There are multiple factors besides the shoes (which probably are worth a few seconds). Anyone who ran in the late 80s/early 90s can tell you that almost everything has changed in high school distance running since back then, leading to dramatically improved results. Nobody could tell you which of the factors is more important than the other:
1) Better middle school programs, leading to more runners who are in their 5th, 6th, 10th, etc year of training when they are a senior vs someone like myself who was in my 3rd year of running as a senior.
2) People training all year round rather than taking the summer/winter off, or doing other sports.
3) Widely available information about how to train. Less people playing the lottery of whether their high school coach knows what they're doing (most don't).
4) Better nutrition, physical therapy, etc helping to improve recovery
5) The death of the "no pain, no gain" mentality. My child's team has one the state record holder in the mile. Most of his workouts would have been light for me (I was 10-15 seconds slower than this kid). Kids are smarter and aren't trying to crush every interval workout or long run.
6) Better competition. At the very top where all these sub 4 guys are, they have more opportunities to race people at their level. When I was just a mere 4:20 guy, I had 2-3 races a year where I had someone sub 4:40 to race against, and usually just 1 or 2 guys so there wasn't a big herd effect like Arcadia.
7) Mentality. When sub 4 has become an annual thing, the top guys are aiming for it and taking their shot. They aren't running 4:03 and thinking "that's good enough"
8) Super shoes, tracks, bicarb, Association. These things help take a few seconds off, so a 4:02 - 4:03 guy back in the 90s would be sub 4 today if they pulled out all the stops.
Because it happens incrementally, people don't seem to be aware how much the spread of knowledge and the sharing of information is rapidly transforming the scene. In my city, most of the top kids are still training and racing mostly incorrectly. You see a lot of very bad pacing during races, some people massively overrating, etc. There are a lot of things that can be optimized. Each year there is improvement and knowledge is spreading around. The level of competition is improving fast.
1) Any advantage gained from starting in middle school compared to in HS will be gone by the start of the junior year. I seriously doubt guys like Ryun and Fernandez would have been any better had they started in 7th grade. People go on and on about Ingebrigtsen training llke a pro at age 11, but I think he would be just as good had he started at 14 or 15.
2) Serious high school have always trained year around. Probably even more so than now. It would been ridiculous to think you could reach your potential without running during the summer and winter. When I ran road races during the offseasons,there were always many HS guys from other schools competing.
3) Even before the internet, runners were aware of the training of elite HS runners. There were articles in RW and other periodicals that contained details. Coaches would talk to other coaches about training and the runners did as well.
4) Good nutrition was invented long ago. I don’t know about physical therapy. Who would pay for it?
5) I don’t think “no pain, no gain” was ever a universal philosophy for running. It was hard/easy and people ran by feel for interval workouts. I didn’t hear too many stories about coaches barking at runners to run faster.
6) Running against faster runners won’t result in outrunning potential. If you, as a mere 4:20 guy, had run against a 4:10 or faster runner, you would have suffered a massive positive split.
7) Mentality doesn’t trump ability and training. I’m not sure any serious runner has said or thought that a certain time is good enough. Everyone wants to improve. If your 4:03 runner really is a 4:03 runner, shooting for 4:00 will backfire.
8) The effects of the shoes, etc,are an unknown.
You estimate the benefit from the new shoes to be 2-3 seconds. How many more seconds does what you mentioned in your 1-7, provide.
1. Total bunk. It takes years to fully develop aerobic endurance. Sure there are people like Ryun and Fernandez who reach extreme levels of fitness quickly. But most people keep making gains all the way through college. If you start a few years earlier, you're going to be farther along by your senior year.
2. I didn't train in the winter. I still ran 4:20. A lot of other people I knew did some other sport and didn't run, and ran about 4:20. I don't know what the winter training is worth, but definitely worth something. My coach told me to rest in the winter (he was retarded but he also got me from 5:10 to 4:20 in 3 years so I trusted him completely). My daughter is a high level runner now, and a lot of her competition is taking huge chunks of time off in both the summer and winter, so it's far from universal that kids are all training year round. But more of them are doing it now than back when I ran.
3. Runners World was worse than useless for details when I was running, at best you'd see a week of some elite runner's training and probably while they were tapering so it looked like Bob Kennedy was running 13:00 while running 25 miles a week. You cannot seriously compare the wealth of information we have today with what was available in the 90s.
4. People are more aware about nutrition today than before. Physical therapy has simply improved because science has improved in the last 20, 30, 40 years. We've made incredible breakthroughs in sports medicine over that period of time. Might be a small effect, but it's something.
