Bill Squires Sounds Like A Raging Egomaniac

As for 15:00 types, I've mentioned Richard Mahoney on another thread. New England 3-mile champion in 14:07 as a senior for Boston College in 1971, meaning perhaps 14:40ish for 5K. His PR's from the club were 14:14 (5K), 29:41 (10K), and the 2:14 at the 1979 Boston Marathon.

Having met Coach on many occasions, I can say he is the genuine article (although many of his tangents can keep going like the Energizer bunny). He also wasn't too bad at other events; a graduate of my high school was second at the DIII Nationals for Boston State in the long jump under his tutelage in the early 1980's.

jesse was a friend wrote:

Rodgers and Beardsley did not look like great talents coming out of high school. I agree with this...

Then you're in agreement with Squires. He qualified his observation by saying if he were recruiting for a college, he wouldn't have picked his athletes. Why would he be talking about their marathon careers when he's referring to their merits as college recruits?

Craigmac may be out of his league but it's because he's playing down rather than up when he's debating you. It's easy to identify "talent" after someone's done something noteworthy and it's such a self-contained argument that it's irrefutable: e.g. Hodgie-san had tremendous talent. How do we know he had tremendous talent? He had to. He ran under 2:11. Rodgers had even more and we know that because he ran 2:09. Essentially you're using "talent" and "achievement" interchangeably.

Again, we aren't talking about guys who struggled for years to get under 11:00 for two miles. Squires coached people like that too and understood that they weren't going to do the things Beardsley and Meyer were going to do. But Meyer was the only one of the group who had any sort of pedigree before coming to Squires.

Rodgers managed to get under slightly 9:00 for two miles as a college senior which was nice running but there were high school kids running faster than he was. He was so obscure that when he began running road races his first name was sometimes listed as "Will" and the "d" was left out of his last name.

If you think the guys Squires coached were exceptionally talented, could you tell us what they did before working with Squires that indicated that talent?

Not that Bill Squires needs any backing from me, as he could always take care of himself, quite well. He spent many days at our offices at BU and having his company and his "folklore" stories always made my day. "Egomaniac"....I don't think so, not in the least. He was a Boston guy through and through and a friend to all. If anything, there were things about him I could only find out about by talking to Bruce Lehane, who was coached by him at Boston State and then became a life long friend to Squires.

Squires was entertaining and lots of fun to be around. He had great stories about a group of guys who dedicated themselves to distance as no other group I ever met. Remember, these guys were not "Pros", rather they were "gym rats" who loved running and used Squire's training to become very good marathoners.

As someone else has stated, if you saw Bil Rodgers, you would not have thought him a great runner. Squires was instrumental in helping Rodgers achieve some extremely high goals. It was Rodgers who accomplished those goals and I am sure Squires would agree to that assessment.

The author of the article on Squires did a great job of getting the Bill Squires' character, just as an artist painting a portrait of a famous politician or statesman.

I kept thinking, yes, that is Squires, the guy got him right. Even the photos portray him as he is, a fun loving character who has given much more to the running community than he has ever taken or ask.

I have always enjoyed Bill's company and consider him a good friend and outstanding man in the field he loves....track.

Best wishes Bill, and I am glad to see you can still get a rise out of people, I know you are smiling about all this.

craigmac4h wrote:

I can't find anything on Meyer's high school times, so maybe he was a 4:06 HS stud recruit and Squires is just a hateful old man.

Greg ran 9:06 in high school, still not a blue-chipper. It wasn't until after college, and under the tutelage of Squires that Greg stepped up big. Trying to parse anything that Squires says and make it into some indictment of character is the passion of fools.

I'm all too aware of the dangers of arguing with an idiot like the OP, but it's Friday night, I have a race tomorrow, and I have nothing else to do in between rounds of wii golf.

If you were a D1 coach, how hard would you recruit a 9:36 two miler?

I think any rational person can look at the record that Squires had with characters who weren't HS/College stars and ultimately conclude that he understands the marathon as well as any American coach. He should be proud of that achievement.

I read the article with great interest and hoped to find a substantive discussion about it here. Instead, I find blathering about what Squires meant by "talent". It's obvious what he meant and it's a fine point. The only bright spot is that legitimate, known, outstanding runners like Hogdie-san, Patti, Derderian, Malmo, and others still bother to contribute anything here. There are many of us who are grateful for your contributions and perspective. Thank you.

