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

Perry: All those races counted. It's only the laziest "fans" who count only the Olympic results to tell them who was "best" in a given era. That's easy when it's the likes of Elliott, Snell, Coe, and so on winning Olympic golds; it's a tad bit harder when it's the likes of Vasala, Rono, and Cacho winning golds. The Olympics is not the only meet that matters. Even a moron knows that Keino was a great talent and, usually, a supremely savvy competitor. However, he ran his share of lazy and dumb races, too. I have no doubt that Keino definitely did learn from his 1966-67 competitions against Ryun to come up with a winning strategy. However, he was greatly aided by factors beyond Ryun's control: the altitude. If that race had been at sea level, Keino's strategy almost certainly would not have worked. So, yes, Keino took advantage of his inherent smarts and the altitude and ran the race of his life. Does that make him a better miler than Ryun overall? Hell, no! For that decision, we have to look at the full record, and Ryun wins that decisively.

lease wrote:

No, Kip Keino has FOUR -- count them -- Olympic Medals and two of them Gold. (Also silver, 5000m 1968 and 1500m 1972.)

you're right ;)

Great post living for the future. I will almost bet its from Mr. Ryun.

Kip Keino may have four Olympic medals but no one that knows anything about running would say that Kip Keino was a better 1500/mile runner than Jim Ryun. Ryun was a world record holder in the event and Keino never came close to setting a world record at those distances. I believe that without Ben Jipcho in the Mexico City race Ryun wins. The pace would have been a heck of a lot slower and there is no way off a pace at just over 4 minute mile pace there is no way Keino outkicks Ryun. Just look at what Ryun ran in his last 400 at Lake Tahoe. It was about 51 flat.

Thanks for the post. I appreciate your comments, but I think you misconstrued mine. I WAS a bit dismissive of the 4:04 miler for several reasons. First, he endorsed another poster's statement that Ryun achieved his potential simply because he set a world record. Huh? I think anyone can see the fallacy in that statement. Look at the examples of runners who have set world records and then broken those world records. Ron Clarke is a good example. Sebastian Coe is another.

Mr. 4:04 also agreed with the other guy that there's a simple choice between setting a world record as early as possible and training for the long term and not getting a world record at all. That's another obvious fallacy.

Mr. 4:04 stated that because life events got in the way after he was 20, he DID realize his potential, which was at 20. But life events getting in the way is another issue altogether. I was raising the question of whether Ryun was overtrained and whether that prevented him from reaching his potential.

And remember, not everyone who trains seriously runs a 4:04 mile. Many of the greatest mile coaches never came close to it. And according to YOUR logic, they should never have gotten involved because they are simply armchair coaches who couldn't possibly understand.

I'm not a mile coach. I'm just a fan of Jim Ryun, and Ryun's failure to improve past the age of 20 is an issue that some people still care about (in other words, his true fans). Someone who runs a 4:04 mile at 20 might have broken 4 minutes at some point. But it's not a question people are going to debate thirty years later.

Jayhawk wrote:

Kip Keino may have four Olympic medals but no one that knows anything about running would say that Kip Keino was a better 1500/mile runner than Jim Ryun.

Kip Keino, Kenya

Olympics 1964 5th place 5000m

Olympics 1968 Silver Medal 5000m

Olympics 1968 Gold Medal 1500m 1968

Olympic Record - 3:34.6

Olympics 1972 Silver Medal 1500m 1972

Olympics 1972 Gold Medal Steeplechase 1972

Olympic Record - 8:23.6

Commonwealth 1966 Gold Medal 1 mile

Commonwealth 1966 Gold Medal 3 miles

Commonwealth 1970 Gold Medal 1 mile

Commonwealth 1970 Bronze Medal 3 miles

World Record 1967 3000m - 7:39.6

Bettered previous record by 6 seconds

Equivalent to 8:16.4 for 2 miles

World Record 1967 5000m - 13:24.2

I believe that without Ben Jipcho in the Mexico City race Ryun wins. The pace would have been a heck of a lot slower and there is no way off a pace at just over 4 minute mile pace there is no way Keino outkicks Ryun. Just look at what Ryun ran in his last 400 at Lake Tahoe. It was about 51 flat.

