Why was American running terrible in the 90s?

"Who needs high mileage?"

Kenyan and Ethiopian distance running.

No group training in the 90s

HANSONS CHANGED THAT.

No central area to exchange ideas in the 90s

LETSRUN CHANGED THAT

This was just before the floodgates opened of East African nation-hopping. The US and other countries have benefited greatly from this, giving the illusion that we are much better now than we were in the ‘90s.

Murph800 wrote:

"Who needs high mileage?"

This. Everyone was looking for shortcuts and magic workouts. A bunch of studies came out that stated low mileage/high intensity training was the way to go. I remember one that stated anything over 65 miles a week was wasted effort. Americans fell in love with this thinking (Exceptionalism and efficiency!) while Africans keep logging the big mileage totals and started taking over the sport.

You see that thinking still in play today. HIIT, CrossFit, Tabata, etc. all espouse short bursts of intensity being equal to hours of moderate paced work. The problem is that these studies are often based on untrained or mediocre athletes over a short period of time (4-6 weeks). Of course, busting your backside will elicit fitness improvements better than building aerobic capacity in the short term ( Ex. - the HIIT group improved their 5K by 6% while the joggers only saw a 2% improvement in the four week trial). It isn't sustainable over the long haul and will most likely lead to cycles of good fitness/injury/recovery every few months.

Bullcrayap. There is no magic mileage number for elite 5k and 10k runners. Never was and never will be.

This song makes running in the 90s sound good

https://youtu.be/BJ0xBCwkg3E

Having been a collegiate athlete in the late 80's and a wannabe roadie in the early 90's, this reverence for low miles and always running fast miles was all the rage at the time. Coincidentally, our fortunes waned as a result. Lydiard became passe. "Real" runners couldn't be seen training at anything slower than 6:00 pace. Everyone was doing two hard track sessions, a tempo run, and a fast paced long run week in and week out. "Recovery" runs tended to become fast efforts. Lots of talented runners were breaking down and burning out. With the exception of Kennedy, Williams, and Holman, most Americans were peaking at collegiate invitationals in April/May each year and no European promoter was flying Americans to the continent for big meets.

You are correct that every athlete is an experiment of one and there are many paths to the top Our distance running depth was horrible during this time and the common denominator was the popular training methods of the time. How else do you explain going from the Salazar/Nenow/Bickford/Porter level performances of the 1980s to the awful 1990-2005 era when our athletes were getting slower and less relevant on the world stage?

Steve Holman was ranked as high as #4 in the world in the 1500 but his best WC performance was 9th and he didn't make the 96 team.

Rich Kenah got a Bronze in the 800 in 1997.

Mark Everett was a real good 800 runner.

Johnny Gray got an 800 Bronze in 92 but was top of the world list that year.

Bob Kennedy was mentioned.

John Trautman would have been real good if he could stay healthy.

Joe Falcon was #3 in the world and won the 1990 Goodwill Games. Had more potential in the 5000 but dealt with constant injuries.

Jim Spivey was a 1500m contender in 1992 (WC Bronze in 1987)

But you're right about the depth.

The US could barely get 3 guys with a world qualifier in any given year in the 90s and that lasted until 2008.

I will credit Letsrun with getting the movement going.

I think we had 10 or 12 with the 2016 Olympic 1500m standard.

1. I wish I could find how many "Train Smart" articles I read back then. The theory was that low mileage "smart" training was better than spending hours and hours grinding away. So there was a big move to focus on low mileage high intensity running.

2. No internet, or if there was, it was very limited. The net and social media really has played a role in opening up training ideas, and performances beyond just the local area. If you only have to run a 9:30 3200 to win State, then that's what you will train for. IF you can see some kid running faster than that it opens up your goals, and make you ask what they might be doing.. performances ramp up accordingly.

3. Complete and total East African domination. They came in and blew everyone away and changed the level of competition.

4. New drugs. The theory before is that steroids didn't help distance runners because they just help explosive/strength based events. EPO came in and changed all that.

5. There were very few post collegiate training groups. Once a runner was out of college not many had big shoe contracts, very little support. You had The Enclave in DC, and a smattering of guys in CA or CO, training together but it was just that... a smattering. Runners could become "road w h ores" to pay the bills but that often lead to over racing chasing money, and then once you had East Africans coming in, the money wasn't even there to do that.

