10 years ago, US was an embarrassment in mid-d ranks (none in Worlds final of 800/1500), now we are a world power - Why?

jeffrey d. boomhauer wrote:

after having to view the asinine clean/dirty poll to get to the boards, my guess is rojo wants to see posts that accuse fast runners of doping.

your obsession with slandering virtually any elite with the doper label is embarrassing. Makes you look small....like a small turd.

I agree. Very unprofessional.

We are a world power in mid distance? Just becasue we finally won a few world or olympic medals does not make us a power. We are a power in sprints, hurdles and relays. Always have been.

You need large numbers of athletes doing hard training to produce a handful of world competitors, most of them will go by the wayside and the big numbers depend upon a running culture in a number of places, but not big-time coaches until after college. Then your Al Sals and John Cooks get their choice of sub 13:20 or sub 3:37 guys to choose from and when they take them down a few seconds, they get all the credit. But the fact is that there were a lot of people involved in getting to that point.

people stopped training according to "less is more"

Ryan Hall would support you on the point about the Internet. He has said he would be more likely to be content as the fastest guy in Big Bear Lake or California if he hadn't been reading about what Ritzenhein and Webb were doing.

jjjjjjjj wrote:

You need large numbers of athletes doing hard training to produce a handful of world competitors, most of them will go by the wayside and the big numbers depend upon a running culture in a number of places, but not big-time coaches until after college. Then your Al Sals and John Cooks get their choice of sub 13:20 or sub 3:37 guys to choose from and when they take them down a few seconds, they get all the credit. But the fact is that there were a lot of people involved in getting to that point.

That's true, we have to accept some collateral damage...in Africa they say only the strong survive.

I can give you the cynical and true reason why we have beter runners now in the MDs. I'm an MD with 2 ivy degrees and a strong, strong interest in PEDs who does some unofficial high school coaching of sprinters and MD runners.

10 years ago, the US didn't lead the world in PED use - both in sophistication and avoidance - we do now.

Kids at the HS level are exceedingly sophisticated in epo use (they know how to get it from pharmacies without scripts) and they know how to use short-acting testosterones. Combine this with thyroid hormone replacement, designer steroids that are always ahead of chemical assays and growth hormone use at a very early age, we have the answer.

If anything, people train less hard than they did 10 or 20 years ago yet we are producing better runners.

As for the whole Webb effect, he was the poster child for high level PED use at an early age. Noone runs 3:53 at 18 and can't run it at 2x without PEDs. Remember his dad was a doctor. All the top young runners modeled themselves after Webb.

rojo wrote:

Man there is some well thought out statements I totally disagree with.

Running on Empathy wrote:

Some observations ...

4. The running boom of the 80's seemed to have planted the seeds of low-intensity/high-mileage training as the "norm", a training technique not necessarily in synch with a high-intensity/speed oriented approach to middle distance running.

To me, the 80s were the opposite. It was the Runnersworld decasde of let's do as little as possible. When I was a senior in HS in 1992, my dad paid for me to get a training plan that maxed out at like 35 mpw.

I guess the article is about mid-d but in talking about the rise distance and mid-d in general in the US, i think a big part of is it knoweldge. We've gone back to the basics. Big Base + altitude (high/low trianing).

I guess we'll have to disagree on this one. When was the last time Runner's World put up a pic of a middle distance runner on it's cover during the 80's and 90's? Thinking back to the 80's, I can remember most of the media focus per running in the USA was on the marathon and guys like Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar (that's Salazar the Marathoner, not Salazar the 10k track runner), and in the 90's it seemed triathlons got the most coverage. If we were lucky to get a USA track meet on TV, most of the coverage and hype was directed toward the sprints and jumps.

One thing I forgot to mention in my original observations was that in the 80's and 90's it seemed the foreign athletes dominated the middle distances in the collegiate system. It's unrealistic to expect American kids to relate to (and eventually try to emulate) a middle distance runner who's from somewhere else.

Like them or not, I give most credit to NOP for bringing some focus back to the middle distances in USA track using American-born athletes for the most part.

hs kids, shooting up under the stands. yup.

has any US middle distance hs kid been caught, or confessed, to epo use? ever? where do you get such conviction other than paranoia?

