50 US Men qualify for the marathon Trials in one race!

wannabe fast wrote:

fact checker wrote:

Interesting article and certainly 83 was a banner year for Americans, but RW needs to correct #2 in the article. The record for sub-2:20 runners in a marathon is not 83 Boston, but 91 London with 105.

http://www.arrs.net/BT_Mara.htm

Imagine running 2:19 and not even cracking the top 100 in a race.

83 Boston was an impressive day for American marathoning, but people tend to forget that that race was essentially an OT race (it was the selection race for Helsinki, the very first WC) and that conditions were very very good that day.

Other posters are correct, too, that in those days there was this culture of people living for their art, like beatniks. It transferred to running. Now, by contrast, the value of anything is measured only by what you can sell it for. Then, people valued excellence even if it didn't lead to big money - maybe especially when it didn't. Jonathan Livinston Seagull was a revered cultural icon.... When you know this, it isn't hard to imagine so many people running the marathon that fast. I miss those days.

Link wrote: I miss those days.

You miss those days because you, like many of us, are old and slow now. How do you "know" that today's runners are only motivated by money? What if they just are not motivated by the marathon? There are at least as many good 5k and 10k runners now as back then.

Every generation thinks the next generation is worthless and weak - what makes you right about this one and the one before you wrong about yours?

Realistically .... wrote:

Imagine there were a track race capable of holding thousands of runners. And imagine there were only a handful of track races each year. Would we be impressed with 50 people running 3:48 or 14:00 in one race? Truth is that we're soft in the Marathon. And there's nothing all that special about qualifying for OT marathon.

Realistically is only 200 or so Kenyans can do it in a year I'd say that's pretty special.

BS wrote:

Link wrote: I miss those days.

You miss those days because you, like many of us, are old and slow now. How do you "know" that today's runners are only motivated by money? What if they just are not motivated by the marathon? There are at least as many good 5k and 10k runners now as back then.

Every generation thinks the next generation is worthless and weak - what makes you right about this one and the one before you wrong about yours?

Not sure where Link said anything even remotely related to thinking that today's generation is worthless and weak.

I think that what he said was that he missed those days of the late 70's/early 80's.

Short Stuff wrote:

Nobody has pointed out the fact that many of the courses were extremely short until the modern day certification. Greg Meyer was no better than a 2:11 guy, he just made his hay on a short Boston course. If you don't believe me, just do a little research on the finish line for the Boston Marathon, it continues to change, yet the starting line doesn't, same can be said for the NY course. Now, I am not taking away the fact that Greg won the darn thing, but he also didn't have the presence of the East Africans. If you convert all of those times from the 70's and 80's, the list isn't as impressive as you would think.

Nobody pointed it out because it's not true. What research did you do? Please read carefully below:

David Katz RE: The Boston course was long? 4/24/2007 6:36AM - in reply to ript Reply | Return to Index | Report Post

In the mid 80's I was invited by the Boston Marathon Course Director Len Luckner to measure the course. There was some questions about it's accuracy. I called Ted Corbitt to find out if the course had ever been accurately measured. He believed it was and was curious to see what my measurements would produce. I measured the course with Bill Noel of the NYRR. When we reached the marathon distance (42.195K) on my Jones Counter I looked down on the ground - I was 1 meter passed the painted Boston Marathon Finish Line, I turned around and looked at Bill. He said he hit the 42.195 and was standing 1 meter infront of the finish line! It was the most accurate course I have ever measured.

A few years later, the course was shifted to it's present finish line location - in front of the library. The course was re-measured and re-certfied.

To the well meaning runners using gps devices - try using it to measure your living room for carpeting! Different measuring devices for different applications - End of story.

David Katz RE:"Although Boston was much shorter than NY back in the day"

Interesting comment above.

For years (late 70's-early 80's) I wanted to measure Boston but Will Cloney wouldn't allow me. Something about letting a New Yorker touch his course!.

Anyway after he died, I along with Bill Noel was invited to measure Boston. We did the measurement on March 30, 1983 cutting all the tangest curb to curb.

The results: 26 miles 1151 feet & 8 inches (42193.97 meters!!). We were blown away.

I called Ted Corbitt after the measurement and he thought Boston would have measured long.

David Katz Re-Elected to the IAAF Technical Committee

Daegu, Korea August 25, 2011

David Katz was re-elected to his third four year term on the prestigious Technical Committee of the IAAF (International Association of Athletic Federation at its Congress in Daegu, Korea.

David was elected with the highest number of votes of the 28 candidates vying for 12 Committee seats. Two hundred Federations (Countries) voted.

The IAAF Technical Committee is responsible for reviewing / writing all competition rules and technical matters for track and field, road racing, and cross country running for the world.

2006 Chicago had 53 American men qualify for trials.

It looks like NYC has gone downhill more than the American Men's distance running.

How many total qualifiers for 1980? Did any run 2:05?

Honestly, I was not drawing any kind of moral comparison. I really don't know how you read that into what I wrote...

