Jess Andrews 90 sec PB! makes Team GB Oly Squad!!! Miracles do happen

Fetching lass:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/36352278

Conditions were very poor. Probably around 40 seconds at least lost due to wind.

Lauren Fleshman's husband (didn't know she was married, thought she was LGBT) is a triathlete and just won a big race. Perhaps good she's injured?

Come on guys, a big PB by itself doesn't make a doper. She's only ever run one 10k, so the sample size is super low; it's not like she's run 34, 35, 34, 33:30, 31:58. Maybe that debut was just a crap race. Secondly, it sounds like she left the sport and came back MORE passionate than before, which would presumably lead to faster times.

Finally, and most importantly, 31:58 is pretty mediocre. Going from a crap sub-elite time (33:21) to a mediocre time more than two minutes off the world record doesn't really flag foul play in my book... east african or not.

You are correct. You are the winner trollism. I am a mentally deficient internet weirdo.

However... you may have weak mind disease.

Calm down wrote:

Come on guys, a big PB by itself doesn't make a doper. She's only ever run one 10k, so the sample size is super low; it's not like she's run 34, 35, 34, 33:30, 31:58. Maybe that debut was just a crap race. Secondly, it sounds like she left the sport and came back MORE passionate than before, which would presumably lead to faster times.

Finally, and most importantly, 31:58 is pretty mediocre. Going from a crap sub-elite time (33:21) to a mediocre time more than two minutes off the world record doesn't really flag foul play in my book... east african or not.

She's run two 10ks in April, a track 33:21 and a road 33:33. She was 5th in the track race, and first woman but 45th overall in the road race. Maybe she was just 'jogging' those and not racing competitively, but to take a minute and a half off your 10k time in the space of a month is out of this world.

She hasn't left the sport, she has a Power of Ten record going back to 2008.

And was coached by Mick Woods and making GB age group XC teams so was certainly training seriously before the "break". Maybe she did come back with more passion but we certainly shouldn't pretend that this her first attempt at serious training/racing.

trollism wrote:

Marcus Times 4 wrote:

Will she? What are the conditions for OOC? IAAF is world top 30 (which I expect she is 400m away from) what are the conditions for UK testing? (I genuinely have no idea at all so this is not a sarcastic question)

You amuse me Trollism - any African is automatically suspicious to you, but this is automatically not suspicious?

I didn't say it wasn't suspicious, but it's not suspicious because she lives in Spain and her boyfriend's a cyclist.

Maybe it is suspicious, but a 33 minute 10k woman going a dot under 32 happens all the time in the super clean world of East Africa (of course doping doesn't work anyway).

If this means that she's selected for Rio, and it seems it does, of course she'll be in the UKA testing pool.

Exactly, an improvement from 33:20 to 31:58 wouldn't be blinked at if done by an African athlete in a diamond league or similar.

Literally, runners that most have not heard of make those kind of improvements (~5%) all the time. We have 'junior' Kenyans running 1:43/1:44 just a year after running 1:48+ and that is at a much higher level than this ~32 min 10k.

It is simply because of the circumstances (Oly trials) that anyone is being suspicious at all.

There is no good evidence she is doping at all. A big improvement and a great run, I wish her well in Rio.

So you think she just started doping after those races in April? Seems like being in the middle of hard training cycle is just as likely.

I don't know her story (was she running 16:19 off 40mpw and upped to 80mpw and now runs a 32 min 10k, was she constantly injuried for the past couple years and had a 6 month good training block,...) but great races happen. In HS we had a guy who ran a 9:15 3200 as a junior at an indoor meet. He never ran with in 15 seconds of that before or after despite no crazy injuries or anything. On that day everything clicked for him were he was feeling good and the pace was just right.

Or of course maybe she is a doper.

She was funded by the Mo Farah Fund which stipulated that she had to start doing pushups. *Poof* 86 seconds gone.

It is laughable that cycling is now "cleaner" than T&F. I would argue they are the same.

UCI (governing body for cycling) does appear to be tougher on doping, and as such, more athletes are caught. By and large, cycling is a "first world sport." Poor people don't cycle. As a result, the culture, information, and resources to dope are much higher in cycling.

Another item is that ASO, who govern French sports, are very anti-doping, and since the biggest event in cycling is the Tour, the ASO has more push than maybe they should have (which again is why cyclists get busted regularly).

This is all cyclical. In 1998, you have Festina scandal. This supposedly "cleansed" cycling of doping. The very next year, you have the reign of Armstrong. I think we all know "how clean" cycling was.

Then you have Operation Puerto, and this exposed the dark underside of cycling, and now it would be clean (Ullrich, Basso, and others busted).

In the very same TdF Landis wins, and is busted for drugs. That'll clean it up.

The next year Vinokourov puts on an exhibition, and gets busted late in the race. That'll clean it up.