I remember the day I became impressed with Rodgers. It was at a minor marathon that I intended to run but not race. Rodgers was there and had dropped out of Boston earlier in the year, 1973, and just wanted to finish a marathon to show that he could do it. We ran the first of the five, five-mile loops in about 50th place. We chatted as usual and picked it up a little each lap. With a lap to go Bill said he felt good and wanted to pick it up. I said ok and started running 5:20s. (at that point I had already finish several sub 2:30 marathons) Bill started running 5:00. We flew by people but Bill kept getting yet another stride on me without appearing to be increasing his effort. He won in 2:28 and I ran 2:30. That's when I started thinking he was "talented." The next spring he ran 2:19 at Boston and the next. 2:09.

But that was five years after he graduated from college...

I was in college at the same time as Bill but do not remember him, but I do remember many, many, much faster runners from then—such as Art Dulong. So maybe Squires remembers them too and not Bill as being "talented."

Tom

Derderian wrote:

See you at the Crossroads. I remember Squires summed up his coaching style with the comment, "Just get the horses together and let 'em run."

Tom

Yes, and if you fall off your horse just climb back on, giddyup!

Sounds like Squires beat the Kenyans to the game of elite training groups by a decade or two.

Hodgie-san wrote:

Derderian wrote:

See you at the Crossroads. I remember Squires summed up his coaching style with the comment, "Just get the horses together and let 'em run."

Tom

Yes, and if you fall off your horse just climb back on, giddyup!

hey jesse, you creating fallacies in your argument by attackting the people writing, and instead start refuting their arguments. It makes you look very weak if you just accuse everyone of being an idiot.

Someone said that Squires is the best marathon coach ever... I think that's disrespectful towards some other coaches, for example Dr. Gabriele Rosa, who has coached literally about 5X as many sub 2:10 marathoners as Squires.

Why does everybody assume that achievements at distances short of 26.2 miles are indicative of "marathon talent"? The only way to have any idea how talented someone is at the marathon comes only when they have been a marathoner for a while. How good you are at the mile? Who knows how much that shows as to your marathon potential.

malmo wrote:

I shouldn't be, but I am continually amazed by the number of idiots who think that training is somehow about 'destroying' workouts. It's not. Until the day comes that you understand this you will never maximize your talents.

The best coaches, and specifically the best marathon coach this country has ever seen (Squires), understood this, and imbued it into his athletes until it was second nature.

To the original poster - you don't have a f***ing clue what 'Coach' was about.

I was waiting for you to come out and give a straight-forward answer. The best answer ever. Love it!!

Coach Squires is one of the best marathon coaches the world has ever seen. May come out a bit off-the-wall but one of the nicest guys around as well. Everybody here should hear Dick Beardsley talk about his first Falmouth road race and the night before.

Always look forward to getting together with Coach at Boston Marathon.

I found Coach Squires' statement that he taught Arthur Lydiard more than Lydiard taught him far and away the most preposterous, arrogant, erroneous assertion I have read on here in a long time.

This whole thread was started because of an article that Squires was quoted as saying he took a bunch of guys with no talent and had great success. Of course they had talent, you can't run 2:12 or better without unusual talent but there are a lot of those guys out there.

Bob Kempainen was referenced in an earlier post about a guy with little talent (if mile speed for a long distance runner is supposed to be the indicator for talent) but he did run 28:30 -40 at least in college. Other than Greg Meyer I don't think Squires brought in guys at that level. And he had several run 2:09-2:14.

Hansons group get similar types. Sell ran 2:10 and the dude that ran 2:12 in the trials but for the most part they have produced a lot of 2:13-2:18 marathoners.

He has a right to make that point. No other American coach has done the marathon with several athletes as successfully even 30 years later. He must know things the others don't, or what I believe had a way to instill total confidence without going over the line in training.

But it also is a different ballgame today. For a coach like Salazar getting sub 27:30 runners and low 13:00 guys, he's trying to get them to be competitive with the current world's best which run 2:04-2:06. They have to take more gambles in training I believe, such as Ritz's 20 mile 4:50 pace workouts.

long dong silver wrote:

Someone said that Squires is the best marathon coach ever... I think that's disrespectful towards some other coaches, for example Dr. Gabriele Rosa, who has coached literally about 5X as many sub 2:10 marathoners as Squires.

Why does everybody assume that achievements at distances short of 26.2 miles are indicative of "marathon talent"? The only way to have any idea how talented someone is at the marathon comes only when they have been a marathoner for a while. How good you are at the mile? Who knows how much that shows as to your marathon potential.

Hey dong, what ever became of sexy rosie's "Discovery America"?

NobbyH wrote:

Everybody here should hear Dick Beardsley talk about his first Falmouth road race and the night before.

Always look forward to getting together with Coach at Boston Marathon.

What happened?