Why does the US SUCK at marathon Running

I believe that 'colder and wiser' and '3:11 scrub' are exactly right. The court of public opinion here in the US has ruled that running for a high school team, then for a college team, are of paramount importance. Everyone weighing in on this thread other than those I mentioned and maybe a couple other posts confirms this. This has 2 effects. These were touched on earlier, although most of you reading this will not be jumping up and down with joy at my conclusions.....

The 'school-sanctioned system' (I'll call it that but it isn't really an official system operated by a particular organizing body; it is actually an approach or way of thinking) identifies and primarily encourages talent up to the 5k. Sprinters come out of the woodwork, and occasionally one is good. Once in a while one of them is great. This is also true of those whose genetics are ideally suited to 600-1k and (a different genetic profile yet again) 1500-2M. There is no shortage of parental, school-paid coach, and sponsor support to those crowds. Those in that last group who really do have some distance genes but less true mid-D genetics and talent, (ie Lagat, Komen, or Houlihan as opposed to Brazier or Ajee) may excell at 5k down to 1500 and will not be ignored. It depends upon where you are and the HS 'system' there, and whether or not parents allow/encourage participation even if you're not making cuts, but that could be the last (most slow-twitch) profile to be noticed as teenagers.

If your ideal specialty events are all beyond that range, the aforementioned 'system' may leave you out. That final group may include some who's best event is around 10k. One can be very good at 10-15k and still no slouch at anything longer than a mile (Rupp, Haile). They are unlikely to be aware (Rupp/Salazar probably were, but many won't be) that their body is ideally suited to something longer than 10 minutes, and possibly 30, as teenagers. However, anyone who's going under 27/31 some day can probably run a 3k ahead of the average teen, and therefore be allowed and encouraged to race such.

But what if you're a natural-born marathoner with 98% slow-twitch? What if your aerobic system is off the charts by any metrics but not your anaerobic? Some folks - Haile, KB, and Kipchoge being excellent examples - have great range. None of them was about win 800 golds, but they could all run 5k and therefore could have been HS stars, then NCAA champions, not realizing yet they could break new ground in the marathon. Most of us, however are not them. Most growing up in the US will, if not successful at mid-D or the shortest of the true distance events, will not pursue the sport.

When teenagers regularly ran road races, you still might have. You'd ignore the school-sponsored track team, but winning your age group in the local 10ks, half marathons, or whatever, could motivate you to seriously pursue running. This describes the US a few decades ago. This approach was a little more inaccessible than simply joining a team at school, but you could still run if you were lowsy at 100-3000m but good at popular road distances. If you were aware of and had a ride to such events, and found success, you might have stuck with it through your athletic prime.

Although it could and did in the past, anything close to this is not about to happen anytime soon in this country. Your pure slow-twitch, small boned, marathon genetic lottery winner will simply be 'not good at sports' and never pursue one at all unless she discovers cycling. You end up not doing a sport in high school, college, or anywhere. In East Africa, you're exactly the kid everyone thinks WILL succeed. Here, we have the 'school-sanctioned system'.....

That's one of the problems. Unidentified and unnoticed talent. At your office, your church, in a class you had, on your street, somewhere, is someone who could scare the AR if she was handed over to Canova or somebody at 15. There may not be a whole lot of them, but you may have met one once. Unlike the Lyles brothers or Shaq, who very obviously excelled at something that schools, and therefore parents, value, they never knew there was something they could have been great at and gotten rich doing. Just read the thread; see what all the running fans think: This country does not care about under 25 distance runners like it does about under 25 sprinters, mid-D runners, football players, etc. You can live somewhere (Kenya, Japan) where everyone's aware of marathoning and believes it to be a valuable profession; you can discover and pursue it on your own; or you can have no idea unless you happen to be passable at the mile as well.

The other problem is less-than-ideal training. This country has fantastic coaching from. 100-1500m. The school system actually does work. The sponsored pro groups and even the NCAA turn out actual medal contenders. Even up to 10k, the US has churned out a parade of contenders over the decades. So shouldn't we have at least one 2:04-2:05 and at least one 2:18-2:19 runner at any given time? Maybe a couple of each every generation. Well, we don't.