After the 2004 Olympics, pro contract values went way up. As a result, more athletes were able to train full time - this makes a huge difference. Even without the increased contract opportunities, if you look at the # of 20-somethings in the general population still living at home now vs the 1980s there's been a huge increase. In other words, there's no stigma attached to living at home and training full time instead of getting a read job.

It comes down to doing the fundamentals. Mileage, staying healthy, quality work, consistency and good competition.

As to mileage, the advent of the Garmin watch has made counting mileage more accurate. Thirty and even forty years ago, I ran big mileage that I now realize was not quite so big. What I counted as 12 miles was really 10.5, 23 was really 20.6. I bet my experience was common. Now when someone says they are running 100 miles per week, we know it is most likely accurate.

Combine this with the sharing and comparison of training over the Internet, as well as race results and we no longer have apples to oranges being compared. It is apples to apples and coaches then can adjust training to make it effective.

Further combine this with our elites doing all the little things that can add up quite a bit. They stay away from injuries more with drills and core work, something that was not done quite so much thirty, forty years ago, or even ten years ago. Athletes use high altitude tents more now, too, even at the collegiate levels. Nutrition is also paid attention to more now than it was even ten years ago.

Most importantly, when the races come, the athletes have good competition more often and everyone gets pulled along. There is a synergy in certain races - Oxy, Mt. SAC, Stanford, the Pre Mile.

Webb's dad is an economist.

Not true about the contracts.

HS drug-testing is almost non-existent.

I currently unofficially coach several HS athletes. We talk regularly. I follow meet results and runner progression. In Texas, even HS XC athletes that are low 17 or high 16 5k runners go to pharmacies where they obtain EPO without scripts. They read about thyroid hormone replacement, short-acting testosterone and HGH as well but don't use the latter until college. Sprinters who are sub 10.8 without drugs and who aren't black are very rare. Most of the kids in the circuits I coach who are sub 10.8, aren't black, have rumors of heavy muscle acquisition and sudden improvement in times (11.4 to 10.7 in 1 year) and are considered roiders by the other kids.

Drugs are EVERYWHERE in American society. I can't tell you how many average American males turn up in my clinic on testosterone injections or gels. We are the most drugged up society oon the planet. PEDS are in every field. Ritalin and adderall for school and work, phosphodiesterase inhibitors for sex, testosterone for social dominance, caffeine for workplace - but we're not leading the world in PEDs in the high school and college and pro level? I can assure you we are. You won't find any Chinese or Russian athletes using EPO in HS, because it is hard to get and expensive and not worth the trouble. In the US, good times in HS can mean a partial scholarship or at least admission to Princeton without scholarship that couldn't be obtained on grades alone.

Wake the f--k up. Get rid of the delusional cool-aid.

yup, 17 year old boys who put on muscle and improve are roiders, yup.

got it.

here's another one for you: all successful people are thieves

and a third: women only like men with money

need any more claims that aren't true? I've got lots.

say this with your real name and I might believe you.

as an MD, don't you have a responsibility to turn in these adults who are illegally giving drugs to kids?

PED's rampant with HS distance runners? Just not believing that. The earlier comment about soccer feeding the pool of distance runners has some merit. We live in North Texas where football has been king and I can tell you soccer has grown far in excess of football - the N. Texas Soccer Association has over 350,000 kids today (if my memory serves me). Kids that would not have been suited to distance had they stuck to football are now in training for future mid to long distance runners. My son was one of them... 10 years of soccer before hanging up the cleats for XC and track. He is now a top runner and many of his team mates came from the same back ground. It's a numbers game.... how many soccer kids in the top metropolitan areas migrate to distance as my son did? The migration from football to soccer and then to distance is increasing the pool of potential distance runners.

David, why is there no mention of the possibility of US running doping and using PEDs. We are among the biggest cheats in sprinting history and cycling. Seems completely biased to suppose runners from other countries are cheating less as part of your explanation.

jhogue wrote:

David, why is there no mention of the possibility of US running doping and using PEDs. We are among the biggest cheats in sprinting history and cycling. Seems completely biased to suppose runners from other countries are cheating less as part of your explanation.

It would also seem a little weird if Americans were not doing it in the 1990s, and then were collectively like, "Hey, guys, why don't we give performance enhancing drugs a try?" right as testing was becoming more stringent.