No doubt Rich is a Big Time Operator. His 2013 NYC Marathon is one of the all-time great performances at the distance.
No doubt Rich is a Big Time Operator. His 2013 NYC Marathon is one of the all-time great performances at the distance.
ck3237 wrote:
Meb, didn't get his PR until 37, Carlos Lopez set the world record at 38
Yeah but both were roughly the same level of performance they had throughout their career. Lopes got a silver in the olympic 10k in 1976 and was a world XC champion and Meb ran a 27:13 (i.e. a performance better than all of his marathons) a decade earlier.
There are plenty of example of people coming late to the sport and doing well. That is a bit different than someone who has been training seriously for like 15 years like Sara did and then breaking through to another level. Now how big of a jump is harder to say when you cross events. Plenty of woman used to run 15:20/2:25 in old shoes. Figure 2-3 mins for them and we are looking at a nice improvement but not as crazy as might seem. But that is a lot of guessing and assumptions. Maybe she was running 60mpw and training like a 1500m runner from 15-30 and at 31 decide to be a marathoner and responded well to 110mpw and found her calling. Or as a lot of people think she just started mainlining EPO:)
It is the joy sapping part of the sport. Any good performance is immediately followed by the question of what are they on.
bumper pod wrote:
Yiannis Kouros didn't start ultrarunning until his late 1920s and many of his records were set in his 30s or even 40s. I believe he was 40 or 41 when he set his famous 24-hour record.
And Cliff Young was 60 when he kicked his ass running the multiday race in Australia
Another female late bloomer is Sinead Diver who only started running at age 33