JIM RYUNS STORY!!!! 5:30 MILE TO 4:10 MILE

chgray wrote:

On June 27, 1965 eighteen year-old high school senior Jim Ryun ran a 3:55.3 mile to beat Olympic champion Peter Snell!

Good thing Jim Ryun did not run up to his capablities! May we all fall short of our potential.

And don't forget, he ran a 4:11 mile the DAY BEFORE in the qualifying race. How many people get a rest day like that before a pr?

[quote Shortly before he died I actually talked with Lydiard about Ryun and his shorter than expected career and as you might guess, Arthur's comments were almost identical to yours, though he never mentioned Timmons by name. Essentially he thought that Ryun was done in by the same problem that does in most promising young Americans; too much trackwork early on and an insufficient amount of aerobic development to continue improvement into their "mature" years.[/quote]

But didn't Ryun do this? Wasn't he running 110 mile weeks inbetween his 11th grade xc and track seasons, preparing for the Olympic Year? 110 miles a week during thre winter sure sounds like aerobic development to me.

Look, I could have run under 4 in high school too, except I was coached by Timmons brother in Jr. High and peaked in 9th grade.

Living in the past: i just realized that sounded harsher than i meant it too. i agree with you in theory; i think Ryun was overtrained - he and timmons both apparently said so. I just don't think it can be proven, and i wanted to clarify what i thought Dr. Daniels was implying when he asked for someone to define overtraining. sorry if i came on too strong, i just ran across this thread so its all still fresh in my head.

No offense taken. In fact, I greatly admired your post. And I would have admired it even if you had threatened to beat me up, posted under "Living in the past," or referred to me as "Living in my ass."

One thing I admire about your post is your point about how do you prove that Ryun was overtrained in his early years and that the training hindered him in his later years?

I certainly can't prove it; but as Drew said, it's a legitimate question. All I'm just looking at is the evidence. Ryun apparently had a small number of recovery days between hard workouts in high school and college. In 1968, he was training as hard as ever but "without getting any results" (these were his words, as quoted in an article). To me, that's evidence that his body wasn't responding to the amount of work he was doing. He was also suffering from a lot of nagging injuries. Both of these bits of evidence suggest chronic overtraining. His body apparently had not been getting enough recovery for several years and this hindered "regeneration."

One thing that Bowerman was good at was the idea of training judiciously. That means training just enough to get the desired results (an idea that you touched upon). Steve Stageberg was busy with graduate school in 1971, but he finished a close second behind Prefontaine in the AAU three mile championships. Because of his studies, Stageberg didn't have much time to devote to training. But with Bowerman's advice, he combined long, easy runs with a judicious amount of track training and had his best season ever. Stageberg apparently did just enough training to get the best results. If you do more than "just enough," you're wasting your energy and perhaps wearing yourself down.

After the bout with mono, Ryun seemed to be psychologically stale. I wonder if he was suffering from clinical depression at some periods during 1969. Jim says that he was better than ever in 1972, and I'm willing to take his word on that. But his performances don't suggest it.

Jim was still running around 4:10 in some of the races leading up to the 1972 Olympics. It was kind of bizarre to see him win a race one week and then finish in last place the following week. Maybe his on-again-off-again gyrations had nothing to do with mono or to lack of recovery between workouts early in his career. But something was causing this bizarre inconsistency, and I guess we'll never know what that was. We do know that it never happened in 1966 or 1967.

Oletimer,

Thanks so much for asking re: 5th Ave...GREAT experience although I\'d have preferred a miserable experience and better finishing time...have never been a \"miler\" but man its been seriously fun at 50 to put on spikes and hammer 200-400 meter repeats...whoa! 5th Ave was 3rd best of the year, noticably behind the 4:56 I managed in June...

