What was it like being a 1990s runner?

As has been said, tech shorts didn't exist. We all ran in Champion mesh basketball shorts.

Winter running was a challenge as winter running gear didn't exist. You'd layer a bunch of cotton and then a Starter team jacket. You'd cover your legs in baggy sweats or nylon "warmup" pants or just wear shorts. Gloves and hats were whatever you had for day to day use. This in the Midwest where it was sub freezing with snow.

Treadmill running was not a real option. Tread tech was bad and you couldn't listen to music. Best option was a Discman that would skip repeatedly.

Ran most mileage around a quarter or half mile loop so coach could watch us and make sure we weren't cutting time.

Ran intervals 3-4x days per week. Tempo or threshold work was whatever you got when some over eager teammate pushed the pace on easier days.

Had to drive 45 minutes to find a shoe store that sold spikes.

Only record of your times was what coach chose to give you at year end or what was published in the paper if the meet director chose to call or fax in times after the meet.

No race timing devices. You'd finish cross races by filtering into a narrow chute and handing a note card that was pinned to your singlet to the person at the end of the chute.

National titles were determined through a postal competition. Teams ran a 3 mile time trial and coaches submitted times via mail to determine winner.

You know, a lot of this was true for my experience running in HS, college, and the roads in the mid-2000's. I'm currently 31.

We still looked up results in the newspaper when I was in high school.

Still used popsicle sticks or note cards when finishing in XC.

Still wore cotton gear and the only pair of running shorts that I owned were the school issued ones.

Tons of intervals.

When the weather was crappy, many indoor track workouts were done by running through the school hallways, in a 160-200m square. No treadmills. No indoor tracks around.

Great. Practices were an hour or less, never tired, plenty of playing time on race day, speed work helped develop a devastating JV level kick, Never wasted time with high mileage, didnt know how much good runners trained, 60 min long run once a week, law of diminishing returns, quality over quantity. Seb Coe never ran over 20 miles per week.

Flex Lewis wrote:

Needed the Sony yellow "sport" discman to listen to your CDs. Long runs you'd have to listen to the same one on repeat. But that thing was still a POS and skipped constantly.

That's why I ran with a cassette player instead

Not one mention of The Harrier newsletter

Shame. My coach was a subscriber and it was a good way to keep in touch with national results

* Low mileage was a killer. Predominately meant we were way too hot on intervals and speed. Mentality resulted in threadbare results for many folks. Injuries were plenty.

* During mixed races (not just same aged racers) 70's-80's guys were a threat. As a result of low mileage, guys from the 70's-80's (high mileage) were a threat to take you down at any distance over 800m. Crazy to think but you could enter a 5K road race in the early 90's and get your ass handed to you by a 30-40 year old. I remember going out in a 4:30 mile one local turkey trot 5K and trailing some old dude and thinking: Damn who is this guy. Just some hard as nails 80's guy killing me with his 80-100mpw training.

* As mentioned by many. It's astounding that coaches didn't learn. Basically the Lydiard-type mentality fell out of favor and they only way we though you could get better was by running fast intervals. You must run fast at times. But not 3 times a week.

* GPS watches. Removes some of the fun of not worrying about pace.

* Track Times were slower as the distances increase when running with same Age group. In college, to find 800m races where the winner was faster than 1:48 was difficult. Same in HS. Breaking 2:00 was a legit marker in the 800m and get you to districts/1:58 regionals/1:56 states. Ran 4:28 for a 1600m in HS and that was viewed as pretty good. If you ran anything under 4:20 you were flying.

* Because of a lack of information and the above reason (slower track times during the 90's). You got a false sense of where you were in the pyramid. With the internet, the pyramid is well known. The internet has helped keep runners hungry.

* High school was more fun for meets if you liked racing. Dual meets I'd do the 200M, sometimes 800m, 1600m, 4x400m relay and high jump. Every once and a while I'd do even more events. Now they limit you.

started XC freshman year of HS, which was Fall '96 in the SF East Bay, here's a few of my memories of the late 90's running scene:

-magazines like "High School Runner" came out, and showed really bright spikes/ waffle xc shoes in them. EastBay catalog would usually have 1-2 covers of a pro runner each year. they were usually cut out and taped to my closet door. (Kennedy, El G, etc.)

