Ryan Hall Out of Chicago

busted foot wrote:

RYAN HALL, IF YOU READ THIS, I HAVE TWO WORDS.

ALBERTO. SALAZAR.

YOU AND RITZ SHOULD TRAIN TOGETHER AND PLOT FOR 2012.

Al Sal has no reliable record training elite marathoners.

Maybe he needs to join the Nike team and bring his experience to Kara and Dathan...

Hall needs a new coach. Alberto Salazar would be good, then we could see what he could do with a 2:06 marathoner, or maybe Hanson-Brooks and see what they can do with a 2:06 marathoner since they have a great track record of producing good marathoners from scratch. I believe Ritz is a 10k guy not a marathoner..yet

I think you're right about Ritz and I have no idea why he is rushing into NY coming right off an injury. Ritz should follow Halls lead and NOT run NY. I don't know why these guys think it only takes 12 weeks to train for a marathon. NY will be Ritz's 5th marathon and if he finishes it will be his 5th marathon slower than 2:10.

Doingnewyork wrote:

On Flotrack there was all this hype about Mammoth and how training was FAST and better than expected. Good TRAINING MAKES YOU TIRED!!!!!!! It happens!

Have you ever seen anything on flotrack that wasn't a PR piece? They are marketing partners for the training groups as far as I am concerned.

Here's an interesting question: Who else in the country can coach Hall? Is there anyone with the experience? The Hansons have never worked with someone as talented as Hall, nor with anyone with such huge expectations. A lot of posters have indicated that one of Hall's problems has been all the pressure on him. Salazar seems like the man to go to for that--plenty of experience with pressure. But, as posters have pointed out, no real record with elite marathoners (Kara Goucher and Dan Browne notwithstanding).

Hmm...What about Bill Squires? He still around? Maybe he can dust off some old training secrets tucked away in his attic. Worked pretty darned well for Bill Rodgers/Dick Beardsley/Greg Meyer/Alberto Salazar.

gfdagagdf wrote:

Hmm...What about Bill Squires? He still around? Maybe he can dust off some old training secrets tucked away in his attic. Worked pretty darned well for Bill Rodgers/Dick Beardsley/Greg Meyer/Alberto Salazar.

His training is not the problem. His head is.

that's easy for you to say from your couch. i've never heard of a marathon on a tough course with an olympic slot on the line as "no pressure." meb wasn't that hurt -- he came in 4th -- and he was the reigning silver medalist. you also had no idea what KK was going to run. it's beyond laughable that some casual runner just dismisses the difficulty of coming in the top 3 in one of the best fields in the history of the event as "no pressure."

also, do you think webb didn't feel any pressure in the 1500 being that he had was the american record holder? he should have been able to jog it in and get top 3, no?

Meb was 4th in the 2007 Trials? I missed that one. What was his time? How close to Hall was he?

So he doesn't trust that God will make him fast on race day despite bad workouts?

What? He doesn't have the world record? I would think that if God is a great as Ryan says he is that he would have given him the power to break the world record by now.

Sounds like this guy's a phony.

I agree that Hall's problem lies in his head. and I think Mahon is not helping him break that dry spell. a new coach with new perspectives can reel him back to competitive. Ritz and Webb have done so.

Graeme McDowell wrote:

I think you're right about Ritz and I have no idea why he is rushing into NY coming right off an injury. Ritz should follow Halls lead and NOT run NY. I don't know why these guys think it only takes 12 weeks to train for a marathon. NY will be Ritz's 5th marathon and if he finishes it will be his 5th marathon slower than 2:10.

He doesn't need to run sub 2:10s in NY to prove anything... last year it was won in, what, 2:09 mid?

I am not a RH fan, but people are getting too caught up in the moment here. The marathon is a tough beast, a long-term script that takes years to play out and even Geb has had some serious setbacks. We all expected that RH would be running 2:05 or better by now, but that's not how it works. Even Bill Rodgers had trouble improving on his "breakthrough" 2:09 in '74 Boston, yet had a long and productive career. Personally I don't think RH will break 2:06, but he will come back for some solid races like NY last year.

