10 Years Ago Kipchoge Was PAST His Prime: What Happened?

To also focus slightly more on the shoes in the case of Kipchoge ..

I remember when they became more mainstream the one huge argument against them was not the fact that they provide a huge advantage but that they provide a huge advantage for certain athletes relative to others depending on their stride etc

I think there was a study done at the time where results showed anything from a 0-8% benefit depending on the athlete.

Maybe the simple answer is that Kipchoge is the only runner of the top contenders who fall into that 8% benefit bracket .. The shoes were first used 10 years ago as a prototype in the olympic marathon by the nike athletes I think

The above is not my base case but at least its a different argument which could be a small additional reason for his success

Trust a German to come up the

Perfect cover in , it's the shoes ..........

Why was sub 2 project , not done in 2016/ 2017 .

The timing was not right ,

the dope was not to be availed of yet .

Regardless of the shoes.

Wow. Honestly this makes Kipchoge even more credible to me.

Basically he did the same on the track as he did on the roads - insane consistency.

He basically ran 10 years sub 13 in a row. Only one year over 13' and that was 2008 and there he got 2nd behind Bekele.

Of course I don't know, but I feel like Kipchoge earns the fruits from neverseen consistency. And that might be the single factor, that determines threshold/marathon pace the most. I guess we all conclude that consistency is the factor for endurance training.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that no one in history of mankind was able to train so much quality miles without significant interruption as he did. Ever. For me this makes perfect sense. Might be that his biggest talent is "just" durability.

It looks crazy, but it doesn't look too fishy for me.

Pikachu

It is clearly not the shoes ,......

If look at track , men's or women's

Records or middle distance and the rise of

various nations , tells you all need to know.

let's pick on Scotland or Australia or Norway.

in middle distance ,

Pick on them as stick out , but obvious the main benefactors in distance have been east Africans in terms of numbers and records

MOTS-c has a strong link to new drug in sprints too and same timeline there and some countries can connect both especially

If including other field events .

Assumption:

That Kipchoge and peers (and recent previous marathon record holders) are not doping, because if there is a chance that they are, then there is no humanly way he could be crushing them like this.

To sum up my point:

I wouldn't be shocked if EK tested positive tomorrow, but I wouldn't be shocked if he ended his career without positive test because he is as clean as you can be.

I believe that - doping or not - his incredible consistency and psychology is key to the spectacular performances. And even the most outragous dopers never got to this consistency.

So it's fair to constat that the performances of EK definitely go way beyond what doping can do. I just hate the prejudices that only have one point: he's fast.

With this logic everyone sub 2:10 would have to be a doper when you'd have asked runners a couple decades ago.

The 4% was first used in the US Olympic trials in 2016, then the men used them at the Olympics that year. There were probably prototypes before that, but the carbon plate/pebax combo has only been around for 6 years, and only really widely available for 4 years

For simplicity, let's divide Kipchoge and his closest competition in to three groups:

1. Dopers that never triggered doping violations or had violations covered up.
2. Dopers that triggered doping violations and were sanctioned.
3. Competitors who never dope.

Group 3 can not credibly exist because we know Groups 1 and 2 exist. Therefore Kipchoge is in Group 1.

This is the answer right here. Been very selective on his races and the rest of the time just focusing on quality training is a perfect recipe to not only improve but also extend your longevity in the sport. Especially for longer distances, constantly racing through all seasons is typically the fast track to injuries, becoming burnt out and not been able to completely peak for the races that count.

Of course you are not getting what Coevett is saying. Unless you are agreeing with him that one of the reasons Eliud barely races relates to his PED usage.

What PED usage is that? He has never tested positive and has set multiple official world records certified by World Athletics. If that's not good enough for you what would be?

I am telling you what Coevett is saying. Why are you so sensitive that you cannot comprehend Coevett’s post?

Since you choose to disregard a comment attributed to Richard Pound, try this from Charles Yesalis, a professor of kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University and leading authority on sports enhancement drugs:

“Drug use has been epidemic in Olympic sports since the 1960s. It will be epidemic in Sydney. And only stupid and careless people get caught no matter how often they’re tested,” says Yesalis.

You may know a bit about track but you know little about doping - because you don't want to. It may surprise you to know that Pound and WADA have relied upon the advice of experts like Yesalis, and will have used his comments like those above as authoritative observations.

It is quite obvious that tests catch few when only 1-2% of tests return a positive and yet the prevalence in some sports exceeds an estimated 80%. Confidential athlete surveys by the IAAF puts the numbers doping in athletics at far higher than those caught. David Howman has conceded that antidoping is less sophisticated than doping, and so they cannot catch most dopers. All they can do is hope to deter some or limit its incidence.

It is a fairly forlorn hope. Since Marion Jones was busted for doping nearly twenty years ago we have known that athletes could use drugs which were masked or for which there was not a test. Those athletes who have failed whereabouts procedures were likely unsure that what they were taking would escape detection, as WADA does not tell them if it has effective tests for each and every drug.

You scoff at doping comments here because you have invested too much in your dream, that the best are not part of the doping circus. They are the centre ring. So we see a 2.01 marathon by a 38 year-old runner who gets better with age. Barnum and Bailey couldn't do better to entertain.

Since you can't be sure any of those historical performances were clean you can't offer them as evidence that Kipchoge's record is clean.

7 yellow jerseys in the TdF from one of sport's "most outrageous dopers" says you are wrong. Doping enables consistency - especially if they aren't caught, as most aren't.

And no one else amongst thousands of runners does that?

I didn't. I offered them as evidence that the assumption that all great performances are the result of doping is absurd.

What's the difference between VO2 max and "aerobic capacity"?

"He set his sights on the Twin Cities Marathon that September, when he’d be 41. His goal was to run under 2:20 and notch the A standard for the 2004 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Hellebuyck ran pain-free throughout the race, but as he approached the final mile, he saw that he still might not meet his goal. The experiment in which he’d invested and risked so much still seemed like a failure. And then, suddenly, he says, all of the years of training and all the injections of EPO kicked in. Hellebuyck felt like he was soaring. “I don’t know where it came from. I got that extra boost, and I finished unbelievably fast. How can you possibly kick that fast at the end of a marathon? I say, You know what? That’s the first time I was believing in EPO. It was not natural. I mean seriously, the way I kicked down that last 400 yards and ran [to 2:19:59] was just unnatural.”
The Confessions of Eddy Hellebuyck (runnersworld.com)