I think what we fail to recognize here most of the time is that a lot of races for college guys are not ideal race conditions. If you look at the times guys run in Europe over the summer, most of these races seem to me to be established to set up fast times. A couple years ago, after I was a sophomore in high school, I saw that race where Alan Webb ran the mile American record. They set that race up so he could run that time. When German F. ran 3:55 he won by almost 10 seconds. If they had set that race up right, or if he had set himself up right to run fast he would have run maybe 3:50. But he wasn't trying to run real fast, because that kind of race you don't know how it is going to be paced. That's why college guys don't run faster all the time.
After that Alan Webb record race, I went to the track the next day and tried to break my own 1600m record. I was training pretty hard for the summer, but I noticed how smart Alan Webb is, because he ran a very even pace for the mile. So I did the same and ran 4:57. That was my best by 16 seconds. Before learning about how smart races are faster, I never thought I would even break 5 minutes for the mile or 1600m. Now I run almost 90 miles a week and have learned to pace my races very evenly. If I look at my progress and what I think I can do on a college team and after, I realize that the even pace, if I can keep improving will bring my times down. I think Coach Smith knows this and that is why we've never seen German go out too hard at the start of the races. I'll bet if we look back at the NCAA cross country race from last year and were able to know his splits, we would see that if he was able to keep running even pace, he might have caught up to Galen Rupp by the end.