5. You obviously did not run in the 80s/90s. It was all about how fast you could blast that set of 400s. I ran at a top PAC10 school: every single run sub 6:00 pace, coach yelling at me for looking at my watch while getting smoked in an interval workout where I was running way over my head. Most of the team was injured for a good part of the year and the rest were overtrained. Nobody improved there.
6. Why does anybody bother traveling to Arcadia then? Why not just take your sub 4:00 shot at the home dual meet? I can't take you seriously when you make a statement like this. How many of the multitude of sub 9:00 Arcadia guys ever ran that performance under different conditions? It's certainly possible to but you can't deny that getting into a pack running a fast time is a performance enhancer. If nothing else because the pacing is usually better.
7. I'll meet you halfway here and agree, but at the same time, you'll never run sub 4:00 if you don't try to do it. People surprise themselves all the time. If you run 4:03 and then shut down your season instead of taking another shot at it, you're not gonna find out if you can run sub 4:00.
8. The effects of all of these factors are an unknown. Hence why I listed them and said we can't attribute the vast improvement in our distance running performances to any one thing.
I think the shoes might be worth a second a lap but it's really unknown. We haven't seen a 12 second improvement in the men's 5000m WR since they came out (but we're not in the full EPO era either so...). Can't tell you what 1-7 are worth because it's all dependent on the individual. If you were already training year round, you gain nothing there. If you weren't, obviously you get a lot better. When you sum these effects up across all the people, the effect is a higher average performance level, which is exactly what we're seeing.
The TLDR of my entire argument is that "it isn't just the shoes".
Smaller family sizes. With 1 kid, more parents can afford to dedicate more resources on higher-level goods (coaching, PT/medical consultation, high-end meets, etc.) that used to be split between 2-3 kids or more. With 2 kids, you can spend 50% more on your kids' hobbies than you can with 3 kids. Coupled with rising standards of living, that means teenagers can spend less time on after-school jobs and more time on leisure pursuits like competitive running.
If you remove Webb, there were 0 HS sub 4 miles from 1967-2011 (44 year period). Then from 2011-2020 (9 year period, pre-super shoes) there were 7 HS sub 4 miles. So I think we need to ask what technological innovation was introduced in 2011!
Blahahahaaaa! Bruh, did you start following track yesterday!? There were more us hs sub 4s in 2023/24 (8) than there were from 2011-2020. There have been more us hs sub 4 runners in the last 4 years than the previous 66 years combined. 7 runners have done in just this year alone! ZERO runners ran sub 4 in 2018/19. Then from 2020-25 you have 21! 21 HS runs have run sub 4 since 2020.
How do you explain the top 3 1500m on the 1500m list being unchanged? If super shoes account for 4-5 seconds, El G was a 3:21-3:22 1500m runner 25 years ago.
The shoe shoes argument breaks down as soon as you start adding backwards compatibility.
Michael Slagowski and Lukas Verzbicas also did it against hs only competition
Verzbicas had a pacer though. Not sure if Slagowski did. Did Gary have one? I know in Jim's case he ran solo from the front in his 3:58.3 HS only race. No pacers or even competition. Dirt track too.
Yes, thank you. People who say "it's just the shoes!!!" are intellectually lazy
'Silly point' sorry but you're losing this argument lol. Nothing happened in 2011. Why are you asking about 2011?
Yes there was a decades long gap of no sub-4 runners, and then Webb, and then 10 more years until the next one, and then a few more years until the next one. Last decade it became more common for a HS runner to go sub-4. And then super shoes came along and changed things completely. Last decade doesn't even remotely compare to what super shoes have wrought the past few years. Night and day between pre-super shoes and post-super shoes.
Obviously we can argue over why HSers started breaking for again last decade (like Webb showing that it was possible so the kids who were hearing about Webb's legend when they started running later the decade began thinking they could do it too, also training improved remember 90s American training was considered pretty bad).
But the main point is that regardless of the amount of sub-4s pre-super shoes, super shoes completely changed things. Last decade was nothing compared to the number of sub-4's in the world of super shoes. I don't see why you're trying to talk about some change in 2011 and downplay super shoes, when super shoes are very obviously what has suddenly made multiple sub-4s every year the norm.
Pre-super shoes most years were no sub-4s, some years were one sub-4, one year was two sub-4's. In the past 4 years there have been 18 sub-4 HSers. 18 out of 30 total sub-4 HSers have happened in four years. We allllllll (even you) know what the change has been: super shoes.
So no, nothing changed in 2011, but super shoes completely changed the game in the 2020s. As of this decade suddenly people who would have been a few seconds off sub-4 are now breaking it thanks to super shoes. If super shoes were around in 2001 Webb might have gone 3:50, and there would have been 4 other guys getting real close to 3:59 (Hall, Ritz, and the Jefferson twins). That's the difference.