It has been argued that the Italian school of marathon training typified by Canova and the schedules posted on this very Board and elsewhere, were largely responsible for taking the marathon from the 2:07-2:08 range the world was stuck in for decades to a new era in which 2:04-2:06 is the new world class. This has been explained elsewhere. In fact, that sentence is ripped off from Nate Jenkins. Nobody, least of all himself, considers Nate to be in the Rupp/Shalane category, but Canova's concepts and schedules allowed a mediocre guy who didn't win the genetic lottery to put up times he couldn't have imagined. Applied to the Rift Valley, they changed everything.

We still see American marathoners doing 6X1mile. 20 1/4s. These are great workouts if proceeded by 18-22 miles of moderate (as opposed to very easy) running. Done at 10k pace as the bulk of a workout, mile repeats are 10k-specific. Quarters done hard are 5k-specific. I believe the 'school-sanctioned system' is at least partially to blame here too. Runners and coaches train the way they know. If your first marathon is after a decade plus of hard training primarily for 5k, the temptation to use similar workouts is apparently too much to overcome.

Avoiding 'The Wall' is one of the primary focal points of effective marathon training that doesn't apply even to the half. Such training requires running through the wall in training and including hard running after the 20 or even 22 mile mark in workouts. After one of Jenkins' excellent essays on Blogspot, a reader commented that he wondered if short and fast work (at the expense of marathon-specific work) was being done due to habits learned in HS and college.

10k-specific workouts with easy long runs that end at the point of glycogen depletion or sooner does not a nation of world class marathoners make. Until true high volume individual workouts (as opposed to simply high overall running volume, most of which is easy) with significant doses of marathon-pace running and even faster work late in the run becomes commonplace, we are doomed to be 3rd tier. Sure, we've had Deena, Shalane, Rupp, and the Halls, but the ease with which we can name them and the time period we need to cover to come up with a list even of that size proves that they are indeed exceptions.

If we had several hundred runners throughout the country truly training for the marathon starting at the age of 20, we'd see world class performers surfacing with some regularity as opposed to the rare exceptions that we (fortunately) get now. Some are trying it now. The schedule that Taylor and Bruce at NAZ are on now in prep for NY looks good. 10M moderate followed by 10M race pace. WU and CD get you close to marathon distance. A 26 miler with 18-24 at race pace. Slightly less specific were 15 times a mile and a long moderate run of close to 30 miles. Many groups including them do 16 at race pace. There is no guarantee that the race will be perfect, but there is a guarantee it WON'T be if you don't train for the event.

Stinson had some great ones before his recent race. A 25k alternator such as Canova prescribes with 1k on/1k float. A hard 23 or 24 mile long run closing near race pace. Now, you might point out that some of these runners are not true world class performers. Stinson's race didn't go as planned. Nevertheless, more widespread use of these specific workouts can only help, especially if the true A-list American talent was all doing it.

If specific workouts were all everyone was doing with only a small amount for leg speed/turnover to break things up, most runners would ditch their non-specific 5k work and such. Get enough doing this early in, as opposed to in the twilight of, their careers, prior to 25, and some will rise to the top that could contend on the biggest of stages. We get an occasional athlete now that can. Salazar was doing something right as he coached several great marathon performances. And that's just it: it is possible, even in this country. We have had a few marathoners competitive with the world. There are more out there...

"When teenagers regularly ran road races, you still might have. You'd ignore the school-sponsored track team, but winning your age group in the local 10ks, half marathons, or whatever, could motivate you to seriously pursue running. This describes the US a few decades ago. This approach was a little more inaccessible than simply joining a team at school, but you could still run if you were lowsy at 100-3000m but good at popular road distances. If you were aware of and had a ride to such events, and found success, you might have stuck with it through your athletic prime."

What? Why are you mentioning 100m and HS kids do not run the 3000m. Any 2:10 or faster marathoner ran sub-9:00 in HS or were capable of doing so. HS sports are the perfect system for developing great athletes and especially for distance running. You believe great HS runners need to compete in fun runs.? You make it sound like there there are 10:00 HS runners that could go on to become 2:10 marathoners if only they were encouraged to train over a long period of time.

Why?

Incentives!

Everything is incentives.

Not many American want to gut out the kind of arduous lifestyle the Africans have. Americans can just go to college, get a normal job and make money for a career. Think of how much money you make from ages 25 to 70. Running at a competitive level is hard as hell and not that enjoyable to most of the population vs. most other sports, especially "ball sports", which pay much bigger bucks.

I remember an interview with Benard Lagat. Interviewer asked him if his primitive living circumstances were a major factor in his running success. He said absolutely. Then interviewer asked if he would go back to that or have his kids go back to that so they could be tough and run well. Lagat said hell no.

