With a bunch of people out on paternity leave, I've been all over the Internet looking for links for the homepage. I'm not sure what took me to Alan and Julia Webb's wordpress site but I read a fascinating post on there from Julia about how she was blown away to learn what Alan did 10 days before his legendary 3:53 mile at the Pre Classic.
I can see why.
Did you know that at his district meet in the span of 80 minutes Webb won the 1600 in 4:06.74 - but he ran that off off of a 2:14 first 800 (so that's 2:14-1:52), then he won the open 400 in 49.29 before coming back to win the 800 in a negative split 1:49.53.
After watching the triple, journalist Pearl Watts predicted Webb would take down Jim Ryun's US hs record as he wrote, "The seemingly impregnable high school mile record by Jim Ryun of 3:55.3 set in 1965 looks to be in the realm of possibility, if not probability, after the performance on Thursday night by Alan Webb of South Lakes."
How sick is that workout?
Julia has Mr. Watt's full recap of it on her blog.
https://runteamwebb.wordpress.com/2014/05/13/history-lesson-how-a-353-became-reality/