Between training improving and whatever else that happened this century that led to sub-4 becoming a regular thing, and super shoes - super shoes has had a way larger effect. Whereas there was no change that happened specifically in 2011, especially given that the next 3 years after 2011 had zero sub-4s.
Back in the day, good runners ended their season after the State meet and if there was a super talent, they would run one grown up race post State meet. Now there are multiple opportunies for the best HS runners around the country to compete against the other best HS runners and it has become the real focus of their season. This new level of competition didn't exist 30 years ago and now runners are training for the higher level of competition.
Good thing it was a full mile and not that pesky 3/4 mile.
On LRC, mile has two meanings; what it says, or 1600m. The results website referred to the race as “1 Mile” so I guess the OP emailed race officials to determine if it was a “full” mile.
No it doesn't. No one calls a 1600 a mile. A mile is a mile. That's it.
I might not change your mind, but I encourage you and others to look into analytics of modern training.
Do high school athletes / their coaches keep a detailed record of workout logs - reps and workouts performed with & WITHOUT super shoes, alike?
and perhaps, hill sprints and hill training, which I presume would benefit less from super shoes?
How about ergometer machine, cardio machine, and other forms of tracking performance output - how do the athletes of today compare to 5-10 years ago?
if we look at all of these things, we can get a better idea of how much the shoes are contributing directly to times
I don't know how old you are - but as an old guy, I can assure we kept super detail logs to the second of every run, conditions, shoes, etc. It was just handwritten in little books, not online.
There are multiple factors besides the shoes (which probably are worth a few seconds). Anyone who ran in the late 80s/early 90s can tell you that almost everything has changed in high school distance running since back then, leading to dramatically improved results. Nobody could tell you which of the factors is more important than the other:
1) Better middle school programs, leading to more runners who are in their 5th, 6th, 10th, etc year of training when they are a senior vs someone like myself who was in my 3rd year of running as a senior.
2) People training all year round rather than taking the summer/winter off, or doing other sports.
3) Widely available information about how to train. Less people playing the lottery of whether their high school coach knows what they're doing (most don't).
4) Better nutrition, physical therapy, etc helping to improve recovery
5) The death of the "no pain, no gain" mentality. My child's team has one the state record holder in the mile. Most of his workouts would have been light for me (I was 10-15 seconds slower than this kid). Kids are smarter and aren't trying to crush every interval workout or long run.
6) Better competition. At the very top where all these sub 4 guys are, they have more opportunities to race people at their level. When I was just a mere 4:20 guy, I had 2-3 races a year where I had someone sub 4:40 to race against, and usually just 1 or 2 guys so there wasn't a big herd effect like Arcadia.
7) Mentality. When sub 4 has become an annual thing, the top guys are aiming for it and taking their shot. They aren't running 4:03 and thinking "that's good enough"
8) Super shoes, tracks, bicarb, etc. These things help take a few seconds off, so a 4:02 - 4:03 guy back in the 90s would be sub 4 today if they pulled out all the stops.
Because it happens incrementally, people don't seem to be aware how much the spread of knowledge and the sharing of information is rapidly transforming the scene. In my city, most of the top kids are still training and racing mostly incorrectly. You see a lot of very bad pacing during races, some people massively overrating, etc. There are a lot of things that can be optimized. Each year there is improvement and knowledge is spreading around. The level of competition is improving fast.
You also have increased competition to get into (top) colleges and money to be made from running in college and even HS with NIL. If you don't think that incentivizes doping (especially since they're never tested OOC) I have a bridge to sell you.
El G was doped to his eyeballs just like every other East and North African at the time.
There are people on LRC that believe all of the American elite runners are cheating and even some of the high schools ones. The there’s no reason to believe the current East Africans are cheating any less than those from El Guerrouj’s time.
The problem with doping accusations is that we don’t know for a fact that El G was doping or how much it would have helped him. Visibly, he was extremely talented,
Yes, thank you. People who say "it's just the shoes!!!" are intellectually lazy
'Silly point' sorry but you're losing this argument lol. Nothing happened in 2011. Why are you asking about 2011?
Yes there was a decades long gap of no sub-4 runners, and then Webb, and then 10 more years until the next one, and then a few more years until the next one. Last decade it became more common for a HS runner to go sub-4. And then super shoes came along and changed things completely. Last decade doesn't even remotely compare to what super shoes have wrought the past few years. Night and day between pre-super shoes and post-super shoes.
