I was looking at marathon photos from the 70's of Bill Rodgers and Co. and realized they weren't wearing watches. Were digital watches around at that time? Was someone giving splits in races? How did runners keep track of their training? When did runners start wearing digital watches, and did performances start to improve with that advent?
Yes, we had watches. We had shoes, too.
It was a system called "vistangstood".
you had to run the number of seconds in a mile before the person on side of you would run to the 300m mark. so in a race if you were on the road running 10 m on the side, you would know automatically that you had run a 5 minute mile.
Don't know how helpful this will be, but my boss told me he had his digital watch for the 1982 Twin Cities Marathon, but its time limit was 59 min, 59 sec before starting again at 0:00.00.
So he was good, given his paces, for splits and total times under 15k.
As with everything, you don't miss what doesn't exist.
Started "serious"/logging miles in 1976. Got my first digital Casio watch in 1978/79. Technology has come a long way since then. I would have loved a Garmin back then. Oh, currently have run over 71,500 miles. Lots of watches and Garmins over the decades. Currently using a Timex Ironman Tap Screen. Mostly because I can easily read the numbers--soon to be 67.
Ok, thanks, interesting to know! How did you track the miles before the watch?
curious cat wrote:
Ok, thanks, interesting to know! How did you track the miles before the watch?
What the ...?
Are you saying you didn't?
Yes my first digital watch was limited to 9:59. That really sucked.
This kid's gotta be trollin'.
curious cat wrote:
I was looking at marathon photos from the 70's of Bill Rodgers and Co. and realized they weren't wearing watches. Were digital watches around at that time? Was someone giving splits in races? How did runners keep track of their training? When did runners start wearing digital watches, and did performances start to improve with that advent?
I got my first "digital" watch in 1975. The time only displayed when you pressed a button, and then the numbers were RED.
I timed my runs by hourglass back in the 80s. That was for the intervals. For long runs I used the sundial.
hogdog wrote:
This kid's gotta be trollin'.
Uh, no. This is legit questions, and I'm beyond being a "kid" but was too young to have been a runner quite yet. For the record, my first digital watch was in 1987.
correction: These are...
Little hand is hours, big hand is minutes, and the skinny hand that moves fast is seconds.
Mr. Obvious wrote:
I timed my runs by hourglass back in the 80s. That was for the intervals. For long runs I used the sundial.
Really? Man, I thought that I was a slacker for using a calendar for my long runs. My friend used to use carbon 14.
Before the first digital Cascio, you looked at the clock on the wall when you left the house, looked at it again when you returned, and recorded the time in your log.
here's a tip wrote:
Little hand is hours, big hand is minutes, and the skinny hand that moves fast is seconds.
Why didn't they wear the analogs in races?
Ed Smallwood wrote:
Before the first digital Cascio, you looked at the clock on the wall when you left the house, looked at it again when you returned, and recorded the time in your log.
How did they track interval/recovery splits or tempo runs within a whole run?
curious cat wrote:
Are you saying you didn't?
I think he's saying that watches don't track mileage, so why would it affect one's ability to track mileage if you didn't have a watch.