It's weird to call a 2:16 marathon debut a failure. It seems like he had a good training build and started the race healthy. That's already a big win. His first 13.1mi was maybe too quick for his fitness. That's normal for a debut. Looks like a B/B+ to me, assuming he recovers well afterward
A 2:16 debut for a guy like him is not a B/B+. I debuted on a more challenging course in 2:17 and I'm irrelevant. I'd say a 2:12 would have been a B for him. He ran 13:13 5k last year, I can name some guys who never went sub 14 and ran 2:12. I was way slower than him and my debut was a 2:17 on a more challenging course, going out in 65 and blowing up. So no matter how you look at it, this was disappointing for him.
No matter how you look at it? How about from a grownups point of view?
I think you proved my point. At age 18/19, Salazar was averaging 100mpw before XC, meanwhile clinger didn't hit those numbers until he was a senior in college.
Where did you get the idea Alberto average 100mpw in high school? Citation?.
He wasn't 18 or 19. He graduated on time, when he was 17.
History looms over Alberto Salazar. He's already in the books for good, of course, with his 2:08:13 marathon last October in New York, the first improvement
"Before his junior year at Wayland, Salazar ran a 9:28 two mile, proof of solid talent. To the credit of his coach, Don Benedetti, Salazar was permitted to train with members of the Greater Boston Track Club and its famously garrulous coach, Bill Squires. "From the first Squires always stressed the long-term way of looking at things, always talked about 10 years down the line," says Salazar. "I'd read of high school guys going 130 miles per week, so I tried it. He grabbed me and said, 'Listen, now is a time to grow, not wreck yourself.' " "It was hard enough at 80 per week, that first year with the Greater Boston TC. "The long intervals seemed to last forever, but gradually I was able to keep up," says Salazar. "It seemed haphazard at times, the way he'd give me a shoebox with my workout written on it, or a napkin. He seemed to speak gibberish a lot. 'You're in with the guppies today,' turned out to mean that I was training with the high school runners. 'The horses' were guys like Bill Rodgers, Dickie Mahoney, Vin Fleming, Mark Duggan, Freddie Doyle and Kirk Pfrangle. They took me in and gave me a nickname, the Rookie, and taught me tactics. The insistence on full recovery, on consistency and on not overracing was the same that I'd get later from Dellinger at Oregon. I've been lucky in being coached the same way for eight years."
Clinger is the USATF 25k champion and surged to take down Klecker in Grand Rapids. 1:12 low for 25k which is sub 4:40. Can't think of a better race than 25k to show marathon potential outside of the distance itself.
