A Collective Effort to Maximizing Potential...or at least to reach the trials

why dont yall try to find sponsors. CocaCola sponsors alot i think. or even small corporations. It would be a tax write-off, would it not? This could be a great thing if you could get financing!!!!!!!

I wanna know why everyone thinks Eugene is such an ideal place to train? I lived there this past fall and didn't find the trails to be all that great. I found all of them and there aren't that many. I confess that I didn't have access to a car and there are probably more trails outside of Eugene, but within the town, there are few, and of those few they are flat and short. To get a long run in you will also have to do a deal on asphalt. The living is cheap but the weather is far from ideal with all that it rains from october through may. So I ask why all the hype about Eugene?

Eugene: 2 words-Jesus Country

Trails-they are plentiful, easy to get to and most people don't cry about the fact that you have to make a loop or 2 on them to get what you need in for mileage when you get to cruise past reminders of greats like Pre that trained here. There are TONS of places to run hills if you NEED to. Take a look at the many bluffs around town. Come over and run up and down Birch if you want to burn it on a hill workout.

Weather-the weather in the summer months-May-October for the most part is dry and gorgeous 75-85 degrees-most other places in the US receive more rainfall in the summer than Eugene. There is virtually NO HUMIDITY-NO BUGS-NO WIND. The rain in the winter is steady-but it never gets colder than 30 degrees, I like the rain and cool weather a little in the winter because it helps callous a guy and can similate the days when it is cool and rainy in racing. Why would you train to be able to burn it when the weather is 15 degrees and there is snow piled up everywhere-where after college are you really going to encounter these conditions?

You want altitude?-Drive 60 miles into the Cascades. You want to run in a hugeee wind for fun-drive 60 miles to the Coast.

History-people that truly love this sport have to appreciate this place-this is where it really started in the US. Every day I drive past Pre's Rock-guys like Pre, Moore, Salazar, Mary Slaney-it seemed to be pretty damn effective for them in the 70's here-which not ironically was the last time US distance runners were legitimately competitve on the world scale.

Ambience: For those of you that need nightlife, culture, diversity, etc. this city is 2nd to none. Always something to do here.

I am going to get this group off the ground here and I will work until I die to help young runners who want to be fast and achieve here and help return Eugene to the absolute #1 place to live and train for the Elite. Who wants to join me?

Eugene: 2 Words-Jesus Country

There are plenty of legends who have trained in Eugene that were not druggies why choose these athletes as your history.

Pre died from the abuse of drugs (alcohol is a drug, although a legal one, but he was over the legal limit, that is abuse)

Slaney convicted and banned

Salazar coach of convicted and often suspected.

Moore great man but his name isn't sexy enough to make your point.

OK first of all I said that the rain came from OCTOBER through MAY nonstop, NOT MAY through OCTOBER. A loop or two? Hendricks Park- 6 miles TOPS and that is going over the same trials many a time. Amazon- 1 mile long, Rexius 2.5 miles, Pre's Trail 3 MILES LONG. Yeah a loop or two or FIVE. Name me the trails if they are so plentiful. Then the worst comment of that whole post:"Ambience: For those of you that need nightlife, culture, diversity, etc. this city is 2nd to none. Always something to do here."

Nightlife? What Nightlife? There is NOTHING to do at night in Eugene. Culture and Diversity? You have got to be kidding me. The vast majority of the people, and I am talking VAST are white. That's not diversity. The hippie capital of the country - if you call that culture and diversity then I feel bad for you. Why don't you get out of Eugene and see what the rest of the country has to offer?

Yea why don't you little hippie boys come visit us here in Flagstaff.

I don't know that altitude is THAT important, but...

Altitude can be easily regulated by moving to Kenya! You aren't going to get much lower than about 1000m/3000', but that is only about 30 min away from 7,000ft+. Also, the weather is good in Kenya, the cost of living is cheap once you have the plane ticket, and the training partners are numerous and talented. Look at Marius Bakken! Why not get an American post-collegiate enclave going in Kenya?

Ha, how about Derek Parra & Home Depot, he made it to the top of his sport. Here's the problem with us, we think we are different then sports like XC-ski, Speed Skating, Swimming, Crew or Rowing, Wrestling, we are not better or different. Get a job with flex time & go to it, just do it.

Parra went the route of Home Depot with a wife expecting at the age of 30-32. The U.S.A. public only cares about a few running events a year & every 4 years at the OGames. Noone owes anyone a living when the the general public could not give one shit about you other then two weeks out of every four years.

If I were you young guys I would move to Flag with JK & go to it & stop making all of these excuses for not doing it, get a job to make ends meet & move on after the dream fades to truth & reality.

NOLIMIT, what is your e-mail, thanks.

NOLIMIT wrote: Why would you train to be able to burn it when the weather is 15 degrees and there is snow piled up everywhere-where after college are you really going to encounter these conditions?

good question - where, indeed? i am trying to figure out what training mecca might have such conditions often enough to warrant comment . . .

