It is the SHOES folks! - 5 HSers under 4 this year!!

An unmentioned factor is the use of pacers in prep meets, something that almost never happened twenty years ago. Yesterday Birnbaum stayed off the pacer but having a string of guys ahead of him the whole race was ideal to draw him to his potential. In the past he would have been 4:02 without a pacer.

Pacers, All-Star meets, invites to pro/college meets, better coaching, better training and better equipment. The spikes are part of this, maybe responsible for a second or so.

The only "national" meet when I was in high school was the Golden West Invitational which was only open to seniors.

They didn't allow pacers in "professional" meets in the 70's (I know they weren't technically pro but read Guy Drut's interview after the 76 Olympics).

is it is why the hell am i not under 4 then?

Labratrundown did a study that showed the Dragonfly has similar efficiency to the Next %. I can’t find the link now, but it’s out there..

Come on now, it's that Pop-Tarts have fallen out of favor. That was the only thing holding us back, guys.

I was your standard 4:30 high school miler. Ran that in late May.

Early September, same year, in trainers, ran a 4:07 being pulled along by a half-dozen guys who were faster than me. Put me in today's shoes, on today's tracks, in a hot race, and I wouldn't have been sub-4, but it's not hard for me to see these 4-OH guys running under 4 now.

I believe it's fair that technology is adding possibly up to a second per lap. I ran an 8:37 ST in college to earn All American honors and still track the sport. It is a joke to consider a sub 4 min mile as the same status of human achievement as it was pre super spikes

Please proove me wrong...

Yes, it is the reason. The US distance running scene has improved dramatically since 2019. From 2010-2019 US times had pretty much leveled off. There was a single year in that time frame where US times were close to rivaling what we’re seeing now but the next year they fell. We’re only part way through the season and the US has never seen times like we are seeing now.
Running differs significantly from other sports in that it is not skill based. Once again, running is not skill based. It is almost entirely based on fitness. Football, basketball, soccer, baseball, tennis, cricket, golf, etc., etc., etc. are all mostly skill based sports. The way athletes in these sports improve is completely different from the way an athlete improves in running and they are not relatable at all. That said, almost nothing has changed with regards to training for distance running. Training guidelines pretty much follow the same principles that they have since the 60s. Following my old college, kids now running unheard of times were, just a year and a half ago (before adopting the shoes) running average to below average times. Within a single outdoor race coming from indoor to outdoor and wearing the shoes they went from average times to a mind blowing improvement. Guys that I thought might barely break 30 min for 10000 were now running under 29 where just a couple months earlier and not wearing the shoes were having a hard time running 14:30 indoors. The data is there. All on IAAFs website. Go map times from 2010-2019 and then compare them to times from the last 2 years.

"Guys that I thought might barely break 30 min for 10000 were now running under 29 where just a couple months earlier and not wearing the shoes were having a hard time running 14:30 indoors."

So what you're saying is that the shoes are worth 2-seconds PER LAP!!!! That's the most outlandish thing I've read on here in a long time, and that's saying something for LRC.

You mean the same pros who are now running times similar to the EPO era and not the slower times that showed up after testing? Let me guess people just trained harder in the 90s which is why you went from 1 sub 13 to dozens.....

See one of my previous posts. No they are not worth 2 seconds per lap for every distance. For a 10000 probably around a half to second per lap. For a mile - more like 2 seconds for the entire race. So, if your a 4:02 guy wearing the shoes could make you a sub 4 which is big.
The college times above were generalizations. But yeah, by the end of indoor ‘21 1 guy I thought was maybe a 29:40 guy and the other 2 maybe just under 30. The 29:40 guy ran just under 29 and the other 2 ran just over 29. None of them had cracked 14:20 indoors 2021. But I would say for a sub elite guy looking at 20-30 seconds for 10000. US womens times average dropped 40 seconds from previous 10 years. All the data is on iaaf. You want answers go look up US times from the last 2 years compared to previous 10. Go look up HS times.

