Did any of you guys run in college in the 1990s? What was your experience like? I loved college running but man, we were so slow compared to kids these days... Why do you think that is? I mean, I know why I was slow (because I am a bad runner), but that doesn't explain the rest of the entire nation.
I just had an interesting conversation with some friends who ran for UO in the 1990s. I ran D3 in the same era and had a similar (though much slower) experience.
They said "Bill [Dellinger] had us run really hard in practice because all the workouts were set up for the fastest runner on the team. So if you weren't Matt Davis or Karl Keska, you were running all out on every interval just to stay with the group."
This was my experience as well. I "raced" every interval just to hang with the team because I didn't want to get dropped. I never ran my own pace. I was always hammering until I got dropped (which eventually happened on every interval).
The second thing they said was "We ran a lot of base mileage over the Winter and then busted out PRs in the first or second race of the season. But then after that, we'd only improve by a second or two all season long. The next 12 weeks were never much faster than the first or second race of the year because we were exhausted."
Summing up, they said, "It was like we had three races a week -- Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday -- and never really recovered or improved."
Do you have a different theory about why the times in the 1990s were so slow?