Charles Bukowski wrote:

Why?

Incentives!

Everything is incentives.

Not many American want to gut out the kind of arduous lifestyle the Africans have. Americans can just go to college, get a normal job and make money for a career. Think of how much money you make from ages 25 to 70. Running at a competitive level is hard as hell and not that enjoyable to most of the population vs. most other sports, especially "ball sports", which pay much bigger bucks.

I remember an interview with Benard Lagat. Interviewer asked him if his primitive living circumstances were a major factor in his running success. He said absolutely. Then interviewer asked if he would go back to that or have his kids go back to that so they could be tough and run well. Lagat said hell no.

You guys do a lot of generalizing that's not true. Great NCAA runners usually compete after college. There are even meh runners that have the "dream" and can barely support themselves, that continue to train seriously.

Not everyone in "ball" sports makes millions of dollars. For every Mike Trout, there are hundreds of players that spent 3-5 years in the minors without ever playing in the Majors.

Lagat is full of crap. There are plenty of great U.S. distance runners that didn't live in primitive living conditions. How is that possibly going to make someone run faster?

TL;DR

Never post a wall of text like that. It's a message board, not a term paper.

Who does produce good marathoners? East Africa? Japan?

All cultures with most of the population living lifestyles one could translate to marathon training.

95% of Americans barely exercise.

calculass wrote:

Who does produce good marathoners? East Africa? Japan?

All cultures with most of the population living lifestyles one could translate to marathon training.

95% of Americans barely exercise.

In Japan, the marathon is very popular and there are many non-sports related companies that sponsor marathoners. Here in the U.S., there isn't a enough prize money to support 50 2:10 guys. Meanwhile, U.S. marathoners win Olympic medals and the Japanese don't.

You are wrong. I'm not sure why some people have such a hard time accepting the obvious truth.

Cowboy math for you:

Average annual payroll for a MLB team is around $100M. There are 30 teams. That's $3B

That's just baseball. Add football and basketball. We're talking many billions of dollars per year.

Now give me those numbers for running.

My senior year there was this dorky really skinny kid running around in gym class when we would walk around campus

I saw him and I'm like "that kid would be a good distance runner" but never said anything. He was uncoordinated and never played a sport in his life but came out for outdoor track, and did sprints of all things.

The kid dropped a 61 at the end of the season, and I came up to him and told him to do cross country because he seemed like he was built for it. The kid has run about 17:30 in his first ever season of cross country (courses are pretty tough by me so I'm impressed)

Plenty of kids like that exist and are never found because they don't do sports since they were never successful at them, once and a while you'll get some who slip through the cracks and that's when you get something special.

10% of minor leaguers ever play MLB and some those will only play in a handful of games. Many guys will play 3 years or more in the minors, riding on busses, and not even making minimum wage that never make it to the majors. Only a fraction of a percent will ever sign a multi-million dollar contract. There have been some many very good HS and College players that never made it past Single A. Do you believe professional baseball is running a charity?

When you say he dropped a 61, do you mean for the 400? If so, he will never be a better than average NCAA runner.

EZ10Miler wrote:

TL;DR

Never post a wall of text like that. It's a message board, not a term paper.

+1

It's self-indulgent.

Don't be dense. Some states do run 3000m in HS, and it's the standard international distance. 100-3200m is the typical range of track races for HS athletes. But you know this already.

I'm not sure this is true, but let's say it is for now. There's still no good way to tell the difference between a 10:00 runner, and a runner capable of 9:00 but stuck in a system with terrible coaching and inconsistent training.

But let's say we have two 9:00 runners. One is a born 1600/3200 specialist, while the other is a born marathoner. The training that each of them does to get to 9:00 probably looks very different. One is practically a mid-distance runner with serious wheels and a great 800 time. He responds to interval workouts and might just be a star on 45 mpw. Your marathoner is nothing but slow twitch, puts in much higher mileage, and needs more long sustained running.

At invitationals, the miler is turning heads in the 4x800, 4x1600, distance medley, and open 800/1600/3200. He's got a wicked kick and a bunch of photo finish victories. The marathoner is just as good at the 3200, but his mile time isn't on the same level. He wins the open 3200 in unspectacular fashion by grinding away from the gun.

When it's time to recruit college athletes and award scholarships, the miler looks like the better bet. He's more versatile in track, and look at those flashy victories. The kid just has a competitive instinct. And all that off 45 mpw!

