Rosebud wrote:
People forget she was a World Junior Cross Country champion. She was always outstanding. The bit about her bad form is overexaggerated. Whatever works. Plus she worked like a dog, had about the highest pain threshold ever seen in the sport, and was wealthy enough to afford more physical therapy than the next 12 elite runners combined.
Working like a dog is easy when your doped up so you can recover between those workouts.:) And while we can't measure it, I doubt her pain threshold is different than just about any other elite runner.
The part to remember about her is that she was fast for a marathoner. Not many 30 min 10k woman take the marathon seriously. After all normaly they can medal in track races. And of the ones that try (Ingrid Kristiansen comes to mind. Of course there were no 10k on the track in championship races for most of her career), few have the marathon as there best event. If you take say 100 guys with 30:00 10k times, you will find a couple of them running 2:15s (go look at the japanese marathoners for guys with ratios like that). Her times are outliers but they aren't absurd to the level we have never seen before.