College Track has CHANGED in 15 years (with data)

Good reply as this does represent a solid control group and should temper those that think this is all about shoes.

Blah blah is right. I remember when I was insecure and just couldn't accept that things move forwards in life for a variety of nuanced reasons. I was like 9 years old but you do you. Dork.

Probably because coaches are more knowledgeable than decades past at the junior levels.

“Yeah man it’s not the shoes that were specifically designed to make you run fast it’s that everyone magically decided to start training better in a really vague way at the exact same time the shoes came about”

Cope

track benefits from being a relatively simple game where cost-benefit on choices displays in times. you can push dumb ideas. they show up as slower times or broken athletes. the next recruiting class then votes with its feet. and compared to when i was recruited and went, information about teams and times and results is so much easier to get. it was harder in the pre-internet era to know what you were signing up for. imagine the conference/regional/national meet results aren't up on an internet. imagine you could maybe find it in obscure magazines you don't necessarily have. now school x approaches you. is school x any good? you can ask school x, see how much that helps. now you have ordinary meets on tv or streaming, results every week posted, national and conference standing obvious.

and then as some have said, training plans aren't buried in a book someplace, and obscure to 99% of runners, you can look them up, you can ask the coach questions, you can compare the answers to the results and assess of what they do seems to work.

the shoes obsession is limiting. i was around when cinder tracks still existed. it's not just shoes, it's how you dress, it's the tracks becoming all rubber, it's the generational iterative improvements on that.

it's the various means of monitoring vitals and feedback that go well beyond a stopwatch, finger to a neck, and VO2 machinery now. i know i would push back in my own ways on being overworked, but it was all kind of vague and intuitive, feeling tired. this is numbers and data. in real time. your in-progress HR=?. lactic. etc.

i also feel like this broad profusion of data about everyone involved allows even the laziest of coaches the opportunity to see trends and issues with even the most peripheral of their team members. you can get nitty gritty with your best. you can work details with the supporting cast.

i also think you simply have better HS programs. to me we have poured a lot of money into HS facilities the past 20 or so years. even the weaker schools.

Precisely. The 15 year window totally obscured that most of the improvement in times has occurred since COVID, and more specifically, since 2022

Thanks. That very helpful.

1) When you say top 95 performances, do you mean the top 95 fastest times run, or the top times by the 95 fastest runners?

2) Why top 95? Why not top 100? Also, it would be interesting to see various levels, say top 10, top 25, top 50, top 100.

3) You say you have the pre-2020 trendline so we can compare pre and post covid. But isn't that also pre and post magic shoes?

4) Maybe I missed it, but where did you get your data?

Some of the posts here remind me of conversations I had about baseball and homeruns during the magic season. I'd say they seem naive now, but TBH, the word is cringeworthy.

to make a comparison, a college or pro football coach used to have to deal with an incoming crowd of kids who had played a HS wishbone or veer or one WR offense.

you now have kids playing pro-set offenses. the college can then run a pro set offense and the kids aren't clueless nor is recruiting for such a system guesswork.

the one thing i'd say is there are naivete and blindspots to that in team sports. i feel like soccer defenses have gotten naive and worse. but most schools play attacking soccer and are better at it than my generation.

track being different because there is a more obvious choice-result linkage with things coaches are trying. you can see the times of the recruiting class, you can see their times in college, you can see the improvement or not, you can see how competitive the team is, and you can link that to training choices which can be made on purpose ahead of time. i think very few athletes would have known what they were getting into before these days. i think a lot of us had football coaches in HS or coaches with a crude sense what they were doing, which could only be gotten from a book or a discussion. now it can be serious, technical stuff. specific plans. with an idea what they produce. perhaps some research done about them.

also with video and monitoring, it's not just something you saw and noted at the meet, like they can break down a race dozens of times after, they can look at vitals and measures. they can get 200m splits they don't have to personally take with a watch and a pad.

i also think some of the "shoes" obsession misses that decades ago your school might have offered generic or offbrand cheap equipment. you're acting like it's literally the tech involved when some of it is that these days if a kid wants it his school may hand him copa soccer cleats or nice nike spikes, which my HS didn't do, you had to buy that yourself. that is a subtlety being missed.

Can’t discount the Wesley Kiptoo effect. The guy showed up & forced the top NCAA runners to race fast when it counted, and the training adapted to his championship racing style. Didn’t Teare & Hocker train specifically for Kiptoo when preparing for NCAA outdoor 5000 in what, ‘21, when Teare won in NCAA record time & a bunch of others were dragged to PR’s?

