Tom McCardle has been injured since his junior or senior year of college. Only a 9:35ish 2 miler at Brookline High School, he went to Dartmouth where by his junior year I believe was a 28:10 10k runner. It is sad that he has not been able to compete since 2003/2004, though he is a great success story of hard work and high mileage.
fghrunner wrote:
Dettman twins never did much in college either
Besides, Sean Mcnamara was better than them, so should be higher up the list of great runners who never did anything anyway.
Beaker! He won, rolled out, and was never heard from again. Quite an exit, though.
Rudy Chapa
Gerry Lindgren
Josh McDougal
Matt Withrow
and lol....Pre set American Records left and right
neanderthal dream wrote:
Matt Davis
Anyone that has ever heard stories, or been around this guy knows that he was probably our most talented runner in the 90's. injuries plagued his career. He would have beat Bob Kennedy.
This is the clear winner!!!
malmo?
The better Davis wrote:
neanderthal dream wrote:Matt Davis
Anyone that has ever heard stories, or been around this guy knows that he was probably our most talented runner in the 90's. injuries plagued his career. He would have beat Bob Kennedy.
This is the clear winner!!!
What were his pr's? That's a pretty bold claim.
Injuries plagued a lot of runners' careers. John Trautmann and Tim Hacker come to mind. But in between injuries they did put down some impressive marks.
Off of the top of my head some recent All-Americans who aren't competing, or at least aren't putting up results that I've noticed:
David Kinsella
Bret Schoolmeester
Trent Hoerr
Matt Withrow
Stuart Eagon
Christo Landry
Jess Baumgartner
Matt Gonzalez
Stephen Pifer (gave up in 2010, or just a bad year?)
Colby Wissel
Kiel Uhl
Antony Ford
Gavin Thompson
Paul Morrison
Travis Laird
Tom McArdle
Isaiah Festa
Josh Spiker
Franklyn Sanchez
Sharif Karie
Mark Pilja
Michael Power
From a cross country perspetive, I think the ultimate answer has to be Josh McDougal, though.[/quote]
Have to agree with Franklyn Sanchez. He was 5th at NCAAs as a freshman and was never heard from again. Where is he? What happened?
What about Marc Olesen from Stanford? Another guy also plagued by injuries?
Keith Kelly
zone so back wrote:
Nicodemus Naimadu, Shadrack Songok. end of thread.
obvious answer wrote:
amazed there wasnt an automatic answer of "pre"
Why?
I have some info on Sanchez. He ran a 8:49 2 mile indoors his senior year. He went to Georgetown and ran extremely well, but he felt like his coach was over racing him and he was burning out. He was going to transfer to Michigan, and some local guy (from MA) was helping him with all the paperwork. One day, the guy helping him called Sanchez and told him he had to mail out the application and other stuff. Unfortunately, Sanchez never followed through and therefore never transferred. He was completely embarrassed and just stopped running altogether. Even to this day, he won't answer phone calls from old running coaches and friends because he's too embarrassed by his action
You guys have left the greatest off the list...
GABE JENNINGS
I love and miss that guy
David Kimani
Hard to brag about his pr's since his best races were in XC on injury. He placed 3rd at 1993 Footlocker behind Adam Goucher and Meb after a month off for injury. Then he placed 5th at NCAA's in 1996 despite having a stress fracture "end" his season in September. He started some minimal training in November.
Search "Matt Davis" in the google search field up on the message board and you can keep yourself entertained for a few hours. Here's a snippet of something I just found:
November 27, 1996
INJURY CAN'T KEEP DAVIS FROM SHINING
Author: John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review
Edition: SPOKANE
Section: SPORTS
Page: C1
Index Terms:
PROFILECOLUMN
Estimated printed pages: 3
Article Text:
You can't win a national championship in football until New Year's Day, but you sure can lose it in September. A lousy June can cost you the Triple Crown. Michael Jordan's latest ring is just more jewelry; the 72 games the Bulls won in the regular season are history.
As often as not in sports, it's the body of work that counts.
Aside from those times when it's simply whether the body works.
In the long run - and that is Matt Davis' specialty, after all - the substance of his season was going to boil down to a single afternoon, a feet-don't-fail-me-now arrangement. This is sort of the deal in cross country, anyway. That injury intervened only narrowed the vision and upped the stakes - and made his accomplishment that much more remarkable.
