American men regularly now run sub 13 5k and sun 27 10k but marathons stuck at 2:07. What gives?

Here are a few reasons and some antidotal evidence.

1. Cost of life in the US. Our best runners run for colleges usually taking on debt. Rent, car, food, student loan payments. Your 10-15th best American collegiate runner isn’t chasing a marathon, they are chasing a career.

2. Health care. Europe will continue to get better and we will be stagnant. You need healthcare and after 25 you need a career to get it. (Many euros also have cheap or free college)

3. Small talent pool. The factors above lead to maybe 10-15 per gender actually chasing a marathon full time.

Scott Fauble has made an amazing career for himself but was never a top dog in college (never won conference xc!). We have 4 Scott graduate every year that dont or can’t pursue a pro career

health care is such a small reason on a scale of why our marathoners suck.

Did Bekele come back from a 10k and El G come back from a 1500

Ignoring "antidotal" (lols)... COL was just as much of an issue in the 70s and 80s, when we experienced our purported golden age of marathoning. NONE of "our best runners" should have ANY student loan payments. It's not the talent pool that's specifically the issue, we're a nation of 333 million. It's incentives and rewards and the level of talent at the top quarter of the pool. Sure, four Faubles per graduating class would be nice, but even just one Mantz per graduating class (per sex) would actually be effective at improving competitiveness on the world stage. The top senior US finishers at NCAA 10K/5K would be a start. The Mantzes merely benefit from Faubles and Youngs as training partners. The money (sponsorships AKA marketing budget) is shifting towards influencers and away from performers who can't engage the buying public outside of a couple of competitions per year. So race a bit more and get the appearance fees and prize money at road races.

Healthcare is a HUGE factor in why we stink at running. Our society pushes everyone to get a career in the system.

Cost of living is way higher than it was in the 1970s when we had our golden age. Also those guys could race all the time for money. The road race money pool is gone.

A lot of our top guys do graduate with student debt. Not every good runner is on a full. Even a 75% scholarship at a state school will leave a student with 20-25k in debt. Try paying that off with a 30k shoe deal and no insurance.

Lastly, Manz of course is doing well. He was the first American to win NCAAs in forever!!! My point with Fauble was his PRs and placing at nationals were never top tier but with a few more years of running and training he was absolutely top tier by 28. We don’t have enough people that can train until 28 to get those huge gains

Um, no.

Nope. And nobody capable of top 5 at the OT this year has gone the Bill Rodgers route, doing grunt work at a hospital. There are far more, better, and easier ways to make an income today.

This is a pretty common topic here and I think the answer is always a version of your post. The guys capable of running sub 13:00/27:00 are running sub 13 and 27 and not marathons. Our marathoners are generally second tier guys not quite capable of sub 13 and 27 who therefore find their best chance at making national teams and getting decent prize and appearance money is the marathon.

I said this on a different thread but if we really look at it, most “pro” runners in the US have the financial ability to pursue the sport with or without sponsorship.

There are a few out there boot strapping it but for most they leave college and get a job.

CJ Albertson, awesome marathoner right now but go look at his college results. TONS of talent in front of him but most of those guys didn’t run post college. I would argue a lot of them wanted to but financially it wasn’t going to be a reality.

I also don’t think you need to be a full time a marathoner to break 2:10- 2:12 and you can do that with a side job. But getting under 2:07 is a lot of really hard training.

Japan has amazing half and full marathon depth because they have a lot of runners that are sponsored

I think the flipside to this is that our best marathoners these days seem to see the roads as an all-or-nothing sort of transition. Current US marathoners hop in a track 10k every once in a while (esp. if they didn't make whatever worlds/oly team they were aiming for), but it's rare and usually seems pretty half-hearted.

The best US marathoners of the 70s/80s (when it seems like we were the most competitive, relative to the rest of the world) were constantly running shorter road races (no pun intended) and frequently track races as short as 2 or 3 miles. When was the last time you saw a US marathoner in an indoor 5k?

When our best runners see a transition to the marathon as the defacto end of their career at anything shorter than 13.1, it's little wonder they're going to wait until they're past the peak of their potential best anyway.

Our majors can be hot/hilly. Domestic runners go to Chicago/NYC/Boston every year instead of Berlin/Amsterdam/Rotterdam/London. Americans who have placed well at domestic majors would have faster PBs if they took 2x fast rabbited marathon attempts each year.

Other issues -- something like the Marathon Project going away after 1 year + Olympic Trials being somewhere warm (not totally against this because you need to pick a team that can manage the heat but it's a shame to know you're not going to get fast times when you know everyone is fit).

The US does reasonably well at the Olympic marathon. Feel like we could focus on PBs or acknowledge some success there & maybe find some balance in this discussion. Would also argue that our 1500-10k runners don't move up when they're in their prime. They don't even get into fast half marathons. A handful of guys could threaten 59 if they went to a fast European half.

The irony of this, of course, is that it's actually way easier to recover from a 5,000m race run in dragonflies than in a circa 1977 pair of track spikes.

Inevitably Frank and Bill will come up in these sorts of conversations. Bill was working full time with disabled kids when training for Montreal. Frank was a law student before Munich. Both trained a lot and raced a lot. Frank ran 2:10 and Bill 2:09 with primative equipment and a negative amount of support from the various governing bodies. But maybe today's times do not denegrate the young runners of the moment but reinforce Rodger's and Shorter's true greatness.

You guys are overlooking the fact that marathon training is:

(1) boring

(2) exhausting (always sore, tired, hungry)

(3) slow

These sub-27 guys can run low 3:50's in the mile. I assure you, they like running fast paces, and switching to the marathon is goodbye forever to footspeed. Running fast is why many of us got into running in the first place.

I was a good fast-twitch mid-distance guy (400m, 800m, mile) in high school and college and when i switched to road race training in my 30's, I missed the track speed stuff and got in a lot of clyde hart type work, just because it was more interesting. I would do 8x 200's with my marathon buddies who could run 2:25-27 in the marathon (i only ran 2:33.high), but they could barely break 30 seconds. I was trying to break 24.

The marathon is a fun race despite the suffering the last few miles, but the training is absolutely horrible.

"Nobody working 40 hours a week will ever beat me in a marathon." -- Bill Rodgers

Doesn't CJ Albertson have a full time job?

supershoes don't make a 10k 30 seconds faster! The second fastest ever 10,000 meter run was done with racing flats

The natural progression as your race distance increases would actually point to 12:59 and 26:59 leading to around 2:07.

The marathoners who can run faster are all doping. That has a lot to do with their ability to hit faster times. Many of you insistently believe most of them are clean when they are not, when the bare minimum require to compete at that level is to dope and get away with it.