SERIOUS DISCUSSION ONLY - Ryan Hall, Albert Salazar, Alan Webb, and Fatigue

"By far" an outlier? Let me guess, the same people who mock him with Rupp-certified and pictures of the asthma mask will now claim he always does intense workouts that no one can handle. From what I read he trained steadily in college for xc and 10000s. He really worked on speed at 22-23 then added mileage after college. He got hurt before WC in 2009 and finished behind Ritz. He did workouts post races like other NOP runners. He has run around 13 (not the AR for 4-5 years) and has been a top 5 10000 runner for 4 years. He has been about level for the past 3 years.You can find lots of runners who PRd and had a 4-5 year stretch at the top in their late 20s. Here are some examples - Tergat, Ondieki, Steve Jones, Mo Farrah. Haile G PRd at the 1500 at 26 and contineued to PR at other distances for almost a decade. As for the thread topic, some people just lastlonger than others. It happens in every sport

Gonna Call Out wrote:

What gets thrown out a lot more is defense of Rupp. He is by far an outlier. His training was not slow and steady, it has always been intense. Believe what you want, but there is something (odd) Salazar is doing with Rupp that preventing injury while doing ridiculous workouts. Rupp will suffer long-term. Joints will break down; walking will become difficult. Chasing medals makes future health a secondary concern.

Not the name I used last time wrote:

"By far" an outlier? Let me guess ...

... some people just last longer than others. It happens in every sport

Eliminating the inner part of your post yields the answer. An outlier is someone different than the norm. Rupp has longevity, and extreme training, and has avoided the typical injuries. Rupp would be an outlier because he has three areas above the norm for high-level runners. Not one or two, but three.

Gonna Call Out wrote:

E.A wrote:

If you're going to call out Rupp, why don't you call out Dathan Ritzenhein, Abdi, Meb, and Deena?

Because Rupp is claimed to be on a forever cycle of improvement, and his workouts are far more intense than the four names you listed.

Do you know how old meb is? Keep in mind that the whole idea with Rupert was that that while his workouts are incredible, his overall mileage was kept low with small increments over the years. He was still around 90 as a senior at Oregon despite making several international teams already. They were building toward 2012 since he was in high school.

Does that mean he's clean? No. but his steady progress is in line with both his program goals of mileage and his age. If he runs 12:48 at age 35 then I think we have a problem. But he may run 2:05 at age 35.

Outlier... wrote:

Not the name I used last time wrote:

"By far" an outlier? Let me guess ...

... some people just last longer than others. It happens in every sport

Eliminating the inner part of your post yields the answer. An outlier is someone different than the norm. Rupp has longevity, and extreme training, and has avoided the typical injuries. Rupp would be an outlier because he has three areas above the norm for high-level runners. Not one or two, but three.

Rupp ran 13:37 as a US junior (and 8:07). He still holds the AJR at 5000, no? But yet he doesn't hold the outdoor AR at 5000 despite many good attempts. While I believe he should have it, I don't think he'd put himself in a league above a handful of others at 5000, just slightly faster. So I don't see the logic in a guy who stays healthy, has been phenomenal since high school, has top training resources, partners and coach but yet is simply among our top 5 ever at 5000 make him some outlier as a drug cheat.

The outlier is that he has had access to altitude tents, alter g treadmills and underwater treadmills since high school, and nobody else has. That will help keep you healthy. And keeping healthy will help you get faster.

I don't know what kind of drugs a male can use and continually and consistently get better and perform in the fall, winter, spring and summer for many years with consistent improvement.

I have not read through the whole thread so I don't know if this was mentioned, but Salazar had just turned 26 the week before the 1984 Olympic marathon (last Marathon) and he arguably had run his best races before he turned 24. So, he did not make it to his late 20s.

Also haven't read through the thread, but have a hypothesis: all runners have a peak of two years, where they have the best performances of their life, and then it's all downhill from there. No one has had more: it seems like their life force is used to accomplish these feats.

Coebra wrote:

Also haven't read through the thread, but have a hypothesis: all runners have a peak of two years, where they have the best performances of their life, and then it's all downhill from there. No one has had more: it seems like their life force is used to accomplish these feats.

Ya?

Meb Keflezighi

27:13 2001

Olympic Silver 2004

NY win 2009 - thats one of the world marathon majors

Won US trials 2012

Olympic 4th 2012

Boston win 2014 another major

It seems to me Meb has been consistently near the top of the world for 13 years, not 2! His marathon pr came 13 years after his 10,000 pr. Even if you want to argue that Meb had two peaks, his first was 3 years long and his second has been 5 years so far! So did he have 3 peaks? 4 peaks? At what point, can we admit an athlete can be at the top of their fitness for longer than 2 years?

