Found out about Joe Falcon today

Junkerman lives in Virginia and I believe he has a specialty run store

OK but since you were his teammate your opinion would be welcome whether some of us agree or not.

His running form was just awesome.

I knew him while he was at Princeton. I am kinda strange but he was out of his head.

In terms of all of the Joe talk: he was small, he was fast and he lived a clean life. If everyone reading that were runners in his era, and lived his life, you probably would have run 8 seconds per mile faster than you did.

Hypothesizing on this is about as valuable gas guessing what he could or couldn’t have ran. He was simply amazing.

As an example, we showed up for our 8am 14 miler hung over. He was bright eyed and had already gone fishing. Simple living!

When Joe’s head was screwed on right, he was hard to beat. his head was screwed on right 90% of the time.

In my opinion, he was more suited for the 5k and think that he could run with anyone. How fast? Whatever the fastest was.

Less than one month after that Dream Mile in Oslo, Falcon’s Achilles sheath was torn when accidentally spiked during a race in Brussels.

Joe ran 1:52.45 - 4:06.6 - 8:53.35 in high school. With the mentoring and coaching under McDonnell he was destined to win six individual NCAA titles across cross country, indoor and outdoors.

To me, the most legendary race he ran in an Arkansas uniform was that anchor leg against the Olympic 1500m champion at the 1989 Penn Relays.

For the memories, head to this article:

letsrun.com

The Legendary Story of the 1989 Penn Relays DMR Where 4 Kids from Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri Beat 4 Olympians and the Olympic 1500m Champ

Andrew Maloney and John McDonnell

by: Andrew Maloney and John McDonnell April 24, 2013 Excerpt from Chapter 9: Closing Out the Decade (1988-1991) of the new biography John McDonnell: The

Link:www.letsrun.com/news/2013/04/the-legen...

Something most posters either don't know or may have forgotten is that Joe won the Stockholm Grand Prix preceding Oslo, beating Wilfred Kirochi, Gennaro DiNapoli and Jens-Peter Herold, each of whom would run in either the next World Championships or Olympics, or both.

I would change that time frame to include the entire 90s from a 1500/mile perspective. A few fast guys, but absolute WIMPS when it came to the big boys internationally. We sucked that decade. Pure and simple, no sugar coating. Bob Kennedy was about the only highlight of the 1990s by becoming the first American under 13 minutes - 9 years after it was first done.

Todd Williams and Mark Croghan were also very good in that era. But pretty much nobody else. Falcon probably had the most potential of any of them, but he was injury prone.

Steve Holman was very talented, as evidenced by his 1:44 and 3:31, but he did not always do his best at big meets.

Whiteley

saw it up close at the 92 Trails

i probably saw it up closer ;) ...straight outta irvine. strange to think he held the road 5k AR...

Even Wheating is another one, I feel like because are sport is so injury prone. There are numerous distance athletes you can discuss from just the past decade who looked like they were going to hit that world class level or only hit it for a very short time.

That’s life at the top or near the top; commonly short lived! Actually unusual to be long term

Hard to believe that only makes him 34th fastest. and 118 runners under 13 minutes now. 13 minutes was't even broken until the mid 80s. And it's not just the Kenyans, plenty of Americans and other countries. (5k is where we stop being competitive) And we all know why this is happening ... Sad