Gosh you make my arguments for me, as that's exactly what I said previously. Ryun only won against top competition when the race started slowly.

However you make a huge assumption that Keino would have somehow altered his Olympic race and jogged the first lap without Jipcho in the race. It was obvious to me at the time that Keino set out with a determination from the start to run the legs out of Ryun. And that's exactly what he did.

You can't even copy this data out of a book correctly. For the record, Keino's OR was 3:34.9, not 3:34.6, and he set his great 3000 record in 1965, not 1967. There may be more misinformation there, but I'm not going to scan it any more closely than this. Obviously, you don't actually care a bit about the history or what these times and races mean.

Jim Ryun Era

June 1965, AAU National Championships, San Diego, California. In high school, beat world record holder/3 time Olympic champion Peter Snell and clocked a personal best 3:55.3.

June 1966, set a world record at 880 yards: 1:44.9 (superior to the 800 record of the day, 1:44.3). Ryun was 19 years old.

July 1966, Berkley, California. One mile world record of 3:51.3, lowering the mark by 2.3 seconds that was held by Michel Jazy.

June 1967, Bakersfield, California. Runs 3:51.1. Ryun states that this was "one of the easiest races I've ever ran."

July 1967, Los Angeles, California. With his last lap in 53.3 Ryun sets a world record in the 1500 meters of 3:33.1 while defeating Kip Keino.

Perry Mason also refers to Keino's mile and three mile perfomances in 1970. But the Commonwealth Games went metric in 1970! So Perry Mason describes races that never happened.

Yeah, Ryun did say that his 3:51.1 was one of his easiest races ever. I made the same point earlier in this thread: "And as for the 3:51 at the age of 20, Ryun himself said that it felt easy."

But according to "Living in the future," I am not qualified to form any hypotheses about Ryun's career based on this statement, since I merely read it in an article and never ran a 4:04 mile.

To Stig O'Tracy. Mr. Daniels made the point that Ryun did 50x440 at a subthreshold effort, which is aerobic. You talked about a combination of aerobic and threshold for this workout, but the Daniels description allows only for subthreshold.

Now let's think about this 50x440 workout. That amounts to 12.5 miles of starting and stopping at an aerobic effort (assuming that there's no jogging during the rest intervals). You say that this type of running is productive for middle-distance runners. But compared to what? Is this type of aerobic interval training more productive than running continuously for 12.5 miles at an aerobic effort? What's the point of frequent stopping if the effort is entirely aerobic?

Living in the Past wrote:

Perry Mason describes races that never happened.

This shows how great Kip Keino really was!

Thats right wrote:

Great post living for the future. I will almost bet its from Mr. Ryun.

Thanks, glad you liked the post. I want to make it clear that I am not Jim Ryun, though it's nice that my words made you think of someone who is by all accounts such a good person.

drewr,

I hope you didn't take my response to mean your father couldn't hold or sustain a fast pace, the splits from the 3:51.1 illustrate that. He literally run away from a quality field in a brillant display of running. SI back in the day had four pictures of each lap with the time. Given the era I would say that was a fast sustained pace, and uncanny even paced ( No rabbits) one which no doubt was a product of his training.

If I am not mistaken his '72 trials last 1200 was pretty amazing as well.

Faster speeds are actually preferable for mitochondrial development, as long as chronic acidity doesn't result.

A faster pace also normally necessitates quicker stride frequency, which (along with the high volume of running done in the workout) contributes to improved running economy at most speeds, but particularly at speeds near those used most often in training, again as long as chronic acidity is not an outcome.

Another benefit of the faster pace is the greater likelihood of briefly exceeding the lactate threshold on many of the reps, effecting an increase in monocarboxylate transporters (MCTs) - specifically the MCT-1 isoform, which is instrumental in the reuse of lactate as fuel in the "fast twitch oxidative" or Type IIa muscle fibers employed during middle distance running.