At the Olympics, Rebellin, a single day stud, gets busted for CERA. That'll clean it up.

And so on. Every year, big busts. Every year "it's now clean."

Great women's race at Night of 10,000 PBs in London

Editor's Note: We have a recap of the meet here:

UK 10K Trials Run Through A Bar: Total Unknown Jess Andrews Sets Huge 83-Second PB To Win British 10,000m Trials And Qualify For Rio; Jo Pavey And Andy Vernon Falter

Peptides, pharmaceutical food replacements... New forms of genetic doping... It's endless. Skeletons riding quicker and stronger than the suped up epo generation, what a joke.

How many runners in your life have you seen that have improved their 10k PR by 1 minute and 23 seconds (13.4 seconds per mile) in 1 month?

My answer is zero.

rjm33 wrote:

Oddities wrote:

She's run two 10ks in April, a track 33:21 and a road 33:33. She was 5th in the track race, and first woman but 45th overall in the road race. Maybe she was just 'jogging' those and not racing competitively, but to take a minute and a half off your 10k time in the space of a month is out of this world.

She hasn't left the sport, she has a Power of Ten record going back to 2008.

How many runners in your life have you seen that have improved their 10k PR by 1 minute and 23 seconds (13.4 seconds per mile) in 1 month?

My answer is zero.

I improved by 3 mins from 36 to 33 in one month. The only difference was I had already done the corresponding time for 5km which she hasn't. But she is still not running fast enough to raise doubts as its easier to make gains at that level. She did previously finish 2nd in the Southern xc which is a big race and I assume has given up her job to run full time. She had cover for most of the race & the wind was not that bad.

Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that a UK coach can actually write and defend this improvement and say nothing to see carry on. They must have been watching the endurance events for years and know what a jump this is for this athlete to go above so many runners who have been putting it in and getting results way ahead of her over last 5/6 years. Guess all the other athletes just don't love running or put in the work.

Strange how these athletes who suddenly put in the work and find their love do it out of the way. UK has a long history of great improvements of their athletes when they just slip off the radar for a while.

I have no idea what has happened with this athlete. But yet again the rush to say nothing to see from those who should know better with all that is going on / has gone on is so disheartening.

This talk of improvement in one month is a misdirection. Look at Jessica's powerof10. She ran a 16min 5k two years ago. Her 10k 'PB' of 33:20 was set in her first recorded 10k track race. Have none of you bombed when first taking on a distance? I'm guessing Letsrun users all ran the perfect race first time whatever the distance?

Nobody has seen the race, she could have got the pacing wrong, she could have just run one to get the feel for it before the trials, nobody knows. The 10k road race she ran in 33 minutes also could easily suggest she was capable of ~32:30 on the track 1 month ago. Guys at the top were all 40+ seconds off their track PBs.

Her PBs she reset like her 5k are two years old. It is a great breakthrough, and on paper looks to be a phenomenal improvement, but you are all coming from the angle that she raced 5k and 10k often, all maximal efforts, then suddenly improved by 90 seconds. That just isn't true. Nobody knows even one quarter of the story. Yet so many shout doper.

I'll add one more thing. Elites are known to respond incredibly to training. There are studies on the response of individuals to aerobic training and the results have an extremely wide variance. Elites respond a lot better than the norm and improve a lot faster than you or anyone else who runs for fun here. Just because it takes one Letsrunner 2 years of 70 mile weeks to improve from a 33min to 31min 10k does not mean that someone with elite genetic potential will need the same. A few months of consistency may be all she needs. Look at Bekele. Numerous times have we heard that he only needed 6 weeks to get into fantastic (sometimes WR) shape. He did it again in London.

The problem is, Metric Miler, is that Jess Andrews was not elite before her 80-second improvement.

However, I don't see how this is any different than a great debut. I had a 5000m pb of 14:49 yet debuted in 29:35 for 10,000m on the track, surprising many. Shocking to some, but not to my coach and training partners and competitors.

Are her competitors shocked? Is her gf Lily Partridge shocked?

I think she has clearly shown elite genetic potential. Nijel Amos could only run 1:47 in 2011.

It wasn't her debut.

I said that this 'improvement' is just the product of her not racing properly in a long time and her opening 10k of 33 minutes in April doesn't show she couldn't run sub 32. People get their first race wrong all the time.

She was clearly in much better shape when she ran her other races this year and just didn't get them right. Not that she ran 33:20 as a perfectly paced maximal effort in perfect conditions in April, then got on the magic drugs which improved her performance by nearly 90s by May. All you lot have is two numbers on her profile and think you can fill in the rest of the story. People here are insane.

What is even funnier is quite a few people here will claim to have had large performance increases like Jess (5%) across their careers and put those down to training or other factors. Yet the same people can't stomach it happening to someone else without PEDs.

She hasn't broken the WR here, just got inside the Oly Q time.