I am happy to email you but I don't give my email out on here "Lasse"

Magpie-I have 2 degrees and I still am unable to discern what your statement there means? If it was a cut on me then Bravo.

a cut on you? what would be the point of that? ease up there, no one is out to get you here.

i will restate for those who think two degrees mean something (not a cut, either, but a ball-busting (ever known any senseless phd-holders? i have)): did you have some place in particular with the '15 degrees and snowbound' comment, or was it just the cry of a carnival barker? i was unsure just how common those conditions are in some of the popular training destinations.

I'm not drinking the JK Cool-aid:

Running is simple and best kept so. It's not necessary to drop everything, move to Flagstaff, give JK some money, and don't expect results for months and months. Heck it sounds chiropractic to me.

Back in my day the GODs were Salazar/Rodgers for men and Joanie Benoit Samuelson for women. All "out-the-door" sea level types.

Leter on, the only USA-ers that made internationalists nervous were Todd Williams and LJ. Todd was a hometown boy. And Lynn Jennings (rest her sole) never did the altitude thing. Even Frank Shorter made his development in Freakin Florida.

Now the GODS are DD(1A) and Marla Runyan (1B) for women and KK for men. DD is a big altitude advocate it seems. But the others...nope.

I agree 100% with you seaman. Lets worry about working our ass off first for crying out loud people.

Ah say forget about proposal and just quit sport. No one care if you get PR or not. The sport is unmarketable and not worth effort.

Take Ah ahvice and quit sport. You do better with your life by pursuing academic endeavors, not worthless track sport.

you speak as if the guys from the 70s and 80s were gods, if their low altitude training was the way to go, then i think their records would still be standing, which theyre not

my good brother bump, YOU ARE A FRIGGIN IDIOT. The whole point is that we are not currently (as a collective group) running faster than the guys in the 70's and 80's. and your point is????????????? That we are????? Altitude is not the main problem obviously as more americans are training at altitude today than 20 years ago and yet we were running faster then.

I finally got around to reading this thread.

And I'm shocked that people think a coach shouldn't be paid. Our sport is treated like a joke because so many people don't treat it as a profession. No one would suggest Bill Parcells shouldn't be paid for coaching a football team or Butch Harmon shouldn't be paid for coaching Tiger Woods. But running coaches are supposed to do it for free? That's ridiculous. Any runner who doesn't give his coach 10% of his winning should find a new coach.

And I'll probably piss off a lot of people but I agree with JK that most people don't really deep down want to be good or put in the effort. A lot of peole get out of school talk about keep training, maybe keep at it a few months, find it difficult with work and the happy hours and give it up after a few months where they don't see immediate results.

And then a lot of people talk about making a big committment to running (ie leaving their jobs, living on a shoestring budget, etc) but never get around to doing it. Sacrificing everything to see how fast one can run around a track or for 26 miles is definitely not something most people should do. But most of the people who talk about doing it and then find a thousand reasons why they can't do it don't get any sympathy from me.

As for Flagstaff, living here isn't that expensive and if you want to live super cheaply you can just like you can in almost any place (if you want to double up rooms, live in not the nicest place). The job situation here is pretty glum, but most people training full-time aren't trying to get rich.

Sure if you do the high-low stuff you tear up a car and gas isn't cheap but you can always hitch a ride for free with me. And as we speak there's an empty bedroom in my house. But I've gotten used to training by myself again and have liked it for the last week so don't move out here:)

The sport isn't a profession. Where's the professional league where athletes and coaches are under contract? Where's the tv coverage of league meets? It doens't exist because there's no structure in the sport whatsoever. Spectators have no identification to the sport, only parents and friends of the individual competitor.

Think of it as investment of money. If two people start off with $10,000 each, and after many investments four years later, Investor A now has $100,000 and Investor B has only $15,000, given all things equal for the next 4 years you can't expect Investor B to catch up to Investor A.

My point is that the flaws at junior level are too big to overcome in the current level of world distance running. Most of you are clueless when it come to other country junior programs and how they operate. They train their junior talent together under the most talented coaches more so than racing, and their goals are centered around world level competition in the long term. American race their junior talent more so as opposed to training with goals centered around the conference or state level and everything little dual and invite inbetween. Anyone who is lucky enough to survive the year-round burn-out injury prone high school program still won't have a decent base to be immune at the college level. America's top 4 runners in the past 10 years all have failed to make steady progress in college (Trotter, Webb, Ritzenhein, Odlaug).

It would take an incredible and innovative post college training program, far greater than the best methods already out there by world-class programs, to overcome the junior level deficiencies now serving our junior youth through the 3rd rate high school system. It's simply not going to happen.

So go ahead and shack up and live cheaply without a decent job following your dream in a worthless sport. Until major changes are implemented at the junior level that will disintegrate the current monopolization of high school runners and replaced by a real world-class competitive training program, you will NEVER see American distance runners competitive at the World level on a consistent basis.