These non distance results are consistent with a trend noted around 2016 that high school student participation in football, basketball, and tennis was falling while participation in track was increasing. Reasons given were fear of concussions, disinterest in team sports, and video games. Those HS students would have been college jrs and srs around 2019. It would be interesting to see whether the level of athletic talent has been increasing, maybe using a proxy measure like height.

Times were virtually unchanged from 2010 to 2019, then a leap forward perfectly coinciding with the introduction of super spikes. Tracks didn't change, coaching did not have a huge turnover and existing coaches didn't suddenly and drastically change their training. It happened suddenly at every level of the sport, not just the NCAA.

100th NCAA Outdoor Track Performance
Year 1500 5000 10000
2023 03:42.47 13:49.80 29:05.27
2022 03:42.11 13:46.80 29:04.04
2021 03:43.15 13:52.11 29:18.77
2020 season cancelled
2019 03:45.62 14:03.28 29:32.21
2018 03:45.22 14:03.58 29:42.61
2017 03:45.44 14:04.27 29:43.43
2016 03:44.93 14:02.40 29:42.32
2015 03:44.61 14:04.40 29:46.66
2014 03:45.33 14:05.11 29:38.94
2013 03:45.68 14:06.41 29:47.66
2012 03:45.79 14:04.37 29:47.91
2011 03:46.34 14:07.59 29:56.68
2010 03:45.98 14:04.39 29:51.28

The analysis skills of LetsRun continue to shock me. Have you ever heard of a confounding variable? Or the old adage, "correlation does not equal causation"? COVID was a massive shock to the system, and making ANY judgments about the causes of this change without doing SOMETHING to control for other variables is just terrible analysis.

COVID was certainly a big event, but the nebulous assignment of an event as an effect no one can quantify is terrible analysis.

What is it about COVID that suddenly made everyone at every level of the sport run faster? Was it getting a disease that affects the heart and lungs? Now everyone is stronger? Can you cite a study? Most studies show the opposite, that the effects are negative and can last some time.

Was it the Year of limited competition? How does that explain new runners who also immediately leveled up to the new faster race times? Or mature runners who were at a plateau and suddenly got faster?

Maybe the 6th year senior thing has some effect on the NCAA, but that does not explain HS or world class times suddenly getting faster.

The number of HS runners breaking 4 minutes for the mile is greater since 2020 (new shoes!) than all those before that.

No one is racing in old style shoes because they would not be competitive without them. They ARE effective. Otherwise, people would race in older style shoes due to preference.

People are trying SOOO hard to assign the shift in times to something other than shoes. Why? Faster is fine. The shoes are legal. The technology shifted things forward and it won't go back. But comparing today's times to 5+ years ago is an unfair comparison and the shoes are the reason.

I don't see it that way. Yes, the throws show real improvement (but, as noted elsewhere, there is some cherry picking with this data set), but, look at the jumps - those are essentially unchanged - in fact far less improvement than I'd expect given the larger population of current college aged students. (And, it will be interesting to see what happens across all the events as the college age group starts to dwindle in the next few years.)

It's just as easy to come up with potential mechanisms as it is to refute them. There are a few factors that I think are universally agreed on to affect times: internal perception of ability, training methods, the equipment, and focus. All of these changed on some level for many runners between 2019 and 2021. The improvement in the distribution of times could be caused by any one of these factors, or all of them. This is further complicated by the fact that these factors are not independent from each other; equipment and training methods affect internal perceptions, which in turn affects focus, which in turn can affect training methods...and so on.

I think it's important to note that I have never said the shoes do nothing. In fact, in this thread I said that I believe they do have an effect, although the evidence I have seen indicates that the the effect is inconsistent and significantly lesser than the effect on the road flats. But it is very frustrating when people consistently try to prove the existence and magnitude of the effect of a variable without doing anything to isolate that variable, and it ruins a lot of good discussion on the topic.

Except when correlation does equal causation. If you constantly have the view of “correlation doesn’t equal causation” with everything you don’t agree with, then correlation never equals causation. It’s so convenient that the cheat shoes showed up during Covid because now there is this magical variable to explain away the ridiculous times. We’re 3 years out of covid, but the magical variable of Covid is still having affect on times? Yes, we’ll ignore shoes specifically designed to allow athletes to run faster and put all of our efforts into Covid to explain away fast times.

It's fine that technology has helped runners run faster times... it's just part of what's happening in the world. No need to complain about it.

That said, it's pretty obvious that the shoes and the new engineered tracks are making everyone faster... technology is the overwhelming cause of faster times.

It's fine and everyone should just move on.