Here is another case: Geofrey Mutai

His first major international performances were in 2008 and 5 years later he's winning some of the world's major marathons, still turning in world class times 2 years after that.

So I'll kill the its just the East Africans myth now.

Toshihiko Seko won Fukuoka in 78 and Boston in 87, winning major marathons most years between. Longer than 2 years at the top of the world!

Martin Fiz of Spain won worlds in 1995 and Lake Biwa in 2000, with a 6th place finish at the Olympics. His pr came in 2000, 5 years after he was among the top in the world. Longer than 2 years!

Andrés Espinosa of Mexico won NY in 1993 but was still fast enough to place 4th in Berlin, only a minute slower than his pr from Boston in 1994, a decade later.

I have shattered the myth that runners have a limited time at the top. While the human body does wear out, its quite possible for a top runner to be world ranked in the marathon or 10,000 every year for over a decade. Perhaps some bodies wear out faster than others, but my hypothesis is what we're seeing from Hall and Webb is some sort of fatigue they don't know how to get out of.

I suspsect Hall, Webb, and Salazar are all seperate cases.

My guess is Webb wore himself out doing mad intervals on the track. At some point he just couldn't replicate the quantity and intensity of his training. That damages the psych. I honestly believe that if he would experiment with long distance road racing, he could return to the top of American athletics. Alan Webb has taken up the triathlon and already had some decent results. My guess is we'll see him near the top of that in a couple years.

Hall has testosterone problems, which could perhaps be corrected. I don't know what he can do at this point. If he'd gone back to the track I think he could have continued at a high level, later returning to the marathon. Hall doesn't seem to like things like 12x1k, 8 x mile though.

Salazar suffered from heavy depression which kept him from training well. I think after his Comrades win he could have returned to the marathon or done well at other road ultras, but he felt he had nothing left to prove. I have an alternate hypothesis, but we don't know if Salazar was truly clean and never will, so we'll just go with the one that says he was clean, because that's what drug tests have shown.

You have to change stimuli over time, give the human body new training to adapt to, then go back to previous training after a while and try to do it faster. There is periodization and longer term cycles of multiple competition cycles, but the human body doesn't wear out. This is bunk science like doctors saying mankind had a limited number of heart beats.

I believe that some of the points made on this thread highlight viable reasons as to why athletes like Hall and Salazar find it physically impossible to continue their careers. Two that are worthy of mentioning are one, the fact that both men trained in a manner that was on the edge of crazy (Salazar and Hall trained at World Record pace), and two, how the struggle to see results can yield a depleted mental state that can amplify the body's sufferings.

But I think the main reason as to why these athletes have seen their careers cut short is because "cumulative fatigue" is a very real thing in distance running, and is one of those sophisticated concepts that few people in the sport understand. Distance training is all about training your body to resist fatigue, but the difficult part of achieving this in training is that fatigue can rear its ugly head in two ways. Most athletes recognized when their body is "fatigued" the day after a workout or lift, in fact, it's easy to trace the genesis of that fatigue because it's cause was only a day or two earlier. "Slow fatigue", and by this I mean "cumulative fatigue" happens much later and can be difficult to trace. Run a couple weeks at 100+ miles and while you may feel fine at first, often times your body can feel run down months later. I think that Hall and Salazar, both being monster talents and having superhuman mental focus and toughness, ignored this long-term fatigued over and over again throughout their careers, until it finally came back in a way that they couldn't overcome.

To use a contrasting example, look at the East Africans (at least the Kenyans, I haven't spent much time working with Ethiopians). Everything about their training is fatigue oriented. Their staple workout is a progression run, which is much more "feel" based than, say, intervals or tempos that force a runner to hit a specific pace. They are also recovery crazed. I have run easy days with Kenyan Abel Kurui and his pace hovered above 8 mins per mile for over 5 miles. This is not to suggest that workout days like "fartlek" and other hard sessions like their long-runs aren't tortuous and soul-crushing, but that they take an approach that can help prevent fatigue from creeping in and building up over the years.

This may sound like hippy-philosophy, but I really believe that the reason why North American athletes tend to fry out after years of competition while East African's do not is because we listen to our bodies differently. In American culture, with all of its distractions, technology, and emphasis on exceptionalism, it is easy for a runner to ignore bodily warning signs and just keep pushing until whole engine explodes. In East Africa, where running can provide a fortune and there are no safety nets if an athlete gets injured,(you're basically back working tea plantations for the rest of your life if the pro-running thing doesn't work out) staying healthy becomes a number one priority. This, and many other cultural reasons cause East Africans to be completely in tune with their bodies compared to Americans.

