American Runners Have Never Been Slower

I am saying that for a long time.

And this study just looked into the years starting at 1996 -22

Runners in the end 80ies where even faster.

Thanks for the humor, that was the most garbage statistical analysis I've seen in a long time.

So much junk math in their study I don't know where to begin, so I'll just pick out one example. They claim to have come up with a method to tease out the walkers from race results so they don't skew the average times. Their method shows that in 2001 4.3% of race participants were walkers, in 2002 it was just 0.5%, and in 2003 it jumped back up to 2.1%. Does that make a lick of sense? What happened to all the walkers in 2002?

Of course they boldly declare that "this is the most exhaustive study of running results in history" and "our key conclusions are 99% statistically significant".

Wow, that’s pretty bad. I’m embarrassed for them. It’s not even wrong.

Midland Road Run 1980

Pepsi Challenge Finals 1980

NYC Marathon 1982

And the races I was running back then, where they'd be taking down the finish chute at 22 minutes in the 5K, and 50 minutes in the 10K.

As living comfort grows, physical abilities get diminished.

I read that in Japan the grip strength of men is now almost 30% lowe r than what it was 50 years ago.

That's perfectly logical. We've developed all sorts of gadgets to do work once done by hand or foot, etc. and in doing so weakened ourselves. Are you likely to develop more muscles by cutting your grass with a push mower or with a riding one?

At most major US marathons you see faster times at the front, top ten or so, than you saw forty plus years ago. But from about twentieth on the times from decades ago were faster. These folks are really just validating something most of us have known for a long time but poking holes in the explanations we've suggested. They don't really have a validated explanation.

Have you seen American people in general? It’s not surprising considering how fat America is now. People fight over parking at the front door of Walmart and the fight over a scooter. My gosh laziness had destroyed this country.

73% of American people are overweight or obese.

Only 27% are normal weight. That is a quite disturbing low number.

But but bouncy shoes!!! Cheater shoes!!! Boing boing shoes!! Surely we can all go under 3 hrs with these with ease?? And have all our elites under 2:05?? I mean they're so cheater-like, you can so easily just fly forever on these!! Just increase your speed by 6 mph and increase your distance by 300%. Letsrun experts told me.

My observation of age group running over the last 30 years is there has been a dramatic increase of the percentage of runners that are over weight or even obese. This group has gotten so large that run company's have had to increase the size of their clothing to serve this customer.