So what constitutes "better training" than what we knew 8 years ago? What is the breakthrough in knowledge?
Eight years ago at the high school level and younger, many fewer coaches knew about lactate threshold training and fewer were testing blood lactate levels. That's kind of a big deal, if not bigger.
Then why doesn't that enable top athletes to run faster than they were 20-30 years ago?
Your posts insult people’s intelligence. We’re all aware of the existence of PEDs in sports, and we can make our own assumptions as to who is cheating, without your mindless comments.
You could say exactly the same about training, double thresholds, lactate testing, nutrition and shoes. I'm sure you know all about that, too, without anyone telling you. But it's only doping you don't like to hear about.
It really is the shoes, in terms of gaining those last crucial seconds.
But running is incredibly popular at the moment and lots more youngsters are taking part. I also think the prevalence of 5k running is having a huge impact.
So what constitutes "better training" than what we knew 8 years ago? What are kids doing today that El G and Bekele didn't? What is the recent breakthrough in knowledge?
What does what El G and Bekele did have to do with HSers? We are talking HS where running 50mpw with 2 reasonable workouts is putting you up in the top 5%..
I am sure it is somewhat selection bias but I have seen a general trend to more miles (kids running 50-60 instead of 40-50), more hard aerobic work (tempos, cv, vo2) and less anaerobic early in the season , and a bit more emphasis on speed (40s hill sprints,plyos, and strength) than the early 00s. Nothing radical but as I said we are talking a couple seconds.
High school and college kids had access to the same knowledge of training etc that the best runners had 30 years ago. So when it is claimed that increased knowledge is producing faster times today, what is that knowledge that the best runners like El G and Bekele didn't have in the '90's and early 2000's? If the answer is the youngsters today train harder or better than they used to, what proves that? These are just claims - like nutrition etc - that are being made to justify what is otherwise difficult to explain.
This post was edited 14 minutes after it was posted.
Your posts insult people’s intelligence. We’re all aware of the existence of PEDs in sports, and we can make our own assumptions as to who is cheating, without your mindless comments.
You could say exactly the same about training, double thresholds, lactate testing, nutrition and shoes. I'm sure you know all about that, too, without anyone telling you. But it's only doping you don't like to hear about.
Right, but when it comes to running, almost all your posts are doping accusations. In the political threads, your posts add to the conversations.
Do you enjoy watching distance racing? I used to be a fan of the TDF. After Lance Armstrong’s last win in 2005, I was looking forward to seeing how the guy that stayed on Armstrong’s wheel during the climbs, Ivan Basso, and Jan Ulrich, would do without Armstrong in the race. They were both busted for PEDs right before the race. I forged on, but Landis being busted after a miraculous solo ride, was it for me. I decided everyone on the tour was a doper, and I haven’t watched a TDF since that time and that was before Armstrong. If I thought like you about track, it would be the same thing.
Covid allowed education, focus, and specialization. Shoes are phenomenal now, this was predicted. All boats are rising. This huge nationwide meets bring it all together.
Had the nation'top high school 3200 runners to compete at night at an Arcadia in 1978 times would have dropped, too. Judy not like now with so many other factors coming together.
You could say exactly the same about training, double thresholds, lactate testing, nutrition and shoes. I'm sure you know all about that, too, without anyone telling you. But it's only doping you don't like to hear about.
Right, but when it comes to running, almost all your posts are doping accusations. In the political threads, your posts add to the conversations.
Do you enjoy watching distance racing? I used to be a fan of the TDF. After Lance Armstrong’s last win in 2005, I was looking forward to seeing how the guy that stayed on Armstrong’s wheel during the climbs, Ivan Basso, and Jan Ulrich, would do without Armstrong in the race. They were both busted for PEDs right before the race. I forged on, but Landis being busted after a miraculous solo ride, was it for me. I decided everyone on the tour was a doper, and I haven’t watched a TDF since that time and that was before Armstrong. If I thought like you about track, it would be the same thing.
I think running today is hardly different from the T de F. That is why I express the views I do, when most fans prefer not to know what has happened to the sport (to all sports). I don't have to approve of it or enjoy watching it in order to recognise what it has become. In that respect, it's much the same as US politics. It is impossible to turn a blind eye to it.
YouTube got my middle schooler hyped for running. All those Newbury Park videos, NXN montages with the gear and parties, the high school kids vlogs on running. High quality media that is easy to access was the spark. It is a shame that it is hard to get good videos consistently. Couldn’t even watch NXN live this year
Anything is possible, but you are most certainly barking up the wrong tree if you think faster times at the high school level are related to wide spread doping. We have faster times across all the runners, not just those running top times.
Somehow all times are getting faster, JV high school runners would have to be doping too. You probably need to get out of your bubble more. Just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean everything is a nail.
Anything is possible, but you are most certainly barking up the wrong tree if you think faster times at the high school level are related to wide spread doping. We have faster times across all the runners, not just those running top times.
Somehow all times are getting faster, JV high school runners would have to be doping too. You probably need to get out of your bubble more. Just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean everything is a nail.