The marathoner, though, keeps getting outkicked. Just doesn't have the fire, it seems. Plus he's been doing college-level mileage for years already. Probably already burned out. Maybe let him walk on to XC, and maybe he'll be okay in the 10K in track.

I think the system is not perfect for distance running beyond 5K. At every step up to college graduation, runners with marathon potential do not have nearly the same incentives to continue with the sport.

Competing in "fun runs," as you call road races, would in fact help potential future marathoners identify a talent at distances beyond 5K. If American marathoners are not competitive at the international elite level, it seems like identifying more potentially talented athletes at a young age would be a good thing. Your resistance to this idea is odd.

You say running 3000m is a common race distance for HSers but then type 3200 three times. A good 2-miler is also going to be good in XC which makes them a better investment.

It is not possible for bad coaching to result in a 9:00 guy running 10:00. With even minimal traing he'll run 10:00 as a freshman.

A runner is not going to improve from 5:00 pace for 2 miles to 4:58 for 26.2 miles. You'll find very few top marathoners in the U.S. that didn't receive scholarships for college. You're 45 mile a week miler example is weird. 9:00 2-milers on the same are going to do the same workouts. No coach is going to do some type of slow-twitch analysis.

It's irritating that posters have no manners on LR. I don't think you know what your talking about but wouldn't insult you.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

You say running 3000m is a common race distance for HSers but then type 3200 three times.

Yes, I typed 3000 when I meant 3000, and 3200 when I meant 3200. I'm not sure what else you were expecting. Some invitationals have 3000m races even in states where 3200m is standard. It really isn't that uncommon. Pointless nitpicking is not useful.

It's irritating that posters have no manners on LR. I don't think you know what your talking about but wouldn't insult you.

Says the guy who dismisses road races as "fun runs." If you can't take it, don't dish it out. And especially don't complain about manners afterwards.

I feel like I have been down this road more than a dozen times. But, here goes...

Places like Kenya and Most Eastern Africa countries have an environment where young boys and girls are seen walking and running to/from school daily. Conversely, in our country, many boys and girls play basketball, thinking they will be great some day. When we watch college or pro basketball on television, we see the best of the best. Maybe 1 out of 100,000. The same is with long distance runners from Kenya and thereabouts. Their distance running is like our basketball. When we see them here or in world wide races, they are the best of the best. This is why many college XC programs recruit from eastern Africa.

While many American youngsters are sitting and playing video games, becoming diabetic on processed foods, the eastern Africans are still still training and hoping to make it out of their small village by earning money in marathons and races in America.

In short; basketball is the the youth of the USA as long distance running is to eastern Africa.

colder and wiser wrote:

SDSU Aztec wrote:

You say running 3000m is a common race distance for HSers but then type 3200 three times.

Yes, I typed 3000 when I meant 3000, and 3200 when I meant 3200. I'm not sure what else you were expecting. Some invitationals have 3000m races even in states where 3200m is standard. It really isn't that uncommon. Pointless nitpicking is not useful.

It's irritating that posters have no manners on LR. I don't think you know what your talking about but wouldn't insult you.

Says the guy who dismisses road races as "fun runs." If you can't take it, don't dish it out. And especially don't complain about manners afterwards.

A personal insult is different than saying "fun runner" and that was said tongue in cheek anyway. I'm a nice guy and rarely come across people as hostile as you.

Anyway, you didn't respond to my point. A 2:10 marathoner a rare human being and the likely scenario is that he runs a fast mile in middle school P.E., is recruited by the coach, runs extremely well in HS XC and track and then runs in college on a scholarship. What is this other path you think a 2:10 marathoner might take?

If you do respond to this post would it be absolutely impossible for you to be nice?

Another scenario is a kid who runs in HS, goes to a small college and runs. Then quits for a few years after college. Starts running again, and after a few years of big mileage breaks 2:10.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

A runner is not going to improve from 5:00 pace for 2 miles to 4:58 for 26.2 miles. You'll find very few top marathoners in the U.S. that didn't receive scholarships for college. You're 45 mile a week miler example is weird. 9:00 2-milers on the same are going to do the same workouts. No coach is going to do some type of slow-twitch analysis.

Umm... ever heard of Brian Sell? 4:28/10:06 in high school. He initially went to a D3 school, but transferred to a D1 school, and became an All American. Ended up being an Olympian with 2:10:47 PB.