-adidas soccer was really popular at the time, and that heavily influenced running. people were usually wearing the adidas soccer slide sandals with socks after races. adidas t&f distance spikes never changed their spike plate at all for years, from about '95-'03 they had the same spike plate/ placement

-the uniforms we had were made by a company called "sub4" and they were these cheap nylon things. the wind would come through San Francisco in the evenings of october/ november races and you'd be running up a hill and just freeze in those. they stuck to your chest with your sweat and were generally uncomforable.

-not sure if this was a local thing or not, but it seems like today the running culture is very supportive of one another. where i was, it seemed more us vs. them, and we don't want any other team to succeed at all. could've been high school immaturity.

favorite one re: running to music:

-when i wanted to listen to a pump-up song (like Bad Religion or Pennywise or Offspring), I would play it loud 2-3 times in a row, and try to get the song stuck in my head, then go out the door and do my 7 miles or whatever.[quote]

People who ran with a Sony Walkman/Discman were not called hobby joggers, but that's how we thought of them.

Cotton. It stayed wet. Oh, the smell of the drying rack in my college dorm. Gore Tex was a gift from God and cost accordingly.

Running tights were new in the late 80s. We were not sure if we should question the masculinity of the guys wearing them. Or should you wear shorts over them? But you could tell when the girls wore them which guys you didn't need to question.

7" shorts were for basketball. Runners wore 1" shorts.

The better female runners were sickly thin and did not look healthy. This may still be true but there are more who do look healthy.

Almost every track I run on now is better than almost any track I ran on in HS and most from college. In HS they were mostly cinder or rubberized asphalt. There were very few rubber tracks and I only ran on one Mondo track in the 90s (college). Indoor tracks were total crap and nobody claimed they were faster.

You would mail order running shoes from a catalog.

I used a Timex Ironman watch. We assumed 7:00 per mile. Most people probably ran less miles than they thought. I got a GPS watch around 2007 and it was a POS: heavy, poor ergonomics, inaccurate. Went back to the Timex Ironman until this year when GPS watches finally became usable watches and reasonably accurate.

Heart Rate monitors existed in the early 90s and they were a POS: heavy, uncomfortable, inaccurate, and nobody really knew what it meant anyway. That is the same as today.

Even without GPS watches, we knew which courses were short. We considered those who quoted these as PRs to be total losers.

There were less races and they were competitive. They were also cheap and usually the top 3 got a running store gift certificate even in small races. Big races had money. Races did not waste money on finisher medals. People did not do races "for the experience". You either raced or you did not show up. Hence field sizes of about 50-100, but there was NOBODY finishing a 5k in 30+min. A 24min 5ker would NEVER line up at the front. Today's races make a lot more money but don't much care about "racers".

Island is a living example that even if you're a terrible troll, if you just stick with it you'll turn out a decent troll.

I train with a lot of runners who have only started in the past 5 years or so, and the biggest difference I can see is that they get psyched out by their GPS paces. This is a bizarre concept to me.

The biggest advantage of starting running in the 90's is that there's only place I care about my pace - in a race. The rest of the time I'm either going as hard or as easy as I can, depending on the type of training run.

For runners now they think they have to hit a particular pace for every single run. That must be tiring.

Live to run wrote:

I train with a lot of runners who have only started in the past 5 years or so, and the biggest difference I can see is that they get psyched out by their GPS paces. This is a bizarre concept to me.

The biggest advantage of starting running in the 90's is that there's only place I care about my pace - in a race. The rest of the time I'm either going as hard or as easy as I can, depending on the type of training run.

For runners now they think they have to hit a particular pace for every single run. That must be tiring.

I don`t think most "pace"-runners think it`s tiring to hit the best individual paces.......

