Why Were Collegiate Times in the 1990s So Slow?

There was some truth to this in the 70s and 80s as well.

It was a time of low-mileage but high-intensity training based , I believe, on a misunderstanding of what Seb Coe was doing.

I’m always impressed with how many miles men and women were running in the 70s but I understand there was a shift to shorter/faster beginning in the late 80s. I grew up in the late-80s and ran very low miles. I had know idea how to train until the early 2000s when the internet allowed a window into what others were doing.

I just ran for fun and cross training, so can't speak to that, but as a 90's D3 swimmer it has been the exact same thing. Kids these days are so fast! Swimming has had a few technical and rules changes that are faster, but for the most part kids train year around and they train more hours. back in the 80's and early 90's high school kids did multiple sports and usually took the summer off or light. Daughter is on a top 20 HS XC team and they train year around pretty hard.

Workouts WERE set up for the fastest guy, and he was hammering to match what the NCAA champion had done at the same school years earlier.

Shoes sucked, nobody knew how to eat, and nobody knew anything or knew anything about anyone else. We had days "on our own," which was only so we wouldn't be racing every single day.

This is spot-on. We used to run hard 3x per week, with generally low mileage.

I remember dropping a huge workout BETWEEN xc regionals (which was do-or-die for us as we were a bubble team) and NCAA xc 9 days later. One year we ran 10x400 every week from January to June. Most of my PRs came after I had injury-forced gaps in training.

It’s the shoes bozo. The shoes and surfaces today are worth about 1 second per lap. It’s why the number of indoor 4 minute miles each year abruptly jumped from a couple dozen each year to about 100 each year.

I think a couple of factors were at play.

1. a few top programs that had most of the top athletes, after that most people stayed pretty regional for schools and hopefully had good coaching.

2. The NCAA wasn’t as organized as it is now. TFRRS and the two regional top 48 system keeps elevating performances. One year I almost made the 10k regional with a 30:00. It’s like a minute faster now. You can keep tabs on everyone. Knowing that you need to run 29:00 to have a shot changes the training mindset.

3. Lack of super meets. Guys were running steeples solo, 10k’s being won by a minute. The Azusa meets, Raleigh relays, mt sac, Stanford etc. it helps to get literally every distance runner in the country to one of these meets.

4. the internet for international recruiting, and recruiting in general. Kids are running faster in high school, the good kids are going to good programs

I think a lot of what has been said on here is spot on. i ran mid to late 90's and experienced many of these. I do think that the whole low mileage 90's is somewhat inaccurate. I think a lot of the younger coaches were following the quality over quantity formula but most of the older coaches that ran in the 60's and 70's era of frank shorter super mileage were freaking task masters. At my school our top guys were easily pushing 90-100 and were going hard MWF on off weeks and MW on race weeks. Most of the schools we competed against with older coaches were doing the same basic stuff. It was survival of the fittest. The guys that made it got a lot faster. Everyone else went to the trainers or quit. I will also say that my high school and college career spanned the entire decade. There was a major transition from absolutely beastly XC courses to the golf course/grass track model we have today. Also back then no one cared about time as much as place and team score in xc.

I do think training theory has taken massive leaps forward mainly because of all us 90's guys that got eaten alive and took different approaches to our teams. Our generation believed in proper development instead of the meat grinder. However, I will say that the huge jump in the last five years or so has really been because of running tech. Shoes, surfaces, even supplements and available healthy diets (we ate at McD's all the time). I think most of the guys from the 90's that were good would be right with the guys now if given all the same criteria.

