jim ryun ovetrained

moron

"ignore the link" ?!

obviously far too difficult for your peabrain to comprehend

if you can't link to a scientifically based possible answer to the question, then don't waste my time

victory wrote:

was jim ryun overtrained, He ran 110 miles a week with most of it fast pace and never ran fatser than a 3:51. also kip keino beat him of only running 40-50 miles a week? was he overtrained?

He was also over religioned.

ventolin^3 wrote:

then don't waste my time

Oh, the irony!

idiot

your link is so full of faulty scientifics it is beyond ludicris. i suggest

http://www.dogshumping.co.uk

dont waste my time again with your drivel

looked at that link with reference to mennea and in the youtube video, you can see him clearly far to the right in his lane just before he is coming off the turn and still far to the right in the lane when he comes off the turn into the straightaway. So, it is quite possible that he ran a little extra, not a little less as long mythologized.

HRE wrote:

wellnow wrote:

Exactly. Just like no one in 2011 is going to run the mile in 3.38 or the 1500 in 3.22

And if someone ever does, in say 2025, people will get on message boards and explain what it was that El Gueroujj or Cram did wrong that kept them from going under 3:40.

************************************************

2025? I was thinking more like 2030?

Somewhere in one of ventolin's rants I saw the word evolution. The best runners of each era, run as fast as they need to and maybe a little faster.

I just pulled 2025 out as a random year in the future. I'm not sure there'll still be message boards then either.

I read a quote from Bruce Tulloh from 1967 a few weeks back as to why there were dozens of four minute milers then and why less than a decade and a half earlier there had been none. Tulloh said it was simply because in 1967 you needed to run that fast to win major races and in 1953 you didn't.

Records stand on the shoulders of previous records.

HRE wrote:

I just pulled 2025 out as a random year in the future. I'm not sure there'll still be message boards then either.

I read a quote from Bruce Tulloh from 1967 a few weeks back as to why there were dozens of four minute milers then and why less than a decade and a half earlier there had been none. Tulloh said it was simply because in 1967 you needed to run that fast to win major races and in 1953 you didn't.

Records stand on the shoulders of previous records.

Yes. The targets are different each generation. A little bit faster, a little bit faster. The runners train with those targets in mind. Physically not much evolution has taken place since the 1960's. But times are faster, training is better, conditions (tracks) are much improved.

Jim was poorly trained. But a lot of that is due to the lack of knowledge back in the day. Was he capable of sub 3:50? Of course. His 3:51.1 felt like a jog according to him, and his 1500 record was set on a dirt track where the track temperature was over 100 degrees (the air temp was 97 that day). But he didn't. And he really wasn't the same runner after his mono among other problems.

People will be arguing about some runner who's in diapers now having not broken some barrier or hit some wonderful time because he didn't have some fantastic training or what have you that came along well after his retirement.

I just can't get myself to the idea that someone who took over two seconds off the world records at the 1500 and mile and was unbeatable for nearly three years was poorly trained. True, what he did wasn't what we now think of as "proper" training and many of us might do poorly relative to our own abilities if we did what he did. But others of us might surprise ourselves and do much better than we'd expect. We have no idea what would have happened had he trained differently and cannot assume that he'd have beene ither faster or slower.

RandomRunnerMan wrote:

Jim was poorly trained. But a lot of that is due to the lack of knowledge back in the day. Was he capable of sub 3:50? Of course. His 3:51.1 felt like a jog according to him, and his 1500 record was set on a dirt track where the track temperature was over 100 degrees (the air temp was 97 that day). But he didn't. And he really wasn't the same runner after his mono among other problems.

How much hotter is the temperature in LA on that day going to get!?

A while back Ventolin had it at 90 degrees, recently he quotes 95 degrees, and now you quote "over 100"

The official temperature on the day was in the 80's according to the Pathe news reel which filmed it: -

Looking at the race on the above link, Ryun had the perfect pacemaker in Keino from 200- 1200m and the track looked in good condition.

Ventolin and his alter egos have mythologized this race somewhat. It was a great run. Could he have run under 3:50? Of course. Could he have run a 1500 in 3:24 on a synthetic track with rabbits?

Don't be bloody stupid!

moron

there is nothing "official" about their temperature call - it's just a newsreader in a london studio with no 1st hand knowledge

this is from the horse's mouth :

2'54 into video

i'll take that as "official"

you can tell nothing from that grainy video of the track's condition

here is a pic of it :

that lane 1 looks beat up & far from ideal

moron

you have absolutely no clue about limits

i saw hicham run lot of his races on satellite from '95 onwards & saw him run a 3'28.91pb in a desperate race against cacho

from 2y of watching him that looked like his limit & i figured he'd probably be good for about mid-3'28 by career end

to see him run 3'26.00 was the biggest shock i ever had to that day & i learnt that day, NEVER put a prejudged limit on absolute top class

even more shocking few years later was bernie going from 3'28.51 to 3'26.34, when he never looked better than a low-3'28 guy

do not let your idiotic, peabrain put constraints on absolute elites

Mate, don't you have other walls you could bang your head against?

