. you don't think derrick, german, etc are trying to work on the hot 800 runner that runs 2:19 and thinks he's god. think again.

Grow up grow up wrote:

That's not that hard to understand. As a youngster he was impressing by womanizers, as he grew older he realized how shallow, insecure and dishonest that lifestyle is.

Any more questions, junior?

Actually it makes little sense at any age. It didn't make any sense to me when I was young either.

It would appear that one must be inherently shallow to begin with to understand it. Guess that's why you're able to "explain it" to us.

Being a road whore back in the 80s often meant racing relatively weak fields (and perhaps radically lowering your chances at track success in the process) to chase a few thousand bucks a weekend. You could fly down to the Wendy's 10K, get treated like a god for running 29:00 and probably get laid if you put your mind to it. A guy with real talent (and Brantly was a great talent) could make decent money at this. But it wasn't the same thing as trying to maximize your talent, and a lot of people didn't respect it much.

And the numbers and quality of international runners in US road races was nothing like it is today. It was relatively easy pickings.

Space Ghost wrote:

But it wasn't the same thing as trying to maximize your talent, and a lot of people didn't respect it much.

If you want your favorite runners to earn a living from the sport then you need to accept and respect that some will be forced to make the choice between the two. It's THEIR talent to do with what they please.

Space Ghost wrote:

And the numbers and quality of international runners in US road races was nothing like it is today. It was relatively easy pickings.

That's wrong. If you look at the historical results of American road races, you'll find that the times today are pretty much the same as 20 to 25 years ago, with only one difference: the lack of the depth of Americans in today's fields. The track times by Americans 25 years ago are just as good as they are today, especially when you consider that there were no night races under-the-lights in championship events and no nighttime timetrials like there is today. Could you imagine how fast Craig Virgin would run at Stanford under those conditions?

Runners were forced to chase money races to survive and prosper. Patti Catalano Dillon was telling me a couple years ago of running something like 48 races in a year (and winning 44 I believe). I think the money then was all or mostly all under the table appearance money as it was around 1980 or so.

If you knew where to go and who to talk to, an emerging elite athlete could make 20-30,000 a year on the roads in the 80's. That doesn't happen today. If it was before the fall of '85 that number was considerably higher due to shoe money.

ray wrote:

If you knew where to go and who to talk to, an emerging elite athlete could make 20-30,000 a year on the roads in the 80's. That doesn't happen today. If it was before the fall of '85 that number was considerably higher due to shoe money.

In the early 80s Brooks was paying Steve Floto $30k to wear their shoes. If you have to ask Steve Who? you wouldn't be alone.

Typical appearance fees for road whores like Lindsay and others were $2-3k plus prize money.