I'm from a bit earlier, high school in the late 70s/early 80s and college in the mid 80s, but this is a bigger aspect that many today might realize. We honestly had no idea what was out there beyond what we could learn from local papers or dedicated magazines. It was usually easy to learn what the fastest people in the state or nation were running, since they'd get covered extensively, but beyond that it was difficult to get information. Maybe you could talk to the guys in your conference when you saw them throughout the season and compare times, but you often went into your regional/district/sectional (whatever your state called it) not really knowing what you were going to see as far as times and so forth, and at state you might know you were X seconds off the top guy but you wouldn't really know whether that would mean you would be seeded 2nd, 10th, 20th, or what. The internet really altered the game in the very late 90s and 2000s. My kids went through their running careers knowing everything about everyone they would compete against. I'm sure that knowing everyone's times is a big motivator.

class of mid 90's ncaa. my coach had a job to do to increase the easy mileage with talks about training and such. as a coach he did not have the ubiquity of the internet to show how important base mileage was. With the internet I would have run a lot more mileage as i was typical 25mpw in high school and gasp 50 mpw in college lol.

At that time i was racing a 3k, what the hell did i need with some Godforsaken 15 miler lmao

I agree that the shoes help. But that doesn't explain the massive gap between now and then. At one second per lap, I would still suck. Subtract 12 seconds from my 5km PR and I am still a D3 schlubb.

My point is that now a million kids are running in the 13s for 5km and back then it was like, "you're sub-14, you are a god. You might win nationals."

You had guys at Oregon in the 1990s who ran 4:10 for the mile and that was fine/normal. Even subtracting 4 seconds from their time, they are not running for the Ducks these days...

Yes. I think our "long run" was usually a ten miler on Sundays, which we ran at the pace of the fittest guy in the group (so I was never going to recover from Saturday's races). Then Monday was a down day and Tuesday was our long intervals. I was always tired even though I only did like 55-65 miles a week. 70 was a "high mileage" week for us and pretty rare.

Shoes are just part of it...super shoes have been around less than a decade. The NCAA steadily got better in the 2000s on.

The 90s "quality over quantity" low mileage mentality was a big part of it. And pre internet widespread training changes came about very slowly.

I went to a pretty good college program in the 2000s. Dis threshold running and big volume and improved a lot. But still went way to hard on some things. Athletes and coaches have way more access to info (both good and bad) than before 2010, and there is almost no comparison from today to 1990.

Shoes are just part of it...super shoes have been around less than a decade. The NCAA steadily got better in the 2000s on.

The 90s "quality over quantity" low mileage mentality was a big part of it. And pre internet widespread training changes came about very slowly.

I went to a pretty good college program in the 2000s. Dis threshold running and big volume and improved a lot. But still went way to hard on some things. Athletes and coaches have way more access to info (both good and bad) than before 2010, and there is almost no comparison from today to 1990.

Lol, my experience exactly. Graduated 2000, and improved dramatically after college just running more easy miles and less intense workouts! 10 miles was a long run, and every interval of every workout was expected to be run all out. I'd run great the first few races of the season and be over a min slower by the end, feeling awful every day. High school like this too.

It was shocking after college running much faster, and basically feeling great all the time. I wonder if 8 years of terrible, hard interval training in HS/College affected my long-term ceiling in the sport.

None of this explains why the rest of the western world was equally slow in the 90s.

Dellingers system never like three races a week. Saturday's were difficult. Tues/Thurs were split up into two easy to moderate sessions. Essentially less than double threshold when Marius Bakken was still in diapers.

Truth of the matter is that your "friends" weren't very good and thats wht they struggled. Dellinger was a big tent kind of guy who let almost anyone walk on.

Starting in the mid 80s and all through the 90s "less is more" was the predominant thought, especially in the 90s. The hs times in the 90s dropped off a cliff. There are threads in the early days of Letsrun the illustrates the statistical evidence of those dark days. It was bad -- really bad.

agreed. I think a lot of programs were run totally different than now. If practice was at 3 that meant we were supposed to be warmed up and on the line at 3. The rest was off of the top guy, and no staff member officially tracked anyone's mileage. I know most of our guys were putting in miles but recovery days were just non-existent. Especially for guys not in the top 7. The attrition rate of programs like ours were massive but when you had 20+ distance guys you can just keep feeding the machine. I still argue that most guys were doing more mileage than most people think but record keeping was spotty, and a lot were doing extra miles on their own. Colorado was pumping out huge miles at the time with Goucher and those guys. The problem was that with out recovery you just couldn't progress the way you should have.