Message:
[quote]replier of posts wrote:
One of these?
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/topic/article/Tom_Byers/1900-01-01/2100-12-31/mdd/index.htm
Ha! I'd forgotten about this race. Very refreshing in an era when Covette were exciting but predictable. Byers had guts to go for it. He got lucky, though: the rest of the field just miscalculated. Never heard of him again.
I agree while a good effort, more of a case of the field watching each other and letting the race slip away. The field only closed with a 58-59 second last lap which even in those days was not much of kick considering the speed of the runners involved.
Anyway i am roughly the same age as Byers and alot of runners in those days got labeled as "crazy" including myself. Since there was alot of good competition guys rea;;y experimented with training, In the previous decade 3 high school kids had broken 4 minutes in the mile, and while i was in HS a couple of local boys(soCal) were within a couple seconds of doing again.
You could go to the library and find out what kind of workouts the best guys were doing and then you had coacheslike Tabori working your ass off.
Consequently guys were trying things like speedwork the morning of races, 23 mile "recovery" runs, triple workouts, running in lead vests etc. Most of our cross country team would work as parking valets on Fri night after our meet, they would parkthe cars on the street usually about a half mile away and run back & forth until 2am and then meet for our Sat long run 17-20 miles at 7 am.
In hindsight, people would call us nuts and they were right but then again most of the guys we were running against were doing the same thing.
Byers was good, but for his time his improvement was defintely less spectacular than Ryun who went from a 5minute mile to the Olympic team in 2 years.
So i can't understand using him as a measuring stick for any modern runner. As far as nuts, I doubt it, a little flaky sure but training wise pretty typical of the era.