Obviously we can argue over why HSers started breaking for again last decade (like Webb showing that it was possible so the kids who were hearing about Webb's legend when they started running later the decade began thinking they could do it too, also training improved remember 90s American training was considered pretty bad).
But the main point is that regardless of the amount of sub-4s pre-super shoes, super shoes completely changed things. Last decade was nothing compared to the number of sub-4's in the world of super shoes. I don't see why you're trying to talk about some change in 2011 and downplay super shoes, when super shoes are very obviously what has suddenly made multiple sub-4s every year the norm.
Pre-super shoes most years were no sub-4s, some years were one sub-4, one year was two sub-4's. In the past 4 years there have been 18 sub-4 HSers. 18 out of 30 total sub-4 HSers have happened in four years. We allllllll (even you) know what the change has been: super shoes.
So no, nothing changed in 2011, but super shoes completely changed the game in the 2020s. As of this decade suddenly people who would have been a few seconds off sub-4 are now breaking it thanks to super shoes. If super shoes were around in 2001 Webb might have gone 3:50, and there would have been 4 other guys getting real close to 3:59 (Hall, Ritz, and the Jefferson twins). That's the difference.
Between training improving and whatever else that happened this century that led to sub-4 becoming a regular thing, and super shoes - super shoes has had a way larger effect. Whereas there was no change that happened specifically in 2011, especially given that the next 3 years after 2011 had zero sub-4s.
Many people think that today's US runners are the same as runners from the 90s or early 2000s, the only difference is that runners today have super shoes. My contention is that this is false. Today's US runners are BETTER than their counterparts from earlier eras. This is due to better training, better competition, and a compounding effect of this higher bar.
This compounding began (slowly) in 2011, which is why we then saw MORE sub 4s in a single decade than we had EVER seen in the previous 50 years combined. How can you possibly deny that things kicked off in 2011? That's just ignoring the data to fit your narrative. Then, super shoes poured gasoline on the fire.
Yes, today's US runners are BETTER than earlier US runners, except for a few outliers like Webb or Ryun. Regardless of shoes, Grant Fisher is the best US distance runner of all time. You give any of the old guys super shoes, and they would not beat Grant Fisher.
People with nostalgia glasses just come up with this super shoe excuse to discredit the hard work and (importantly) intelligence that kids today are training with. We have progressed. Super shoes are a small part of this progression.
Smaller family sizes. With 1 kid, more parents can afford to dedicate more resources on higher-level goods (coaching, PT/medical consultation, high-end meets, etc.) that used to be split between 2-3 kids or more. With 2 kids, you can spend 50% more on your kids' hobbies than you can with 3 kids. Coupled with rising standards of living, that means teenagers can spend less time on after-school jobs and more time on leisure pursuits like competitive running.
The Youngs did okay with three of their brood; the Ingebrigtsens even better with three of seven or eight.
Smaller family sizes. With 1 kid, more parents can afford to dedicate more resources on higher-level goods (coaching, PT/medical consultation, high-end meets, etc.) that used to be split between 2-3 kids or more. With 2 kids, you can spend 50% more on your kids' hobbies than you can with 3 kids. Coupled with rising standards of living, that means teenagers can spend less time on after-school jobs and more time on leisure pursuits like competitive running.
Competitive running is a leisure sport? Is that exclusive to distance running or does it cover all HS sports?
For most parents, their contribution is buying shoes and very few or paying for PT/medical consultation. The default is that the runners will stay healthy throughout HS so why would consultants be needed? When I was in HS, probably than less than 10% of the student population had part-time jobs and I believe that most parents were happy to have their children compete in a sport and did not want them to work.
El G was doped to his eyeballs just like every other East and North African at the time.
There are people on LRC that believe all of the American elite runners are cheating and even some of the high schools ones. The there’s no reason to believe the current East Africans are cheating any less than those from El Guerrouj’s time.
The problem with doping accusations is that we don’t know for a fact that El G was doping or how much it would have helped him. Visibly, he was extremely talented,
El G was the poster child of the epo era. For those that followed his career in real time, it's known that his era was an anything goes time for doping. There was no test for epo until approx. sydney olympics. We have had various other doping trends since then, but from about 1995 to 2000 we had some mind blowing performances that were not repeated for quite a while. But it is true, there have been a few more doping blips since then.
1) Any advantage gained from starting in middle school compared to in HS will be gone by the start of the junior year. I seriously doubt guys like Ryun and Fernandez would have been any better had they started in 7th grade. People go on and on about Ingebrigtsen training llke a pro at age 11, but I think he would be just as good had he started at 14 or 15.