Living in the past,

Rather than get into the details of what bugs me about Updike specifically, note that my participation is largely just harmless ball busting as it relates to liking versus disliking the works of Kenny Moore...you don\'t dig it and i on the other hand think that he\'s so spot on in his slant on running and its finer nuances...if these are the biggest issues we have in our lives, than MAN are we doing good!!! (err uhh, \'well\' for you letsrun.com grammarians)

Bottom line for me is just how off the charts remarkable Jim Ryun was/is and what he did to get there...Fun thread...cool memories...have a great weekend.

just as big a \"running geek\" as the rest a \'ye,

MF

that's the beauty of track and field, fanelli. it gets into your blood, and try as you might, you just can't get it out of your blood. i'll forget my grandma's birthday, but i can remember 400m repeat times from 15 years ago. i'd suspect that drew, et al will also be strapping on the spikes for some hard runs downthe backstretch on a nice summer day. just can't beat it.

Have a great weekend yourself, Mike. I agree that Jim Ryun was "off the charts remarkable." He is my favorite miler ever. So while you get your kicks from Kenny Moore's quest for deeper meaning, I'll get my kicks imagining how great Jim Ryun might have been at 25, if only...

No attack on anyone intended, but I have often been asked what is overtraining and how do you deal with it, so I thought I might get some insight here. I prefer using the term “hypertraining” as that is easier to define in my mind – meaning training harder than is necessary to reap the benefits you are trying to achieve. And the way to determine that is to train a little harder and see if you get better. If you do improve, repeat the above until you do not show better performance with greater training stress. When it comes to the ideal age for best performance it is interesting to compare running and swimming. Many swimmers give up the sport when at the age of 18 they start getting beaten by 15-year-olds who have been at it 3 years less than the 18-year-olds have. Do we decide that 16 or 17 is peak years for swimmers just because that is a pretty common age for top swimmers in the world (or certainly used to be). Even if the best runners are age 25 when doing the most damage, doesn’t mean every runner will continue to get better until then (or can’t get better later in life), and if they don’t, they have been overtrained. Even admitting that “I was overtrained” or that my athlete was overtrained doesn’t really define overtraining. It is impossible to separate the physiological from the psychological and lack of improvement doesn’t settle too well with someone who is training very hard, so things don’t go so well and then this person is tagged with being overtrained. I guess what we would do, even if we could identify what markers indicate overtraining before it strikes you down, would be to train as hard as possible until we achieve one or more of the overtraining markers. So is the goal to try to achieve overtraining and then admit that, yep we overtrained. And when you finally achieve that elusive goal you stop and start over in another direction. I prefer to try to avoid overtraining as the solution to overtraining, rather than work to achieve it, then start over. Maybe starting in another direction will not reach the same level of performance as the original approach did. Then, of course it would be easy to say you should have done it another way in the first place. Who knows? Do you suppose Timmons really knew that Jim was overtrained, or was it just a matter of things not going so well and he was willing to take the blame (something must have prompted him to think it was overtraining, whatever that is)

could someone please tell me how to overtrain, to age 19 the way jim ryun did

thanks

ryun, as far as we know, did hard interval work all year round. Arthur would never have had an athlete do that.

Living in the Past wrote:

I always wonder what he could have done if Bob Timmons had not been his coach. What if Ryun had been blessed with a coach who really understood training for the long term? Ryun would have almost certainly been the first man to break 3:50 in the mile. My guess is that he would have run 3:46 before hanging up his spikes.

Yeah, he was capable of that. However, the 4th place finish at the trials was more a result of Ryun not having run a real 800 meter race in five years. He was in superb shape in Munich - two 800s in 1:51 with 3 minutes rest between. He was confident because of the easy 3:52 mile he had just run. I think he probably would have outkicked Vasala, as the final drive would have been over the last 300, hard, instead of Vasala just sitting on Keino until there were 90 meters to go. Ryun never got anywhere near his true potential in the 800 or 1500. That 880 record of his was run with negative splits - and it was 90 minutes after a heat in 1:50.3 - 53.3 / 51.6. He was a 21st Century stuck in the 60's with a coach who didn't really know any better. BTW - Timmons had a gold medal winning swimmer on his credit list along with Ryun, San Romani, etc.

