US HS 1500 record holder Alexa Efraimson (4:03.39 pb) retires at 25

My experiences are that for the very good athletes (all american) the training is more tailored and competitions more selective in order to stretch out the season beyond the ncaa. I was a 400m conference medalist, but not quite the calibre needed to make the ncaa's. I am also canadian, and i was surprised how unscientific the training was, more just based on sheer workload. I always liked the workload and grinding it out, but it was a one fits all approach and many state champs that came into the program were broken down.

THe thing with the US is you have so much talent that you can get away with this approach to some degree. I was always amazed a guy like Grant Holloway, doing a crazy number of events, never suffered in the 110mhs. Indoors i always ran dmr/200/400/4x4, and outdoors I always ran 4x1/200/400/4x4. My individual events definately suffered a bit, but from a team perspective I certainly contributed to a higher team total than if someone else ran my 400m legs.

A little disrespectful to Hobbs. He is a teen still (maybe 20 now) and had injury right off, so "never" is relative. And he has some signs of improvement including a PB in the mile as a pro as well as some odd distances. Albeit modest PB. Just dont work so hard to bad mouth everyone.

Alana Hadley was in that group, too, right? That career progression is its own story, I suppose.

Anybody over the age of 50 here? These HS kids nowadays are just that...kids. Even in my time, I have to admit I may have been a complete disaster if I turned pro in anything at 18 y/o. That is asking for a lot of maturity. For me- girls, running, classes and beer in no particular order. Hats off to the kids who go pro at 18 and can do it. Hell, I have a lot of respect for anyone who can even run high level NCAA! They give up a good amount of partying and fun that comes with college for us mortals. Those kids (XC) always looked exhausted to me on campus. I think they need NCAA if for no other reason for the structure, lack of travel all over the earth and all the other pressures with being a pro. They need to steep.

Someone like Lebron James was set up for failure, poor kid 18y/o with millions and proclaimed king on day 1. But he was put together emotionally from day 1. So much respect for those guys and gals that can do it at 18.

Good for her. Pro level racing didn't pan out the way she probably would have liked, but she's 25- whole life ahead of her!

She would probably look back at her running career and have more positive feelings from it if she went to college for a few years and won multiple NCAA titles and did exciting things there, along with full scholarship, and then run pro starting at age 21/22. As a pro runner significant victories are hard to come by. All of the weight is put on the US championships and global championships and nothing else really matters.

And with the NIL world of today, a runner like her could still make some money while running in the NCAA. Anyone going pro today better be making the world/olympic teams at age 19, otherwise it's probably best to run in the NCAA.

Although it looks like her best year was her senior year of high school, so maybe she thought she was going to be making the world/olympic teams every year which would have made sense to not run the NCAA season.

Yes, this is right. If you choose the right situation — and unless you don’t have the grades pretty much any of these phenoms can go anywhere they want if Webb could get into Michigan — you can develop well through NCAA competition. All of our very best distance runners have. Neither Cain nor Efraimson got life-changing income out of the sport though it can be argued that Hunter has. Neither did Webb and he might have been better off developmentally if he’d transferred and stuck it out for another year or two, but he was immature and impatient and the money was still on the table. None of them were “lost in a sea of other good runners” yet to what ultimate benefit? Their development as athletes was stymied by making a jump they weren’t prepared to handle well. They might have also been poorly prepared for college life, but we’ll never know.

Funny how many people think she made the wrong decision and Hunter made the wrong decision when the facts say they made the right decision. She got aud for 8 years and git a free education. She would have been luck to get a contract had she first gone to college.

No, my fat-fingered friend, Hunter made a good decision to take a life-changing income. His priorities are his own. What we’re really talking about is the best developmental path for a teen phenom distance runner prioritizing getting to the biggest stage in the sport. We know what works well and we have evidence of what has failed 100%. It’s certainly possible that those in that 100% group lacked something that would have led to failure going the NCAA route like it has with many others. We’ll just never know.

No. 100% of the best runners in the world bypassed the NCAA. You act as if Americans are a different mammal than other humans.

Really? Because I competed in college against guys who were the best in their home countries and were often the only competitors in their events at the Olympics and World Champs from said foreign countries. So I know first-hand that it’s somewhere south of 100%. And, for whatever reasons, the model you tout has a 100% failure rate for Americans. You have yet to explain that adequately.

I confess that only about 90% of the best did not go through the NCAA. I encourage you to take a look at the top 10 all time 1500, 5000, and 10,000 meter runners. I wonder how good McDonald, Cheserek, or Knight would be had they taken the path that the best runners took.

What if she went to college and got a bunch of 3rds and 4ths? She was running OK but there would have been plenty of people right next to her.

She is different than a lot of phenoms in that she didn't fall off a cliff. She just didn't get better. She stayed at a 2:01/4:05 level but couldn't take the next step. Maybe that is all she had. Maybe she didn't progress the training. Maybe bad luck with injuries. Maybe the difference between 4:05 and 3:55 is willingness to take thyroid meds and eat pork. And so on.

Like Deena or Shalane or Jenny or Emma?

I still think Gusman is the problem.

And since you are slow, how much has he improved his 1500m time?🤣 You would need to be Greg level of cluelessness to not realize the emoticon represents that we are talking about someone early on in their career...

We don't have enough record holders who went pro to say a whole lot. Or even record holders period. If you go down the top 10 list of every year, most people improve. But there are plenty that don't.

Valby you mean with her toothpick legs?!

Ashton Eaton? I guess he lost the WR but he held it for a while.

This seems to be mainly a discussion of NCAA, yay or nay. How about a discussion of Alexa's career. Watching her 1,500 races, she seems to be always at or near the front, pushing the pace. I always wondered if she would have more success experimenting with tactics. She always seem to be running out of gas the last 200. Or maybe she just didn't have that change of gears into sprint mode that others did. Could she have had more success in a longer race?