HRE wrote:

I just can't get myself to the idea that someone who took over two seconds off the world records at the 1500 and mile and was unbeatable for nearly three years was poorly trained.

Ryun's training was deficient in recovery, both long term and short term. You may recall Cordner Nelson's prescient observation at the end of the "Jim Ryun Story" (which went through the 1967 track season) that Jim was showing signs of overtraining and that he should probably take a break but had to go straight into the cross country season for his junior year at KU.

Ryun came down with mono the following spring. At the US Olympic Trials in 800 meters that summer, he dropped out during the final lap, which is an event that he might well have won in Mexico City.

Ryun was obviously stale by the time the outdoor season came around in 1969 (his senior year). He was barely winning races against inferior competition. He got his clock cleaned by sophomore Marty Liquori at the NCAA mile, and he dropped out during the final of the NCAA three mile at the same meet (even though KU needed the points to beat San Jose State for the team championship). The following week, he dropped out during the AAU mile.

He should have been obliterating the domestic competition that year. But he was stale from overtraining and from having no breaks in the training cycle. He even said so to the media at the time.

From 1971-1972, his performances were wildly erratic. He would run a mile under four minutes one week, and then finish last in 4:10 the following week. It was a relief when he finished fourth in the 800 meters trials in 1972, because he had been running poorly in previous races. It wasn't even clear that he was going to make the Olympic team.

It also isn't clear WHICH Ryun would have lined up for the 1500 meter final in Munich (had he not been tripped by Billy Fordjour of Ghana in the semis).

I suspect that part of his struggles after 1967 were due to the lack of recovery. This is not an indictment of Ryun, because he had a strong-willed coach who pretty much dictated what Ryun did up to that point.

You say that Ryun might not have run as fast as he did if he trained differently. But the best years for performing at that distance is 23-26 for the vast majority of world record holders and Olympic champions. Most of the great milers like Morceli, Snell, Coe, Cram, Aouita, Ovett, El Gerrouj, Webb, etc., ran their fastest times between the ages of 23-26. Even Herb Elliott was 21 when he set his mile record.

So I think Ryun likely would have improved if he had had a really good coach following the principles of Lydiard and Bowerman. Ryun got an unlucky draw, although it could have been worse.

this is the main paper on altitude effects ( mexico, etc )http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/70/1/399unfortunately, my medline access won't bring up the full paper & the key part ( as this paper is pretty ole ) :

Tables of performances equivalent to the current world records for selected altitudes ranging from 0 to 4,000 m are proposed

if anyone has better medline access, can they post the table

Somewhere in this thread someone mentions the talk of Ryun doing better with Lydiard than he did with Timmons as being "talk over beers." I actually had that talk with Lydiard over beers and I'd be one of the last people to argue that any athlete might not have done better working with Lydiard than with anyone else.

But we don't know what would have happened if Ryun and Arthur had hooked up. Could Arthur have prevented Ryun from getting mono? Before you blame the mono on overtraining remember that it's a not uncommon disease for people in their teens and early 20s. Our local high school has several cases of it right now and no one infected is running 110 mpw with sessions like 40x440.

Could Arthur have protected Ryun from the expectations of the American public and sports media and the resulting pressures (which are the reason, Ryun claims, that he left the sport)? Remember that track was a much more popular sport then than now, Ryun was intensely scrutinized, and I'm not sure how well Arthur, coming from as small a place as New Zealand, would have been at relieveing that pressure on Ryun. Maybe he'd have been great but there's no way of knowing.

Could Arthur have found Ryun a job that allowed him to train and race as much as he needed to while still supporting his family (another reason Ryun says he retired)? Maybe he could have moved Ryun to New Zealand and landed him a job with Rothman's like he and Snell had gotten. But maybe Ryun wouldn't have wanted to leave the US or work for a cigarette company or maybe Rothman's wouldn't have hired someone who wasn't a Kiwi.

There is so much more to succeeding in his sport than simply getting the "proper" training. It's easy to look at Ryun's career from 1968 on and say he didn't recover enough or was pushed too hard. But it took an awfully long time for all of that to catch up with him. Yes, milers today seem to peak between 23 and 26 but in the 60s loads of athletes had retired because they needed to get jobs. He was an internationalist for four years and benefitted greatly from all of that incorrect training.

Yes, maybe if you have him do something else for training he runs even faster and has a longer career. But maybe he never breaks 4:00 as a high schooler, never makes the 1964 Olympics and maybe all of those early successes motivated him to push himself to the later and greater successes.

Ryun was the best middle distance runner the US ever produced and one of the best who ever ran.

It's just unbelievable to me that so many people can look at that success and decide that he'd done it all incorrectly.

[quote]HRE wrote:

You're right that track was more popular in the US then than now, but it's also true that Liquori, Cram, Ovett, Coe, and Walker (to name a few) had a similarly large celebrity to contend with. Being physically run down would make public pressure even harder to bear. So for a celebrity like Ryun, recovery is even more important than for a no-name miler. In fact, the celebrity itself might have contributed to the overtraining.