As to Ryun being trained wrong etc, his kids had more speed but ran 30 seconds slower for the mile. Heck, he ran 4:07.8 in his first year of the mile in 10th grade.

Did they ever run faster than this?

Really if his living in the past kids think they knew any better than why did they fail to run any faster than they did?

Ryun tried many times to run a faster pace and he failed.

His talent was in the last lap kick but he was not good at holding a fast even pace all the way. Every time he tried to do this the doors came off, and this is how Kip Keino destroyed him in Mexico City, 1968. Oh yeah and Liquori, who was not as fast as Ryun, destroyed his kick by extending the kick to two laps.

Ryun ran as fast as he was able to run, and he was not able to run any faster than the times that he ran.

He never would have run any faster than he did, and he didn't.

A small point: JR's first WR mile (at age 19) has been described in this thread--a couple times--as coming off ~2:00 for the half. Not so.

In fact, Ryun's splits were 57.9, 1:55.5, 2:55.3, 3:51.3. His last quarter was 28.0, 28.0.

I never saw his splits for his 3:51.1 mile (the following year). In that one, as I understand it, he *did* run close to 2:00 at the half. But that wasn't true of his first record, which was actually run as a (slight) positive split.

I did get to see him negative-split a race "live." I was in Flagstaff during the summer of 1968 and lived in the same NAU dorm as Ryun. He ran an 880 in one of the all-comers meets they had--was supposed to be paced through ~53 by a local runner, but instead they came through around 55. Whereupon the pacemaker dropped out and JR picked it up to finish in 1:47.9y. This deeply, deeply impressed me. (I had DNF'd in an 880 the week before, having PR'd my quarter en route--man, that quarter felt so easy, then it felt like someone had drained every molecule of oxygen out of that stadium. I couldn't stand up for 20 minutes.)

I also remember, in that same meet as JR's race, watching Nightengale (sp?) run a two-mile (? I think). It was sad. He went out at a decent pace and just completely rigged. I admired him immensely for sticking out that second mile. It must have been complete hell. I ached just to watch him. The only distance rigs that I've ever seen match it have been in actual steeplechases, but this was in a flat race. It hurts just to think about it again. Ow.

It WAS his 2nd record, genius, where he hit the 1/2 in 2 minutes....he led the entire way, too. there is video of it on this web site.

"It WAS his 2nd record, genius, where he hit the 1/2 in 2 minutes."

Thanks. I actually saw that video. But this was the first sentence of my post:

"A small point: JR's first WR mile (at age 19) has been described in this thread--a couple times--as coming off ~2:00 for the half."

In fact, in this thread Living in the Past (I should have known!) made precisely that reference to JR's mile WR *at age 19*--i.e, Ryun's first record. You can check pp. 5 and 12 of the thread, if you want. I was correcting LitP's misstatement.

But I certainly appreciate the "genius" appellation. Thanks.

What exactly was the point of this post?

Yeah, his running story is really fascinating.

the big swede wrote:

thanks for the answer. the physiology aspect of training/racing has always fascinated me. i have always wondered, given the old greek myth of lifting a calf everyday from the time he is born until he is a bull, if a program could be set up over any amount of time utilizing a similar callousing effect to run a sub 4 mile. i.e. start with running 16 x 100 at 15 with whatever rest you needed. then, gradually cutting the rest until the eventual goal is complete. does that even souind feasible?

ha! snacker du svenska?! hansyn med tre, jag forsta. tacksa, och har dag bra...

En sak är säker: du är definitivt inte från Sverige!

Lease, thanks for correcting my error in confusing the first-half split in 1966 for the one in 1967. I should not have relied on just my faulty memory before posting that.