Of course, the great risk with high-speed repetition running is that chronic acidity will result. It is extremely easy to abuse a system involving a great deal of moderately fast to very fast speeds. You are correct that this approach is a quick fix. But if you somehow hit on the right speeds for your own talents and can find an adequate recovery scheme, it can be a very good quick fix. This is apparently what happened with Ryun, at least up until the point when his ability to recover was finally exceeded. In fairness, though, most of us, regardless of how we approach things, manage to overtrain at some point in the search to find our limits.

But perhaps he was a precocious athlete who matured quickly as a runner and would have peaked in his early 20s in any event. Having said that, I'm pretty confident Lydiard's program would have allowed him to have a longer career and an even higher peak than he ever actually achieved, had he handled it structurally. But how are we to know if a protocol involving more continuous running at slightly slower speeds would have been a plan Ryun could have withstood from the standpoint of mechanical stress? For Ryun, more running at those slightly slower speeds might have contributed to lazy stride mechanics, longer time spent in the plant phase, slightly more exaggerated knee and ankle flexion, poorer economy across the spectrum of running speeds, and increased risk of injury. There are a few things he could have done to reduce the likelihood of those maladies, but it's unlikely anyone at the time knew about them or how often to incorporate them (one is a conscious attempt to maintain a quick stride frequency even on the slowest runs; another is use of some running drills which promote a short time spent in the plant phase and increase the explosiveness of each footstrike).

The bottom line is that running was still in a more experimental stage in the 1960s. Training an athlete with the phenomenal abilities of a Jim Ryun represented uncharted waters. But history has shown that, at least in the pioneer days, the people without charts have often been the ones who have gotten the farthest. And we can all agree Jim Ryun got pretty far.

Just catching up on the posts. Why did I get mono my senior year of high school? Don't know. Just did. Why did Ned and I never run as fast as dad? We're not Jim Ryun. Never were, never could have been. The only American miler who has ever been on par with dad, in my mind, is Steve Scott. Yes, no WR, nut a faster mile PR, a WC silver.

That's not to say Ned and I didn't try.

I don't think anyone is attempting to say Keino was not fantastic. He was incredible. He was gutsy and dad could always depend on him to make a race interesting. Bottom line, dad always found a way to beat Keino before the 1968 Olympics. Going from 1200, 800, 400-Keino could not find a way to beat dad. And this nonsense that dad could not handle a fast pace from the gun-in his 3:51.3, he went through the 880 at 1:55. Covert that to meters and that's as fast or faster than the 68 final. Pulled hamstring and mono aside, at sea level, I have no reason to think he would not have beaten Keino at sea level.

Nor do I think that the Kenyans would have beaten George Young in the steeple.

2 things that got missed/unasnwered from my post earlier:

1. Jim got sick the winter after his first HS season- no running. Then he comes out and blazes the 4:10. What was that illness?

2. I have read that Jim was later diagnosed with asthma- the root of his allergies. That would be a severe limitation on any improvement in his career, especially if undiagnosed.

MarathonMind wrote:

2. I have read that Jim was later diagnosed with asthma- the root of his allergies. That would be a severe limitation on any improvement in his career, especially if undiagnosed.

While I agree with the point in your second sentence, from my experience, the asthma-allergy cause and effect is reversed. I have plenty of allergies as well as asthma that is triggered by both exercise (EIA) and allergies. AFAIK, allergies generally trigger, and sometimes cause, asthma, not the other way around. Regardless, to run that well under such a handicap is even more exceptional.

This has been a wonderful thread to read, with a few posts that are ignorable exceptions.

I have asthma and know that the allergies generally cause/exacerabte the asthma, so I meant that but it came across wrong. Regarding Ryun, according to something I just read, he WAS diagnosed in high school, but the treatment back then was fairly primitive. I can't believe that whatever therapy was available to Ryun could have gotten his breathing to 100%, so again, I have to think that it was a significant limitation. As an example of how debilitating and serious Ryun's condition was, he nearly passed out after the 1500 final in Mexico City- not being able to breathe at all. He does attribute that to the altitude and air pollution, but this sort of crisis is not unknown to athletes with asthma- you think you are 100%, but not until you engage in full exertion, does the underlying fact that you have compromised lung function become evident.

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