... Hard to believe that 25ish years ago no high schooler in the US broke 9 in the 3200.
My son was a decent (4:19 mi) high school runner then. It definitely was the "low mileage 90s". The general coaching philosophy then tended to be long on VO2 max work and very little threshold work. There were a lot of good 800 runners, but few high schoolers with the training volume to run well at 2miles/3200.
Just goes to show how incredible Webb and Ryun actually were. ....Ryun could've closed that race in 53.xx! Can you imagine if he had a Sowinski, mondo track and modern shoes!?!
Where is his family from? Tinoda Matsata... unusual name. Yes as the other poster says mentioning his race may trigger people but is he of East African descent as one might expect....?
So just because someone isn't named Bob, Joe, or Jimmy you assume he's from another country?
Matsata is from Zimbabwe. My guess is his parents or grandparents are from there.
Alan
Lol! I assumed from his name and from his performance that there was a strong likelihood his ancestry was not from West Africa like the majority of black Americans. And if what you say is correct then I was correct in my belief. Thx!
Finally someone with some sense showed up and said this. Bitter, out of touch old timers insinuating that 'the super shoes' (oddly enough, never specific in naming which just vague references to a poorly understood generalization) giving 4 seconds over the mile, utterly ridiculous. If what they say is true then El Guerrouj's world record should have been easily shattered by hordes of previous 3:29-3:30 runners already.
What hoards of sub 3:30 guys? Outside of the EPO era when was 3:30 being broke on a regular basis? Instead we get a bunch of 3:32 guys all running 3:29.... Or in this case 4:03 guys running 3:59...
This horse has been best to death. The top 10-20 list every year for the 1500 & 5000m have been remained consistent. There is no discernible difference over the last 20 years.
Except that the shoes give you around 3 seconds, so,... really, there were zero tonight.
Except Birnbaum wore this years Hoka spikes, which are far from super. Guess he must be in 3:54 shape in dragonflys then huh?
Well played. So many feel the need to discredit this influx of fast HS MD times, probably to protect their egos and maintain that they’d be just as competitive now as they were in their day.
I scored 3rd-places in the 800 and 1600 at the Iowa HS state meet in ‘09/‘10 - last weekend my HS PRs would have put me 12th and 16th respectively. I don’t think it’s the shoes, I think it’s largely because Jackson Heidesch gets 250 “kudos” every time he logs a bowel movement on Strava; within the community of motivated HS runners, everyone can see what their competition is doing and strive to emulate it. Once a couple local kids are running faster times, the bar is raised and the momentum just builds. I have no doubt there’s also a higher percentage of competent HS coaches than ever, after 20+ years of the internet offering an easy resource for knowledge and discussion and with dwindling holdovers from the 80s and 90s that produced 0 sub-4 kids.
Really there should always have been more sub-4 high schoolers nationwide than we’ve seen in the past. I mean it just doesn’t make sense to me from a physiological/developmental/statistical standpoint that we’d have a crop of 18-20 year old college kids running sub-4 every year to no fanfare while 3:59 for a 17-18 year old HS kid is supposed to be reserved for future Olympians. You could say it has to do with “training age” and that leads me to another point, that more middle schools have XC teams than we had in years past. Way, way more freshmen are running sub-17 and 4:40 miles than when I was in high school and they’re coming from schools with good middle school programs.
TL;DR: more kids training intelligently from the age of 12-13 and dreaming of running fast times = more kids running fast times
5000m HSR-setter Connor Burns and Simeon Birnbaum are going to take a run at Alan Webb's 3:53 mile HSR. Can they break it? Both have gone sub-4 and put up other great marks, but not sure they have the speed that Webb has...
Before Webb went 3:53 everyone was saying he had no chance at Ryun's 3:55, maybe 3:57.
Teammates, coaches, threads on here...watch the race, the announcers said Webb had no chance at 3:55.
Yeah that's just not true. I was on that team and we all believed he could break Ryun's record. Nobody on our team or the coaches were saying he had no chance. Not sure where you got that idea. Whether or not he would get it done in the one shot he took was a question, but we all knew he was capable of it that season. Don't try to rewrite a history you weren't a part of buddy haha. Maybe the announcers were questioning it (not sure, been a while since I've watched that race) but don't confuse the announcers speculations with what people who watched him and ran with him every day were saying.
Does anyone know what Alan Webb's PR was before he ran the 3:53.43? I think his first time under 4 minutes was that same January 2001when he ran a 3:59.86 indoors. So perhaps Webb ran a 6.43 second PR when he set the HS record - that seems bonkers.
Connor Burns with his 3:58.83 PR would "only" have to PR by 5.5 seconds .
I actually wouldn't be surprised if Tinoda Matsatsa gets the win in 3:55 even though I dont think he has broken 4:10 in the mile before. Tinoda's winning 800 at New Balance Indoors of 1:48.27. I think Tinoda actually has more speed than Burns and Webb did when he set the record.
Yeah the 3:59 indoors was Alan's PR before that. But the 6 second drop isn't as crazy as it sounds. I was on his team and he was ready to do 3:59 junior year but our coach shut him down a few weeks early cuz he had a minor little injury and our coach didn't want to push him.
He ran that 3:59 indoors, he ran 3:59 split 1600 at Penn Relays, he ran a 47. 4x400 split at one meet, he ran 8:45 all on his own in the 2 mile at indoors nationals, hell he ran a 4:06 at our district meet as part of a workout in which he did 4:06, 1:49, and 49. 1600/800/400 in I wanna say 90 minutes if I remember correctly, but that 4:06, being a workout and all, he did with 2:14/1:52 splits (coach wanted him to do 2:12/2:00 but when he hit 800m he clicked his watched and just took off like a bat out of hell blowing by the field haha). By end of senior year just doing sub-4 would have been easy for him. So the fact that he only had a 3:59 PR coming into that 3:53 race doesn't mean much. Was blowing out Ryun's record by nearly 2 full seconds amazing...yes absolutely! Us on his team were thinking in a good race he'd beat Ryun's record but not by a lot, maybe 3:54.5 to 3:55-low.
Also you gotta understand that 3:59 indoors was done without much work at all to get him ready to run a really fast mile at that point in the season. Our coach was ecstatic after that indoors 3:59 because they hadn't really even begun to get Alan ready for running the mile yet that season. Running a fast 2 mile at Indoors Nationals was the goal for indoors, not running a fast mile. His indoor training that year was focused on building strength for the 2 mile, then outdoors was all about honing down for the mile record.
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