What about the athletes that train at Arkansas ? Gay, Campbell, etc. That's a load of WC and Olympic medals right there.
What about the athletes that train at Arkansas ? Gay, Campbell, etc. That's a load of WC and Olympic medals right there.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that the 3rd tier clubs like hanson, zap, minnesota, mcmillan could pool their resources and support a small group of "cream of the crop" types - perhaps competing with mammoth? Seems like a better investment than giving cash to 16:10 women - 28:50 men. All of the top people seem to go to mammoth or portland.
Can someone give details to the Mammoth groups and who the coaches & athletes are? Reading the RT article it sounded like there was only one, the T. Mahon group.
Is Bob Larson still up there too? With Meb and Deena? any others?
We also need 2nd tier and 3rd tier groups to thrive. You never know who is a late bloomer or didn't have a chance train consistently. From what has been written about the Kenyan camps, it seems they have many, many runners.
The bigger the net...
Fayetteville AR wrote:
What about the athletes that train at Arkansas ? Gay, Campbell, etc. That's a load of WC and Olympic medals right there.
They don't train in Arkansas.
I'm not so sure it's as simple as throwing people into 3 to 4 groups. The reason you have "coaches" is that each person responds to training a little different than the other. Are you going to take a promising young 13:45 guy and drop him a group of 3-5 guys running 13:10? If it was that easy why didn't someone already do that. Blowing up a 13:45 guy before he can develop isn't going to do any good.
I still think allowing the clubs to function independent of each other is a good thing. People have to go through phases in their running and racing careers to get to where they want to go. I'd like to see Nike dump even more money into some of the club teams in hopes that the guys who can't get contracts can keep running. You never know if one of those guys would blossom into a medal hopeful at the Marathon.
Right now Nike is really the only one willing to dump money into this thing at a high level. Maybe if they start getting medals then you'll see Reebok and Adidas in the US following suit. If there isn't money to be made however, they probably aren't interested.