The challenge with its all about the shoes is that we are not seeing progression at the Pro / Olympic level in the 1500 and 1 mile. On another post everyone is debating whether or not Jakob will break the ER in the mile that was set 37 years ago, one person has broken 3:47 in the last 15 years.

So there's a few questions, if it was the shoes you'd expect to see faster 1500 and mile times in the pros. You could argue that maybe doping makes a bigger difference than shoes at the pro level or the shoes aren't making a big impact on shorter distances.

What's important to remember is that the mile isn't as popular as it used to be even in the US as most high school meets compete in the 1600, but recently there have been way more mile invitationals and it seems to be hyped much more than it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. Certainly in Europe it was all about the 1500 lately.

So while I am not discounting the impact of shoes I think the # of sub 4 milers this year can also be explained by better coaching and more focus on the distance. Also competition breeds success. One of the reasons you had so many fast times in the 1980s is you had three amazing middle distance runners from the UK that kept pushing one another. Ovett, Cram, and Coe absolutely raised the bar for each other.

The problem with saying this is that times for both individuals and the entire field don't progress robotically upwards There is stochastic variation. Superspikes were first out in limited quantities two years ago (Dragonfly spikes first mentioned here in April 2020) and have only been widely available for an entire season since last year. Yet people making your argument are suggesting that the world records should be destroyed the very same or next year in the 1500 (some WRs actually have been destroyed in the 5,000, 10,000). It doesn't work that way. You need to look over more years, and since you can't do that yet because the superspikes are so new, you need to look deeper into the results.
In the absence of a technological breakthroughs, previous world records were not steadily broken by tenths of a second every year. There were wide variations in seasons bests in the 1500, and the world records would not be set every year. The current WR is from 1998! Even before that, there were three times since Elliot where there was 7 years between WRs. Looking at the past 15 years, the season's best men's time in the 1500 varied from 3:26.69 to 3:31.49. That would easily hide the benefit from superspikes if you just looked at the #1 performance in a season.
Looking at the 20th fastest time in each of the past 15 years to get a 20-times deeper comparison, you can see that although there isn't really a trend line from 2007 to 2020, 2021 has the fastest 20th fastest time by 1.18 seconds better than the average from 2007 to 2020, and is 0.48 seconds faster than the next fastest year (2013).
3:34.09 (2007)
3:33.63
3:33.63
3:33.67
3:33.42
3:33.82
3:33.15 (2013)
3:33.47
3:34.13
3:34.09
3:34.17
3:34.38
3:33.21
3:34.98
3:32.67 (2021)
Similarly, people asking why Jakob isn't running 3:26 yet have to realize that runners also don't progress robotically year to year, whether that's variation in fitness or variation in how the races place out.
For example, look at the progression of two Jakes, that I just picked from near the top of current world rankings. Pick anyone else and you'll see yearly results are not only up in the beginning of a career and down at the end. There are ups and downs.
Heyward. I see a regression from age 19 to 20-21, and then a big jump in 2021:
3:57.57 (2015, age 16)
3:46.50
3:42.12
3:36.90
3:39.38
3:39.04
3:32.82 (2021, age 22)
Wightman. Regressed from age 20 to 21, massive improvement age 26 in 2020 presumably running in some of the earliest superspikes:
3:51.74 (2012, age 17)
3:43.74
3:35.49
3:40.05
3:36.64
3:34.17
3:33.96
3:31.87
3:29.47
3:33.48 (2021, age 27)

Calling it 'fake progress' doesn't mean it is fake. It's just your opinion based on where you have chosen to draw a line.

great, what exactly is the problem? everyone can wear them and innovation is good for running

What I don't get is:

Where are the girls? As far as I can see, no US HS girl has completed a 1 mile race this year.

Are there results out there? It's certainly been done in the past. I haven't seen one even in 10 minutes lately. Anyone have a link to a race in which an American high school girl finishes a race over exactly 1 mile sometime during this year's outdoor season?

Nothing - I think it’s great. Took 20 seconds off my 10000 pr from 20 years ago.