2) Serious high school have always trained year around. Probably even more so than now. It would been ridiculous to think you could reach your potential without running during the summer and winter. When I ran road races during the offseasons,there were always many HS guys from other schools competing.
3) Even before the internet, runners were aware of the training of elite HS runners. There were articles in RW and other periodicals that contained details. Coaches would talk to other coaches about training and the runners did as well.
4) Good nutrition was invented long ago. I don’t know about physical therapy. Who would pay for it?
5) I don’t think “no pain, no gain” was ever a universal philosophy for running. It was hard/easy and people ran by feel for interval workouts. I didn’t hear too many stories about coaches barking at runners to run faster.
6) Running against faster runners won’t result in outrunning potential. If you, as a mere 4:20 guy, had run against a 4:10 or faster runner, you would have suffered a massive positive split.
7) Mentality doesn’t trump ability and training. I’m not sure any serious runner has said or thought that a certain time is good enough. Everyone wants to improve. If your 4:03 runner really is a 4:03 runner, shooting for 4:00 will backfire.
8) The effects of the shoes, etc,are an unknown.
You estimate the benefit from the new shoes to be 2-3 seconds. How many more seconds does what you mentioned in your 1-7, provide.
1. Total bunk. It takes years to fully develop aerobic endurance. Sure there are people like Ryun and Fernandez who reach extreme levels of fitness quickly. But most people keep making gains all the way through college. If you start a few years earlier, you're going to be farther along by your senior year.
2. I didn't train in the winter. I still ran 4:20. A lot of other people I knew did some other sport and didn't run, and ran about 4:20. I don't know what the winter training is worth, but definitely worth something. My coach told me to rest in the winter (he was retarded but he also got me from 5:10 to 4:20 in 3 years so I trusted him completely). My daughter is a high level runner now, and a lot of her competition is taking huge chunks of time off in both the summer and winter, so it's far from universal that kids are all training year round. But more of them are doing it now than back when I ran.
3. Runners World was worse than useless for details when I was running, at best you'd see a week of some elite runner's training and probably while they were tapering so it looked like Bob Kennedy was running 13:00 while running 25 miles a week. You cannot seriously compare the wealth of information we have today with what was available in the 90s.
4. People are more aware about nutrition today than before. Physical therapy has simply improved because science has improved in the last 20, 30, 40 years. We've made incredible breakthroughs in sports medicine over that period of time. Might be a small effect, but it's something.
5. You obviously did not run in the 80s/90s. It was all about how fast you could blast that set of 400s. I ran at a top PAC10 school: every single run sub 6:00 pace, coach yelling at me for looking at my watch while getting smoked in an interval workout where I was running way over my head. Most of the team was injured for a good part of the year and the rest were overtrained. Nobody improved there.
6. Why does anybody bother traveling to Arcadia then? Why not just take your sub 4:00 shot at the home dual meet? I can't take you seriously when you make a statement like this. How many of the multitude of sub 9:00 Arcadia guys ever ran that performance under different conditions? It's certainly possible to but you can't deny that getting into a pack running a fast time is a performance enhancer. If nothing else because the pacing is usually better.
7. I'll meet you halfway here and agree, but at the same time, you'll never run sub 4:00 if you don't try to do it. People surprise themselves all the time. If you run 4:03 and then shut down your season instead of taking another shot at it, you're not gonna find out if you can run sub 4:00.
8. The effects of all of these factors are an unknown. Hence why I listed them and said we can't attribute the vast improvement in our distance running performances to any one thing.
I think the shoes might be worth a second a lap but it's really unknown. We haven't seen a 12 second improvement in the men's 5000m WR since they came out (but we're not in the full EPO era either so...). Can't tell you what 1-7 are worth because it's all dependent on the individual. If you were already training year round, you gain nothing there. If you weren't, obviously you get a lot better. When you sum these effects up across all the people, the effect is a higher average performance level, which is exactly what we're seeing.
The TLDR of my entire argument is that "it isn't just the shoes".
When did you run? I grew up in the 70s. Everyone in my club ran year round - from HS kids to masters runners - perhaps you don't recall the marathon and road running boom back then? Look at marathon depth charts from the 70s - a ton of non elite runners breaking three hours mostly through lots of consistency and miles.
Actual coaches were not relying on runner's world for their coaching education. I totally agree we are more sophisticated when it comes to running science, but we were also pretty sophisticated in 2015 - yet the big jump has only happened since super shoes showed up.
Physical therapy is no different than it was in the 70s - stretch strengthen ice rest recover. It hasn't changed. Lots of voodoo science out there, but that for sure isn't turning 4:10 kids into sub fours.