Matt Davis finished fifth in Monday's NCAA cross country championships in Tucson - the highest place for a Spokane runner since Gerry Lindgren won the race 27 years ago. Now a junior at the University of Oregon, Davis was the second American across the finish line and led the Ducks to a third-place finish, their best showing of the '90s. The last Duck to place higher than Davis: Alberto Salazar in 1979.
This is all terrific stuff for the resume - and doesn't even include the asterisk: two months ago, Davis' season was pronounced dead with a stress fracture of the right femur.
``To be honest, I had no idea how I'd hold up,'' said Davis. ``I knew I was going to run as hard as I could, but when you've only raced once all season, it's hard to know how good your best will be.''
We should be getting the idea by now.
Davis didn't win every race he entered when he was a student at Mead High School, but damn near - and since moving on to Oregon he'd been 31st and 15th in his first two NCAA cross country meets. When he came up limping in September, it seemed the timetable would be pushed back a year.
But Davis had his own plans, and his own reasons.
``One, I wanted to run with Karl Keska - this was his fifth year and I wanted to have one last season with him,'' said Davis said. ``And secondly, I just wanted to run with this team. There's a chemistry here that's hard to describe, but these guys never let you down and I didn't want to let them down.''
Those guys include three former Mead teammates Rob Aubrey, Greg James and Davis' younger brother Micah. Only James ran in Tucson - he was 57th - as the other two fell victim to what Davis called ``sort of a Catch-22.
``We have nine guys on the team, but only seven can run and we switched guys in and out of different meets. When it came down to the district meet, Rob and Micah sat out - and every guy who ran wound up being all-district. It wasn't like coach (Bill) Dellinger could pull any guys out who hadn't run well and run the others at nationals. What he did do was fly them down for the race anyway. They warmed up with us and helped us and talked to us, and they're as much a part of it as anyone. But it was a pretty stressful situation.''
For Davis, the stress was a little different. After restricting his workouts to the pool for three weeks, he tried running on his injured leg too soon and had to take another 10 days off before resuming training in November. Then he had to pass muster for Dellinger in two workouts just before districts to get his chance.
``If they hadn't gone to Bill's design,'' Davis said, ``I would have redshirted.''
Didn't that seem like the prudent option anyway?
``You have to take the risk,'' he insisted. ``Really, the only race that matters is the NCAA meet. And it was worth it. I was 10 spots better than I was last year after missing basically the whole season. It gives me a lot of inspiration to train hard this winter. I really feel like I can run with those guys now.''
In Tucson, he mostly ran them down. He brought up the rear of the top 25 after two miles of the 10,000-meter race, moved up into the first 10 two miles later and then ``started to fade a little bit.
``I just thought, `You've got to have faith - you can finish this race,''' he said, ``and suddenly those guys I thought I was going to lose to, I wound up passing them and a few more. You tend to forget that other guys may be feeling as bad as you are.''
The ones he couldn't catch were three Kenyans - the winner, Godfrey Siamusiye of Arkansas, and Jonah Kiptarus and Cleophas Boor of Nebraska - and Stanford's Greg Jimmerson. Among those he did was Pac-10 champ Mebrahtom Keflezighi of UCLA.
His motivation, however, wasn't taking aim at the big names.
``Really, it meant so much to have Rob and Micah out there yelling,'' Davis said. ``I could catch onto that and push even harder. And Greg, a mile runner out there going 10,000 meters as hard as he could, means a lot to me. It makes me dig in that much deeper. I don't think you can put a worth on having friends like that with you.''
Whether it's for one race, or for the body of work.
Caption:
Matt Davis credits teammates for success. File/Associated Press Color Photo
Memo:
You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.
Copyright (c) 1996 The Spokesman-Review
Record Number: 9612020224
Read more:
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=1494972&page=2#ixzz19HbSjlsa
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Look More Closelerly wrote:
You guys have left the greatest off the list...
GABE JENNINGS
I love and miss that guy
I miss him and his drum section at the NCAAs like a bad case of crabs.
John Quade. Was supposed to be America's next great miler when there was nobody in the late 80s after running 3:54. Think he got injured and then disappeared.
Sounds to me more like a failure of high mileage and work.
addf wrote:
Tom McCardle has been injured since his junior or senior year of college. Only a 9:35ish 2 miler at Brookline High School, he went to Dartmouth where by his junior year I believe was a 28:10 10k runner. It is sad that he has not been able to compete since 2003/2004, though he is a great success story of hard work and high mileage.
What about Brie Felnagle?
Harry Green walked on at Univ. of Texas and had top time at 10K for three consecutive years. Quite impressive but I don't think he did anything after college.