She didn't just move home. She also started thinking about her training less and talking to friends and family about normal everyday things. I started doing this yesterday and feel faster already. Right now I'm thinking about inhaling helium and playing charades with my people, and I don't care at all how my run goes today.
This summer there was A LOT of discussion as to how Hull could have improved so much. She explains here:
“I had got so in the zone in the US that I couldn’t switch off between training sessions. If training didn’t go well, I would sit there and overthink things like being half a second slow on a split and what I needed to do to get better,” Hull said.
“It was really hard to leave training at the track because running was the reason I was there.
“Once I came home, I noticed I was able to do the track session and just move on because I was around my people and we talk about things outside of the running world.”
David Moorcroft broke the 5000m world record by five seconds when he was 29. It appears to have been a 20-second PB over a little more than 3 miles, versus 7 seconds over a little more than 1 mile. Granted he was primarily a miler. Had run a few 5000s but you could argue that he hadn’t gone all out until that race. Is that not even more extreme an improvement?
It says a lot when you have to go back over four decades until 1982 for a proper comparison (with someone who may have doped or who may have been clean, what with the complete lack of ooc testing and legal blood transfusions until 1985).
Moorcroft's 13:00 was also an extreme outlier - he never went under 13:20 before or after 1982. Hull's next years will be very interesting.