ON the pulse wrote:
I feel like Jerry's biggest flaw is that he sees racing and training as being zero-sum (aka if you do too many races, you're not going to be training well). And this may very well be true for his approach (which emphasizes volume heavily). Lots of people used to revere Jerry for how mysterious and ascetic his program was. But this only works if you have athletes who are both immensely talented and incredibly durable. It didn't work, for example, for German Fernandez (who might be the most talented athlete to go to the group).
But Dathan has done a fantastic job at integrating races strategically into training, working with injury prone runners to get the most out of them (Geordie Beamish now running well), and creating a bigger connection between fans of the sport who get to see people they like racing, instead of hiding from the camera, training all the time, and being one of the biggest hermits in the sport.
I'm excited for the future because it is going to look more like OAC than it will BTC.
I just think it's kind of sad for his athletes. A running career is usually very short - probably 6 good years, though some who are exceptional can go longer - and BTC athletes are wasting some of their prime years running mainly on high school tracks. I was watching a highlights reel of Steve Cram's career and it was packed with races against the very best of his era. When an athlete retires do they really want to spend their days thinking about that time they ran really fast in front of 50 people on a high school track? Maybe that's fine, just seems like a waste of a career and the opportunity to experience amazing things