dombey wrote:
I ran in high school under Timmons and was one of the people who simply faded with the stress of it all. I can remember coming home and just sitting, too exhausted to eat, too exhausted to do anything but sip water. Certainly his coaching helped shape the rest of my life, however. We were taught never to have excuses and to keep pushing ourselves. The attrition of the team was simply a fact of life. I would never call his approach "military," although perhaps it was. He would never yell at us, or berate us; he would simply urge us in a quiet way to keep pushing. I can see now that some of us could have done better with a less rigorous approach, and a little more rest, but the workouts never got shorter. We were told we should never rest before a meet, and we never did. We worked just as hard the day before a competition as any other day. I can remember one cross country meet when we had all done our best, and probably won, and then as runners from other schools sat recuperating, exhausted, he had the entire team line up to the start line and run the course again. The meet had simply been our warm-up. He was very scornful of what he called Roger Bannister finishes. Bannister, of course, sometimes collapsed at the finish line. He always said that if any of us collapsed, we would just be left lying on the ground. No one would come pick us up.
As a former Kansas high school runner and fan, I always wondered what happened to the 410 miler, Mike Petterson that ran with Jim Ryun. If not for Jim, Mike's time was probably in the top 5 in the country for 1965? I don't recall hearing anything about Mike after high school. 2ndly: JD Edmiston, who took over in '65 for Ryun and Petterson's senior year, once Timmons had moved to U of Kansas; did he run the same program basically as Timmons? I recall in high school, when warming up for my mile races in the early '70s and the great Randy Smith, also from Wichita East would be warming up too; the guy would practically run an entire workout before the race. He must have run 20 x 100 on the football field as well as the jogging part. It made me tired just watching. I wonder now, after reading all these posts if that was part of the Timmon's legacy still at WE....the long, hard pre race warm up that was a workout in itself? btw; my high school coach at SM North, Coach Gish was old school too in finishing races. No collapsing or lying on the track. You were told to finish with class and keep moving. I remember diving at the tape once in a mile and got a knee and palms full of cinders and made sure I jumped up right away so as not to incur the wrath of Coach Gish who was a good man, but old school, too.