I have seen comments on threads by athletes here who have claimed they saw that doping was unchecked at school and college when they were there. There was no testing. Antidoping has also confirmed that doping is in the schools as it is in the gyms and in all age groups. That isn't saying everyone is doping but many of the most successful may be.
Was just thinking about this yesterday - I started track almost 50 years ago - our 'training' was 2 to 3 weeks of half-assed laps around a gym until the snow was gone - then about 4 to 5 weeks of races until the school year was done (Minnesota). We NEVER ran more than 15 miles a week at best and in most cases closer to 10 including races. And the shoes were horrible from a TRAINING STANDPOINT - the quality and weight of the shoes radically improved about 20 years ago not just recently.. From 14 to 24 when I stopped racing I had continuous shin splints that never went away ever. So training was based on how much pain I could take from that. We basically ran in gym/tennis shoes with leather spikes (no padding on the bottom) for races.
Now in my mid-60s I run/walk 55+ miles a week with no shin splints and only minor niggles I have to deal with.
It has to be some kind of nurture thing too - because most kids in modern day are overweight to a much greater extent than before. So where did all these lightweight dudes come from ? It might be from other sports - soccer and football have documented head trauma issues and I would bet most parents pushed their kids away from that towards something safer like running.
And a genetic thing as well : Lots more immigrants in the USA now - less than 50% white only now among young people - immigrants are generally thinner than original Americans. Nuguse for example. And unions of athletes as well - look at Kessler's parents - both are as thin as he is and were excellent runners when younger. Lots more of those types of unions among parents of high achieving young middle distance runners.
So IMO - LOTS of things coming together at the same point in time is responsible for this.
This post was edited 54 seconds after it was posted.
Covid disrupted the usual channeling of the better athletes to team sports. Relatively tall Engelhardt and Hedengren look like basketball or volleyball players.
What will be the excuse when there are even more running fast in five more years? It's not like they're all running faster than old records. We don't have people beating what Alan Webb did decades ago. We just have a lot more people running what used to be fastest in the country types of times. There was often an 8:40-8:45 runner somewhere in the United States, now there are more of them. And they show up to the same race with each other, and one of them with the extra competition runs sub 8:40. Before the new shoes in 2016-2018 we had as many sub 4's in high school as we did from 1960-2009. It was already starting to happen before new spikes, it's not the spikes.
And from 2020 on we have more sub 4 milers in 1 year than you did in all of 2016-2018. Basically the same thing with sub 8:45s. Better training helped all those 4:02 kids run 3:59. Better training and shoes let the 4:05 kids break 3:59.
A guy like Kessler was a clearly different level of talent being like 4s faster than all the 3:39 guys. What isn’t clear is if was a Webb/Ryun fitness or more like Drew Hunter in HS. I sort of expect it is the later. I expect in the next 20-30 years we will have some other outlier dropping some 3:50 type mile in HS. See the other various 17 years running fast.
And we can’t discount kids being held back (3:59 as a high schooler was epic. Probably something like 10x as many do it when you add in freshman year of college).
Training wise I get the feeling that we have a combo of more kids starting in middle school and more kids being exposed to hard core soccer/swim training at a young age. If your norm for sports training is what travel soccer does, you aren’t going to question things like 2/days. The time commitment in some of those sports is nuts.
Yada, yada, yada. It’s the shoes you dolt! It takes 4 seconds off of a mile. The reason the number of sub four milers each year suddenly went from 20-30 per year to about 100 per year had absolutely nothing to do with some revolution in training. It had to do with the $250 spring shoes they sell today. It’s clear cheating, but will never be regulated because the shoe companies control the sport and are making too dang much money off of it.
10 years ago you would hear lots about burning kids out. Any kid who pushed the limits you would just hear whispers about them burning out. You want to run threshold workouts someone doing 200's everyday would ask where's the quality work in that program. Crabs in a bucket type scenario. Now I have kids asking about doing morning runs, weights, double thresholds, cross training. If one kid starts doing it they all want to do it. No one wants to get out trained and they can see on Strava is someone is training more even if they are across the country. Tough to say your training hard when you look on Strava and see someone ran twice as much as you.
In summary people are just willing to run more now than in the past.
3 kids broke 4 in the 1960s. Then it increased every year right? We should have had 2 kids do it every year and then 3 and then 4 and then 5. But no. We went 35 years until another kid broke 4. I guess kids in the 70s, 80s, 90s just didn't care as much as kids in the 2020s. Kids today are so much more focused. They have nothing else to do since they used to have video games, and the internet, and phones, and everything else going on in the 70s and 80s.
As a late ‘80s HS runner, I honestly think the reasoning goes like this.
phase 1: running starts becoming big and we get some early stars running in basically keds.
phase 2: running companies start putting foam in shoes and while people like it, it actually screws up so my high school kids with injuries that low mileage “higher quality” training become a thing. There aren’t great times because either kids trained wrong to avoid injuries or trained right and got injuries
phase 3: starting in mid 2010s (may be off on the timing) running companies started figuring out how to make shoes consistently that don’t injure runners. Kids start running higher mileage and younger kids are inspired by older kids running higher mileage
phase 4: super shoes, social media, internet, looking up national times on Milesplit and athletic.net, etc.