I get a little nostalgic this time of year with all of the high school track state meets going on right now and wonder how good my 4x800m relay team could have been.
When I graduated in the early 1990s, there was a kid on my 4x800m relay who ran close to 16:00 for 3 miles in cross country. In track, he would typically run the open 800m race and also ran the anchor legs on our 4x800m and 4x400m relays. He would run about a 50.0 sec split in the 4x400m relay and about 2:00 in the 800m. He also ran something like 4:45 for the 1600m and 10:10 for the 3200m in dual meets.
He always thought that he should have been able to run faster than 2:00 with his combination or endurance and leg speed. Granted, this was in the early 1990s, so we did a lot of repeats and probably weren’t training correctly.
How fast should he have been able to run an 800m race?