Indeed, the current generation of 18-30 year olds are some of the most noble, charity minded people I've ever met. But, the entire culture has been Gordon Gecko-ized. In this new zeitgeist, it's very hard to justify doing something so self-involved as running 150 miles/wk so that you can... make the OT, or maybe, just set a PR or find yourself. People back then were, in some ways, more selfish. But they weren't so motivated by money either. MY point is that things have changed and that one consequence, I think, is that there's not too many guys running 2:16 anymore.

Short Stuff wrote:

Nobody has pointed out the fact that many of the courses were extremely short until the modern day certification. Greg Meyer was no better than a 2:11 guy, he just made his hay on a short Boston course. If you don't believe me, just do a little research on the finish line for the Boston Marathon, it continues to change, yet the starting line doesn't . . .

Here's "a little research":

Now perhaps you can show us what support you have for your assertion that the Boston course was short in 1983, or your assertion that the finish line "continues to change, yet the starting line doesn't."

I've never considered times on the Boston course (including my own) to be marathon PRs, ARs, WRs, or any other kind of records except course records. This year's race certainly confirmed my views about that. But I wouldn't say that Meyer was no better than a 2:11 guy in April 1983. In the weeks prior to Boston that year, he tuned up with a 27:53 PR for 10,000m followed by a still-standing AR of 46:13 for ten miles, crushing an excellent field by a huge margin. Among those of us who had witnessed his ten-mile performance about three weeks before the marathon, Meyer was the clear favorite in Boston that year. Of course, I don't know what he was capable of running on a fast record-quality course like London, Berlin, or Rotterdam. Neither do you.

I'm not sure which marathon courses you think were "extremely short." NYC in 1981 was, of course, short enough to invalidate Salazar's proposed WR, and I believe that ARRS has also flagged NYC as being likely short in the earlier five-boroughs years of 1976-1980. Also, a number of course were then, as now, point-to-point, including the 1980 and 1984 U.S. Olympic trials courses and the old Mardi Gras Marathon. But even after adjusting for those factors (which would also require some massive adjustments for recent U.S. races like this year's Boston and Grandma's marathons), the depth of U.S. marathoning in the '70s and '80s remains very impressive by today's standards, especially when you look beyond the very top runners and into the ranks of, for example, the 2:15 to 2:25 guys.

American marathoning may have had much more depth in the early 80s but undoubtedly the global depth is still growing. According to ARRS the number of sub 2:20s in the 1980s ranged from a low of 2212 in 1980 to a high of 4877 in 1983.

The highest number of sub 2:20s happened in 2009 with 7621 - about double the average from the 80s.

Is there anywhere to find the number of sub 2:20 Americans in a given year? My hunch is that the number has not fallen that much if at all. It has just been spread out to a larger number of races.

Without really good year by year data we can look at the Olympic trials as a proxy.

1980 OT marathon - standard 2:21:54

225 qualifiers, 192 starters

1984 OT marathon - standard 2:19:04

201 qualifiers, 172 starters

Given the tougher standard this was a more deep qualifying period than 1980.

2012 OT lists (not sure if these include NY yet or not)

Standard 2:19:00)

150 qualifiers (will grow in the next month)

only 78 have qualified via 26.2, the others from 1/2M or 10k.

Clearly there is less depth in US marathoning in 2011 than there was in the early 80s.

Clarification: #19 is Sal Vega, not G. Vega, and from West New York, NJ

For the person asking about holding down a fulltime job and competing, the first one that comes to mind is Phil Coppess out of Iowa. He was a factory worker thru his running career. There were lots of competitive marathoners working fulltime. Of course, some were working at sporting goods stores and such, so not so much physical work.

You are 100 percent right....It was a running boom of a different magnitude...kids graduate now a days and hangup the spikes...

categorically wrote:

Without really good year by year data we can look at the Olympic trials as a proxy.

1980 OT marathon - standard 2:21:54

225 qualifiers, 192 starters

1984 OT marathon - standard 2:19:04

201 qualifiers, 172 starters

Given the tougher standard this was a more deep qualifying period than 1980.

2012 OT lists (not sure if these include NY yet or not)

Standard 2:19:00)

150 qualifiers (will grow in the next month)

only 78 have qualified via 26.2, the others from 1/2M or 10k.

Clearly there is less depth in US marathoning in 2011 than there was in the early 80s.

Keep in mind that the qualifying window for the 1984 Olympic trials was much shorter than the window for the 2012 trials, beginning at the 1983 Boston marathon for a trials race just thirteen months later. So all of those 201 qualifiers for the 1984 trials ran 2:19:04 or faster during a qualifying window of about one year. Also, the qualifying standard of 2:19:04 was determined by the 100th-fastest American marathoner of 1982 -- a year in which no times counted as trials qualifiers. So the difference in depth between then and now, as measured by the number of American marathoners running sub-2:20 or so, is even greater than the trials stats reflect.

To answer your earlier question, I have seen a year-by-year breakdown of the number of sub-2:20 U.S. marathoners over an extended period, and the decline (at least up until pretty recently) was very striking. Offhand, however, I don't recall where I saw those figures. (As I recall, those stats were juxtaposed against the corresponding figures for sub-2:20 Kenyan marathoners.)