We may know more about nutrition, but I am pretty sure we aren't seeing that trickle down to the 4:10 HS miler level in large doses. If anything we have more sugar, more fat, and more processed food than ever in our diets.
Let's not overlook COVID. We had a few years with no doping control at all, coupled with runners being able to focus solely on big training blocks (i.e. not peaking all the time for various meets), coupled with super shoes. Put that all together and you have a pretty simple recipe for an explosion of PRs.
1) Any advantage gained from starting in middle school compared to in HS will be gone by the start of the junior year. I seriously doubt guys like Ryun and Fernandez would have been any better had they started in 7th grade. People go on and on about Ingebrigtsen training llke a pro at age 11, but I think he would be just as good had he started at 14 or 15.
2) Serious high school have always trained year around. Probably even more so than now. It would been ridiculous to think you could reach your potential without running during the summer and winter. When I ran road races during the offseasons,there were always many HS guys from other schools competing.
3) Even before the internet, runners were aware of the training of elite HS runners. There were articles in RW and other periodicals that contained details. Coaches would talk to other coaches about training and the runners did as well.
4) Good nutrition was invented long ago. I don’t know about physical therapy. Who would pay for it?
5) I don’t think “no pain, no gain” was ever a universal philosophy for running. It was hard/easy and people ran by feel for interval workouts. I didn’t hear too many stories about coaches barking at runners to run faster.
6) Running against faster runners won’t result in outrunning potential. If you, as a mere 4:20 guy, had run against a 4:10 or faster runner, you would have suffered a massive positive split.
7) Mentality doesn’t trump ability and training. I’m not sure any serious runner has said or thought that a certain time is good enough. Everyone wants to improve. If your 4:03 runner really is a 4:03 runner, shooting for 4:00 will backfire.
8) The effects of the shoes, etc,are an unknown.
You estimate the benefit from the new shoes to be 2-3 seconds. How many more seconds does what you mentioned in your 1-7, provide.
1. Total bunk. It takes years to fully develop aerobic endurance. Sure there are people like Ryun and Fernandez who reach extreme levels of fitness quickly. But most people keep making gains all the way through college. If you start a few years earlier, you're going to be farther along by your senior year.
2. I didn't train in the winter. I still ran 4:20. A lot of other people I knew did some other sport and didn't run, and ran about 4:20. I don't know what the winter training is worth, but definitely worth something. My coach told me to rest in the winter (he was retarded but he also got me from 5:10 to 4:20 in 3 years so I trusted him completely). My daughter is a high level runner now, and a lot of her competition is taking huge chunks of time off in both the summer and winter, so it's far from universal that kids are all training year round. But more of them are doing it now than back when I ran.
3. Runners World was worse than useless for details when I was running, at best you'd see a week of some elite runner's training and probably while they were tapering so it looked like Bob Kennedy was running 13:00 while running 25 miles a week. You cannot seriously compare the wealth of information we have today with what was available in the 90s.
4. People are more aware about nutrition today than before. Physical therapy has simply improved because science has improved in the last 20, 30, 40 years. We've made incredible breakthroughs in sports medicine over that period of time. Might be a small effect, but it's something.
5. You obviously did not run in the 80s/90s. It was all about how fast you could blast that set of 400s. I ran at a top PAC10 school: every single run sub 6:00 pace, coach yelling at me for looking at my watch while getting smoked in an interval workout where I was running way over my head. Most of the team was injured for a good part of the year and the rest were overtrained. Nobody improved there.
6. Why does anybody bother traveling to Arcadia then? Why not just take your sub 4:00 shot at the home dual meet? I can't take you seriously when you make a statement like this. How many of the multitude of sub 9:00 Arcadia guys ever ran that performance under different conditions? It's certainly possible to but you can't deny that getting into a pack running a fast time is a performance enhancer. If nothing else because the pacing is usually better.
7. I'll meet you halfway here and agree, but at the same time, you'll never run sub 4:00 if you don't try to do it. People surprise themselves all the time. If you run 4:03 and then shut down your season instead of taking another shot at it, you're not gonna find out if you can run sub 4:00.
8. The effects of all of these factors are an unknown. Hence why I listed them and said we can't attribute the vast improvement in our distance running performances to any one thing.
I think the shoes might be worth a second a lap but it's really unknown. We haven't seen a 12 second improvement in the men's 5000m WR since they came out (but we're not in the full EPO era either so...). Can't tell you what 1-7 are worth because it's all dependent on the individual. If you were already training year round, you gain nothing there. If you weren't, obviously you get a lot better. When you sum these effects up across all the people, the effect is a higher average performance level, which is exactly what we're seeing.
The TLDR of my entire argument is that "it isn't just the shoes".