As for milers retiring early because of the difficulty of finding a job in that era, yeah, that happened a lot. But many continued to compete well past college (Grelle, Beatty, Young). Ryun's job as a sports photographer allowed him to train for two years after college. I'm guessing that he intended to retire from amateur running at the end of the 1972 season.

I agree with this statement: "Ryun was the best middle distance runner the US ever produced and one of the best who ever ran."

That's why there are so many threads like this about Jim Ryun. It's not that his career was a failure--far from it! It's that fans still imagine how much greater he might have been under better coaching.

Many, if not most, of the great middle distance runners of that era had great coaches (Liquori, Snell, Elliott). What if Ryun had had a similarly great coach?

Ryun continued to the age of 25 as an amateur athlete. I always wondered whether the lack of recovery beginning in his sophomore year in high school took something away from his performances at 24-25. This should be an interesting question not only to track fans but to serious middle distance runners, since chronic overtraining can be an insidious problem. There's no way to prove that Ryun was overtrained, but if you look at his senior year at KU, it sure did appear that he was. Anytime you don't have the competitive drive to finish the last lap of a championship race against, something is not right. The most likely explanation is fatigue.

By the way, I never said that fatigue caused the mono, but I did think it worthwhile to point out the irony of Cordner Nelson's point at the end of the book about Ryun not getting enough rest and Ryun's mono six months later. Maybe the fatigue didn't have anything to do with the mono. Maybe it was the mono and not the fatigue that caused Ryun's periodic troubles thereafter. That's always a possibility.

Rock Opera wrote:

You say that Ryun might not have run as fast as he did if he trained differently. But the best years for performing at that distance is 23-26 for the vast majority of world record holders and Olympic champions. Most of the great milers like Morceli, Snell, Coe, Cram, Aouita, Ovett, El Gerrouj, Webb, etc., ran their fastest times between the ages of 23-26. Even Herb Elliott was 21 when he set his mile record.

So I think Ryun likely would have improved if he had had a really good coach following the principles of Lydiard and Bowerman. Ryun got an unlucky draw, although it could have been worse.

Webb has had more than his fair share of injury problems during what should have been his best years, Ovett lost a season at 26 from running into a railing and then had respiratory problems from 84 onwards, Coe lost 2 seasons through mono and then toxoplasmosis when he was 25 and 26.

Shit happens to many, preventing them from perhaps reaching their best.

And for every athlete that reaches their peak between 23 and 26 there are those greats who run their fastest and best at 20 or 21, and never run faster again, for various reasons

Borzakovskiy ran his 1:42.47 pb at 20, Cruz his 1:41 at 21.

Ngeny ran his 1000 WR and 3:43 Mile at 20, Kipchirchir Komen his 1500 best of 3:29.02 at 21

Daniel Komen ran his incredible 3000 WR at 20.

Now don't tell me he should have improved by another 5 or 6 secs by the time he was 24.

Some athletes reach physical maturity earlier than others. Ryun was most probably one of those and there is no certainty he would have been any faster late in his career.

I've read Ryun's autobiography and one thing he never netions as a problem in his later days was fatigue other than when he had the mono. He never mentions hating the sessions or the miles. He talks a lot about the expectations and pressures.

Can't speak for the Brits you mention but no American miler in my lifetime reached the level of celebrity Ryun did. Liquori was well known but not followed by the media with anywhere near the intensity Ryun was.

And speaking of Liquori who you say benefitted from better coaching than Ryun did, let's remember that he has no Olympic medal and only made the Olympics in 1968. Great coaching couldn't prevent him from being injured in the '72 and '76 Trials.

Clearly something was wrong during his senior year at KU but where you see overtraining I see a guy who probably found that year as anti-climactic as something possibly could be.

In any case, we can beat this horse indefinitely and neither of us is going to change the others mind.

Watch vids of Ryun post mono on. His form isn't even the same. He's very "heavy legged" when running. Doesn't flow smoothly when kicking, which is generally when his form would suddenly change and he would look smooth and very powerful. He never really had this look or the same speed, power, endurance after he had mono. His training was sporadic after '69, he took almost 2 years off, and that doesn't help anyone. So yeah, there was potential that wasn't reached. Btw, Noah Ngeny was older than what he claimed (not unusual for Kenyans these days), according to Colm O'Connell. He said Ngeny was already at the age limit for juniors while in HS at St. Patrick's.

Ryun's progression was actually similar to Steve Cram's, but Cram didn't have some of the lousy luck Ryun had in certain areas. I think Ryun's potential was along the lines of Cram's, a bit better in fact. Cram's WR mile, watch it on Youtube, clearly shows a runner who was capable of 2 seconds or more faster on that night. I have no doubt many record setting runners never reach their potential, their limits. Herb Elliott, Daniel Komen, Jim Ryun, it's a long list. I doubt Coe reached his full potential in the 800, nor did Alberto Juantorena. I know Rudisha hasn't reached his in the 800. I hope he does.