marathon as a serious endeavor emerged shortly after our 'big group' descended at the school '70 and then only serious in 71/72 - when we had 3 guys qualify for the 72 oly trials. Before or after that we had 3 guys rated in the top 10 nationally, running 2:17, 2:17, and 2:2x. in '73 we had a 2:15 [rated #3 nationally] (others are bit foggy - 2:17, 2:20. 2:28 thining out in 75-76 as people graduated and moved on. Ours was largely a function of group training. There were several other guys who didn't get a marathon in in a given yr - but were in excellent shape. I know a few developed stress fractures and other related running impairments. Thats what forced me to hang em up in '73 - largely out of frustration.
Some of our runs were 'controlled 'very often at or nears sub 6:00. There were not a few in which we ran that last 2-3-4-5 miles at 'race pace' (5:00 - 445/50)or better. As I recall these were spontaneous and emerged when on or more guys were just feelin it. That happened a fair number of times Remember we had a bunch of SOCAL all CIF runners, and a groups of about 10+ group of HS JC all americans (translate - a pretty rare group of athletes) - upwards of 20 - there were egos to contend with and someone was usually 'on' - so we had the guns to pull that off. Our distance runs were intense. There were runs that stayed sane, usually in the taper phase. I'm not sure this, in toto, is a wise training package now. Our recovery time was marginal. We had some people who had trained religiously with Laslo Tabori, who was a disciple of Mihaly Igloi. There philosophy was run intervals = very hard, then run some more - even harder. Some of our track workouts were easily 3-4 hours long - at very high levels. I had trained with Bob Chambers who had a much different approach. I also trained with Archie Williams - another approach. So I/we were fortunate to have 3 Ollympions and mentors. When we contact each other now we just say that the whole CSUF phenomena was an accidental, semi planned alignment of the stars. Non of us really thought we had it all come together at one time and individually fell short of what our workouts indicated. (I don't think we were the long ranger in that regard.