Claiming 1 second per lap is very aggressive and results in some crazy times for what past runners could have run. Again, if it results in that much of an improvement, the total effect for 1-7 is zilch.
To pick two at random, why would you not run year around? Were you isolated from the history of the sport? it would seem like common sense that you would consider a conditioning sport to be a year around endeavor. If my coach told me shut it down, I would thought he was nuts and ran however much I wanted to.
How do you know the early start matters? Hocker, Nuguse, Kessler and many others did not run seriously before HS.
1) Any advantage gained from starting in middle school compared to in HS will be gone by the start of the junior year. I seriously doubt guys like Ryun and Fernandez would have been any better had they started in 7th grade. People go on and on about Ingebrigtsen training llke a pro at age 11, but I think he would be just as good had he started at 14 or 15.
2) Serious high school have always trained year around. Probably even more so than now. It would been ridiculous to think you could reach your potential without running during the summer and winter. When I ran road races during the offseasons,there were always many HS guys from other schools competing.
3) Even before the internet, runners were aware of the training of elite HS runners. There were articles in RW and other periodicals that contained details. Coaches would talk to other coaches about training and the runners did as well.
4) Good nutrition was invented long ago. I don’t know about physical therapy. Who would pay for it?
5) I don’t think “no pain, no gain” was ever a universal philosophy for running. It was hard/easy and people ran by feel for interval workouts. I didn’t hear too many stories about coaches barking at runners to run faster.
6) Running against faster runners won’t result in outrunning potential. If you, as a mere 4:20 guy, had run against a 4:10 or faster runner, you would have suffered a massive positive split.
7) Mentality doesn’t trump ability and training. I’m not sure any serious runner has said or thought that a certain time is good enough. Everyone wants to improve. If your 4:03 runner really is a 4:03 runner, shooting for 4:00 will backfire.
8) The effects of the shoes, etc,are an unknown.
You estimate the benefit from the new shoes to be 2-3 seconds. How many more seconds does what you mentioned in your 1-7, provide.
1. Total bunk. It takes years to fully develop aerobic endurance. Sure there are people like Ryun and Fernandez who reach extreme levels of fitness quickly. But most people keep making gains all the way through college. If you start a few years earlier, you're going to be farther along by your senior year.
2. I didn't train in the winter. I still ran 4:20. A lot of other people I knew did some other sport and didn't run, and ran about 4:20. I don't know what the winter training is worth, but definitely worth something. My coach told me to rest in the winter (he was retarded but he also got me from 5:10 to 4:20 in 3 years so I trusted him completely). My daughter is a high level runner now, and a lot of her competition is taking huge chunks of time off in both the summer and winter, so it's far from universal that kids are all training year round. But more of them are doing it now than back when I ran.
3. Runners World was worse than useless for details when I was running, at best you'd see a week of some elite runner's training and probably while they were tapering so it looked like Bob Kennedy was running 13:00 while running 25 miles a week. You cannot seriously compare the wealth of information we have today with what was available in the 90s.
4. People are more aware about nutrition today than before. Physical therapy has simply improved because science has improved in the last 20, 30, 40 years. We've made incredible breakthroughs in sports medicine over that period of time. Might be a small effect, but it's something.
5. You obviously did not run in the 80s/90s. It was all about how fast you could blast that set of 400s. I ran at a top PAC10 school: every single run sub 6:00 pace, coach yelling at me for looking at my watch while getting smoked in an interval workout where I was running way over my head. Most of the team was injured for a good part of the year and the rest were overtrained. Nobody improved there.
6. Why does anybody bother traveling to Arcadia then? Why not just take your sub 4:00 shot at the home dual meet? I can't take you seriously when you make a statement like this. How many of the multitude of sub 9:00 Arcadia guys ever ran that performance under different conditions? It's certainly possible to but you can't deny that getting into a pack running a fast time is a performance enhancer. If nothing else because the pacing is usually better.
7. I'll meet you halfway here and agree, but at the same time, you'll never run sub 4:00 if you don't try to do it. People surprise themselves all the time. If you run 4:03 and then shut down your season instead of taking another shot at it, you're not gonna find out if you can run sub 4:00.
8. The effects of all of these factors are an unknown. Hence why I listed them and said we can't attribute the vast improvement in our distance running performances to any one thing.
I think the shoes might be worth a second a lap but it's really unknown. We haven't seen a 12 second improvement in the men's 5000m WR since they came out (but we're not in the full EPO era either so...). Can't tell you what 1-7 are worth because it's all dependent on the individual. If you were already training year round, you gain nothing there. If you weren't, obviously you get a lot better. When you sum these effects up across all the people, the effect is a higher average performance level, which is exactly what we're seeing.