I don't know.

The big training group was the Enclave who trained in Georgetown.

They weren't low mileage.

I think everyone I listed in my previous post had at least one season missed due to injury.

Falcon wasn't low mileage.

There was a low mileage guy who emerged at the end of the 90s who has gone on to have a pretty good career and is still going.

His name is Bernard Lagat.

John Cook produced some good runners without pounding high miles.

Go back to the 80s and who did you have? Steve Scott and Jim Spivey. Centro 1.

Were there tons of top guys in the 70s?

There was never depth in US distance running like today.

You'd have a few top guys.

It was more about the talent pool than training philosophies.

If you went from 7-10 world class runners in each event down to 2-3 then training could be an issue.

Star wrote:

I don't know.

I don't see how this is even debatable. Sure you can cherry pick a few of the very very very best runners from that decade, but just look at HS times across the board from back then.

There was definitely low in late 80's through most of the 90's.

Playing contrarian is fine, but if your position is that we were just as good during that decade as decades before or since, that is NOT a hill I would want to die on, but have fun.

Lack of training information. Few guys did high mileage and their results, as well as how the rest of the world trains weren't available at one's fingertips like in the 2ks.

2000 Marathon Trials wrote:

No group training in the 90s

HANSONS CHANGED THAT.

No central area to exchange ideas in the 90s

LETSRUN CHANGED THAT

Training groups are part of it, but I would argue even before post college training groups could happen the NCAA wasn't very deep. We had a guy who only ran about 14 flat for indoor 5k and was D1 All-American. That is so weak, when I was in college like 5 years ago there were 13:40's guys who were not All-American indoors, and a ton of them who weren't All-American outdoors.

The depth in the 90's was pretty terrible in the NCAA distance running (take out international athletes), and that lead to the lack of marathon guys able to run under 2:19 in the 2000's.

NCAA running seems to have gotten way deeper in the past decade, and this is also leading to more depth post college since there are more fast people in college there are more people continuing afterwards. And when you have so many fast guys in college, only the top ones keep running track. This makes more 28 flat guys move up to the marathon instead of sticking to the track, which means even more fast marathoners.

I would disagree on depth. The fields at Boston, New York, and London were extremely deep with domestic talent in the early 1980s. I think 80 or so American athletes broke 2:20 at Boston 1983 and many of them weren't even full time runners.

Same as everyone else is saying.

Lydiard was the old way of thinking.

Coe ran only fast stuff.

All intense all the time beat slogging along.

East Africa emergence.

Drugs.

Funny thing was, all the folks that were spectacular during the 90s were running all the time. Nobody else was.

Demographics.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0sDT5GLuJ_k/XNw5Pm-uviI/AAAAAAAAyFs/l3GHxHrBx9QSGIGvhU1LsWasE9SlIwrxwCLcBGAs/s1600/Births2018.PNG

EZ10Miler wrote:

2. No internet, or if there was, it was very limited. The net and social media really has played a role in opening up training ideas, and performances beyond just the local area. If you only have to run a 9:30 3200 to win State, then that's what you will train for. IF you can see some kid running faster than that it opens up your goals, and make you ask what they might be doing.. performances ramp up accordingly.

This was a big one for me. The state champions where I was from ran like 4:18-4:19 for 1600 so that was what I was gunning for. Occasionally we would get these magazines talking about the country's top runners like Michael Stember and Sharif Karie who were getting close to 4:00 and they just seemed like aliens from another planet. If you were running 2:00 for the 800 you'd be all conference where I lived, so 4:00 just seemed impossible.

And then not knowing how other people trained was a big one. I just followed what my coach said which turned out to be mediocre guidance.

I was a pretty good high school runner from 1988 to 1991 in a very large county (top 20 or 30 in county every year) and I don't think I ever ran more than 25 miles in a week. Our long run was a 6 mile run. My coach was a great guy, but he was just doing what all the other coaches were doing.

In fairness, though, I did a lot more low-level aerobic stuff outside of running than kids these days do (i.e., riding a bike, pickup basketball, tennis, beach volleyball). A lot of kids who run 55 to 60 MPW in high school these days don't do much other stuff outside. If you're running around outside 2 to 4 hours a day, you can probably get away with 25 MPW to some extent.