I see all these posts about Jim Ryun and Bill Russell running this and that on cinders. Did they not have asphalt tracks back then? A couple of schools in our county still had asphalt tracks. Being stupid teenagers, we still ran with our spikes on cause we were too lazy to take them off, both sprinters and distance runners. Pretty dumb and probably terrible on our joints and bones, but our times were pretty much the same as on synthetic tracks.