When considering the American future of this event, Solinsky is the HUGE Wild Card (in multiple sense ha). I can see him doing some pretty impressive things after 2012, as seems to be his intent.

The fact "Ryan" tweeted how he is tapering for Chicago after he announced his withdrawal from Chicago shows how many corporate obligations he has. It also shows, many of his tweets and perhaps even his blog posts aren't really his. There probably is some master schedule set up and it says, "10 days out tweet and post about tapering" and then that post goes up. The tweet was after the pull-out announcement but the blog post it is pointing to is from 2 days ago.

It's fine for Ryan to have a pr person handle his tweets but the farther that person is from Ryan the less credibility they have.

However if someone else is handling all of Ryan's tweets and maybe his blog posts then maybe these things aren't as much a distraction as we think. However, then they should be less effective if they really aren't from Ryan.

After looking into it for some reason twitter says for everyone who is not following the post that he posted the tapering post "6 minutes ago." It said that yesterday and says it today.

However, if you look at the specific tweet now it says it was "19 hours ago."

http://twitter.com/ryanhall3/status/25823054100

That would make it about 5:30 eastern yesterday. Philip Hersh's final story went up at 6:50 (eastern or central?) but he had an earlier one up before that.

So the "tweet" about tapering may not have gone up after he announced his withdrawal but for sure it went up after he knew he wasn't running.

He needs to leave the marathon for a while. Meb was forced away by injury and came back strong. A nice, long injury would be a good thing for Hall.

IMO, he's just going to keep seeing disappointing results until he takes a long break. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Wanjiru go on a similar decline unless he takes a break. You can almost sense the way Wanjiru talks that he's not really as committed as he was before the Olympics.

I think Hall kind of peaked in the Olympic Trials, and since then has been trying to find something that really motivates him. Getting 3rd or 4th to Africans isn't motivating him as much as crushing the field at the OT's did. So it's hard to keep the fire burning.

Why didn't he just pray to God more? I thought God could fix this stuff. Maybe God isn't all that great.

UsedToBeKnowItAII wrote:

He needs to leave the marathon for a while. Meb was forced away by injury and came back strong. A nice, long injury would be a good thing for Hall.

IMO, he's just going to keep seeing disappointing results until he takes a long break. I also wouldn't be surprised to see Wanjiru go on a similar decline unless he takes a break. You can almost sense the way Wanjiru talks that he's not really as committed as he was before the Olympics.

You are dead right!! He doesn't need a new coach; he needs a break and a change. A winter of European XC would do him good. There would be no expectations and it would be a healthy change.

It is very easy to get caught in a cycle of spring and fall marathons and it catches up to you within a few years. A lot of the people who are commenting have never run elite marathons and had to wrestle with the emotional, psychological and physical pressures that high level marathoning entails.

Give him time to step back from marathoning and come back for a good run at London 2012. Think about it, if he did a fall and spring marathon in 2010 & 2011 and then trials in January 2012, then he would have done 5 marathons in the 2.5 years leading to the Olympics. London would be his 6th marathon in 2.5 years. Way too much to perform well at the Games IMHO.

To medal in London, he will need to be ready to run 2:05 on the day. He can't get there by racing a marathon every 5-6 months.

Ryan and his coach Terrance Mahon know what they are doing. This endless cycle of half marathon/marathon has beat him up though. Running as fast as he typically does is a huge stress on the body coupled with the intense long training blocks he has to endure. He has proven that he is tough physically due to no injuries in quite sometime and competing at a high level. We all get stale and have issues with running from time to time, it goes in cycles. Personally, I think he's lacking some speed training. People tend to forget that he ran a 13:16 5k the summer before he ran his 59:42 half marathon in January. He needs to back to some fast racing again then look to his some fall marathons to mix it up and keep his edge.