The TLDR of my entire argument is that "it isn't just the shoes".
Your posts are 100% on the money.
I'll offer this:
We set 4:00 as a somewhat arbitrary time to cut off those who do and those who do not. But if we instead consider the whole bell curve of runners and their best times, your list tells us why the whole bell is shifting to the right. So, there are more guys running sub 5:00, and sub 4:30, and sub 4:10, and sub 4:05, and the very right tail of the distribution pushes into the sub-4:00 zone.
Then, when we consider that tiny part of the distribution that pushes close to 4:05 and faster, and THEN add the variable of super shoes, we get more sub-4:00 runners.
But it can't be explained just by "the shoes." It is the totality of the variables, each contributing some degree or another, and moving the entire distribution to the right. Then you add the shoes fairly recently and we see what we are now seeing.
1. Total bunk. It takes years to fully develop aerobic endurance. Sure there are people like Ryun and Fernandez who reach extreme levels of fitness quickly. But most people keep making gains all the way through college. If you start a few years earlier, you're going to be farther along by your senior year.
2. I didn't train in the winter. I still ran 4:20. A lot of other people I knew did some other sport and didn't run, and ran about 4:20. I don't know what the winter training is worth, but definitely worth something. My coach told me to rest in the winter (he was retarded but he also got me from 5:10 to 4:20 in 3 years so I trusted him completely). My daughter is a high level runner now, and a lot of her competition is taking huge chunks of time off in both the summer and winter, so it's far from universal that kids are all training year round. But more of them are doing it now than back when I ran.
3. Runners World was worse than useless for details when I was running, at best you'd see a week of some elite runner's training and probably while they were tapering so it looked like Bob Kennedy was running 13:00 while running 25 miles a week. You cannot seriously compare the wealth of information we have today with what was available in the 90s.
4. People are more aware about nutrition today than before. Physical therapy has simply improved because science has improved in the last 20, 30, 40 years. We've made incredible breakthroughs in sports medicine over that period of time. Might be a small effect, but it's something.
5. You obviously did not run in the 80s/90s. It was all about how fast you could blast that set of 400s. I ran at a top PAC10 school: every single run sub 6:00 pace, coach yelling at me for looking at my watch while getting smoked in an interval workout where I was running way over my head. Most of the team was injured for a good part of the year and the rest were overtrained. Nobody improved there.
6. Why does anybody bother traveling to Arcadia then? Why not just take your sub 4:00 shot at the home dual meet? I can't take you seriously when you make a statement like this. How many of the multitude of sub 9:00 Arcadia guys ever ran that performance under different conditions? It's certainly possible to but you can't deny that getting into a pack running a fast time is a performance enhancer. If nothing else because the pacing is usually better.
7. I'll meet you halfway here and agree, but at the same time, you'll never run sub 4:00 if you don't try to do it. People surprise themselves all the time. If you run 4:03 and then shut down your season instead of taking another shot at it, you're not gonna find out if you can run sub 4:00.
8. The effects of all of these factors are an unknown. Hence why I listed them and said we can't attribute the vast improvement in our distance running performances to any one thing.
I think the shoes might be worth a second a lap but it's really unknown. We haven't seen a 12 second improvement in the men's 5000m WR since they came out (but we're not in the full EPO era either so...). Can't tell you what 1-7 are worth because it's all dependent on the individual. If you were already training year round, you gain nothing there. If you weren't, obviously you get a lot better. When you sum these effects up across all the people, the effect is a higher average performance level, which is exactly what we're seeing.
The TLDR of my entire argument is that "it isn't just the shoes".
Your posts are 100% on the money.
I'll offer this:
We set 4:00 as a somewhat arbitrary time to cut off those who do and those who do not. But if we instead consider the whole bell curve of runners and their best times, your list tells us why the whole bell is shifting to the right. So, there are more guys running sub 5:00, and sub 4:30, and sub 4:10, and sub 4:05, and the very right tail of the distribution pushes into the sub-4:00 zone.
Then, when we consider that tiny part of the distribution that pushes close to 4:05 and faster, and THEN add the variable of super shoes, we get more sub-4:00 runners.
But it can't be explained just by "the shoes." It is the totality of the variables, each contributing some degree or another, and moving the entire distribution to the right. Then you add the shoes fairly recently and we see what we are now seeing.
The # of sub 5 milers has significantly increased in the last couple years. Per Athletic.net in 2017 there were 25100 sub 5 boy milers. In 2024 there was 28904. In 2025 there have been 28907 though there are still several several big meets left.