USA Middle distance in disarray

Burrito-gate threw a wrench into the main Nike USA camp, with trickle-down repercussions, that actually had roots in The Oregon Project shakedown.

The Hocker-Teare brigade hit a hiccup.

This might open a door for a fresh start with Coach Brosnan (Newbury Park) and a SoCal Camp that includes a Mike Smith NAU pipeline.

I could add,

also the Adidas roll-of-dice with either Tinman or Hobbs is MIA, an the ON AC coach is not a mid-d specialist.

The only American mid D athlete OAC has is Sage Hurta who did brilliant at USAs. I don’t count Yared as he was coached by Carlson up until USAs

I suspect too much over thinking training, and not enough basics.

We should make Jim Ryun the Commissioner of US Middle Distance !

Yet our HS athletes have never been better than these last few years.

no matter what it is, it’s been very grim the last couple of days

I dont get why we're surprised when athletes who race so infrequently fail to race well when it matters

All the wasted time on gimmicks.

All the studs are trying to swag out ‘till they pass out instead of race. Too busy posting on Instagram.

Yep. That and all the coddling.

Knew this was going to be how it would go after USA's. Cooper Teare struggling to pull ahead at the US championships against a bunch of people who aren't really relevant on the world level. And then in the 800 same thing, our typical studs of Hoppel and Brazier struggling, Murphy not the same anymore, and no one else has really stepped up to be a consistent 1:44/1:45 low runner in the last couple years. Our typical people either need to get back to their formal selves of we need some fresh college grads to step it up to the next level.

So a pro group is going to start up with a coach who has coached a 4:56 and 13:43 as his best athletes? Any idea how many coaches have far more experience and better credentials?

Too much time trialing and not enough actual racing.

I don't know why Americans think lane 1/the rail is going to open up, it hardly ever does.

True, today's crop of Americans love to get boxed. Although I have a hard time blaming a lack of racing. Cooper Teare ran a ton of college races and he's the worst of them.

At any rate, being boxed doesn't explain why basically all our middle distance runners, outside of the women's 800, get dropped any time that the pace is fast. By the time they get near the finish, they're not close enough to the leader to get boxed.

Not running fast enough.

This 1:45, 3:33, 13:10, 27:20 mindset has killed us.

Most of Cooper's mile/ 1500m races in college were fast, time trial type races. Rarely had to resort to good tactics to place well. He even acknowledged this, and said that's why he wanted to give the 1500 a real shot this year.

That's not the problem with the US men 800 and 1500 runners. Most of them race enough.

It's some of the 5k and 10k runners that don't race that often.

We have guys running faster than that, the problem is that they’re not running fast at the right time of the year. Flashy early season time trials don’t mean anything if you pick up an injury going into worlds and the Olympics.

I’d rather we had more Americans like Centro, Paul Chelimo, or Jenny Simpson who didn’t bother running insane times early in the year, but would always peak right for the big show.