Most of them inclusive myself as a runner finds it very inspiring to perform their individual paces that is a very good "instrument" to predict their race times.....no hard workouts....just exact individual best paces.

Things I Heard and Learnt wrote:

Flex Lewis wrote:

Needed the Sony yellow "sport" discman to listen to your CDs. Long runs you'd have to listen to the same one on repeat. But that thing was still a POS and skipped constantly.

That's why I ran with a cassette player instead

there was a minidisc player phase for a few years.

There were more track and cross country programs that contributed to strong competition in most events. For example, I live a couple of miles from the giant University of Maryland. The AD abolished several non-revenue sports years ago, while spending millions on loser football coaches and basketball teams.

This morning I ran on a track down in SE that is practically invisible to most people except a few local walkers, yet the surface is better than the U of MD track, which today is not much more than the staging area for the soccer team bleachers....

Times on the track can predict that. Plus factoring in the average mileage in the build.

It's wasted energy to analyze your predicted race times every single run, whether factoring in pace or not. At most I might check in with race or predicted race fitness once a month.

Nothing like going for that summer training run on a hot late July/early August evening before heading back to college, and then dialing up rotary style 1800TRACK (or whatever it was) to get the latest results from Vic Holchak over in Europe.

-Women's/girls was different: they ran a 5k college X-C instead of 6k; there was no steeplechase for girls/women either; women also ran 3,000m on the track instead of 5,000m.

-Less East Africans on the US scene dominating everything.

-Less mixed race kids also dominating everything (sprints, mid and long-distance) as the country was far whiter.

-No-one really knew their competitors very well, as you couldn't look up profiles, times or anything else on the internet.

-People were nicer, in general, and more naive; less obsessed with 'how they looked'; definitely very few girls wore make-up plastered all over their faces like today at X-C and track meets. I guess social media profiles and the 'selfie' obsession have changed a lot since then. Definitely, the girls were less plastic.

-You didn't fear for you life every time you went running, and night time running was a thing, even for the girls on our college team (you worried a lot more about dogs or the weather than being attacked by a crazy).

-You estimated the time/pace you were running, and became quite expert at knowing exactly what pace you were running at, and the distance (due to no GPS or being able to map out the courses on a map app beforehand). Having said that (in the midwest), having the roads spaced roughly 1-mile apart was a big help.

-You knew your neighbors, and the distance running fraternity was very tight-knit.

This isn't quite right. There was no depth in elite U.S. distance running at all, but the oddity was the U.S. had one world class male athlete in every event from the 1,500 to the marathon: Holman, Croghan, Kennedy, Todd Williams, and Kempainen respectively.

I think the 90s was the decade when race organizers figured out baby boomers preferred to run 5 Km road races instead of 10Kms. It's only half as far. I road raced primarily in the 80s and I don't recall ever racing a road 5 Km. Also, I don't recall any of the guys I ran with in the 90s paying any attention at all to their heart rates.

Remember the "New Breed"? Mid 90s marketing of top runners like Todd Williams and Steve Holman, and there were one or two others.

Some Americans also made "remarkable" improvements from age 28 to 35, like dropping 30 or 40 seconds for 5000 meters; from journeyman pro to Olympian. Regina got caught.

The Runner succumbed to Runnersworld in 1989 so, and the latter promised to bring good reading for competitive runners. They lied.

There were only two or three message boards available, and they weren't all that populated.

Trackandfield list serve, where thread messages were delivered as emails.

TnFmedia.com sort or ruled for a few years, and it was a precursor to this place.

rojo was thin

By the end of the decade "A" standards for the Olympics were difficult to achieve, and the US often didn't field full teams because so few male runners were making the standards (ca. sub 3:36, 13:30, 28:00, 2:14)

Something like 6 high school runners ran sub 9 3200 from about 1990 to '98, compared to a dozen or more in the 70s and 50+ today.

Nobody talked about hobby joggers and they didn't serve hot chocolate after most races.

I ran from the mid to late 70s. The 1979 NCAA XC meet was super competitive. The winner was a 4 time world record holder. Many good runners came from that meet.