In sum, cumulative fatigue is a career killer, if you let it become one. Someone earlier mentioned Rupp as an exception, but I would say he is the example of how to avoid cumulative fatigue. Salazar certainly has learned from his personal training mistakes and has devised a plan to maximize Rupp's talent without creating a massive debt of fatigue. Had Hall followed a similar path, his career would still be alive and well.

But that's hindsight, thanks for the memories Ryan, you're a legend!

I have always believed that you only have so many competitive miles in you. You either burn physically or mentally, but once it hits you are basically done competing. You maybe able to go out every once in a while and give a good go, but basically you are turned into non-competitive runner. You maybe still be able to physically train ok, but putting together 15, 20, mins or hours in a race just won't happen.

I think what is obvious here is that running is not healthy.

RUNNING DESTROYS YOUR BODY

The WSJ recommends a weekly maximum of no more than 3x30min of jogging.

That's like doctors saying you shouldn't be smoking more than 20 cigarettes per week. It is a maximum, less is better.

Humans were not intended to RUN. They were made for long walks and occasional short burst of SPRINTING during their hunts.

Persistence hunting is a myth and was never a thing in evolution.

Survival of the fittest: god made sure your testosterone plummets when you run too much so you can't have any offspring.

agip wrote:

extreme is extreme - it doesn't matter if it is from running too long or doing too many intervals.

you are playing with the odds if you go out there on the crazy edge. But that's how you win medals, so I understand why they do it.

I'm late to the party here and have just done a quick read so maybe I missed something else, but I think you've pretty much nailed it. Lots of people, maybe most of them, who push themselves hard in their primes, whether it's with lots of miles, lots of intervals, or both, find themselves with a somewhat empty tank years later and there doesn't seem to be a way to refill it.

I know when Bill Rodgers was approaching 40 he talked about wanting to better Jack Foster's "world record" for the over 40 marathon. He couldn't e get anywhere near Jack's time and announced he had downgraded his goal and wanted to better Barry Brown's US record time. He didn't get that either. When Ron Hill was in his late 30s he went for medical tests to try to find out why he could not produce the kinds of running performances he'd done previously and said he was disappointed to learn that he was perfectly healthy. It's a pretty common theme among a lot of us who ran a lot and hard in our 20s and into our master's years that "new" masters, guys who took up the sport recently have a big advantage because they aren't dealing with the wear and tear of decades of hard running.

I don't think the question of why guys like Hall, Webb, and Salazar struggle after years of hard training is nearly as intriguing as why a handful of others don't and there are a handful who fit that category. Joan Samuelson is the poster child (poster geezer?, poster geezerette?) for this group but she's not alone. Gary Romesser was piling on the miles in his prime and running very well and still doing it well into his 50s. Maybe he still is, I've lost track. Chuck Smead was running national class marathons in high school, winning mountain races and a medal in the Pan Am Games marathon in his 20s and 30s and either won or came second, can't recall for sure and am not going to look it up, in the 60-64 age group at the National Cross Country Championships 2 or 3 years ago. But it seems to me that these folks, not Hall, Salazar, Webb, etc., are the real man bites dog story.

Say what now wrote:

The outlier is that he has had access to altitude tents, alter g treadmills and underwater treadmills since high school, and nobody else has. That will help keep you healthy. And keeping healthy will help you get faster.

Well then, why hasn't the same "access" worked as well for other top runners? If only it was so easy to "keep healthy and injury-free."

Amazing post, thank you. The Glands on Strike post was awesome too.

The crazy thing about this type of fatigue we're seeing is that we really don't have a concrete medical explanation for it and we probably won't for a very long time. Doctors are concerned with the general public, not the few thousand guys on earth who push themselves the way Hall and Salazar did.

I would venture to say it's a hormonal issue. The male body slows its production of testosterone, HGH, DHEA, etc. etc. pretty much every year after 25. From my admittedly limited knowledge, even a slight decrease in these hormones can significantly inhibit recovery. Hormones also fluctuate, both throughout the day and during significant life changes. So the periods of solid training Hall says he's had in the past few years could easily have coincided with temporary hormonal "upswings".

Hall, to me, was the perfectly "built" runner, with a relaxed stride that seemed to cover more ground with every step. That's probably what made this whole process so infuriating for him. He could still glide through the air for a few miles (remember, as recently as September he was with the front pack for the first few miles of the Great North Half Marathon Run in the UK), but his body could no longer respond to the fatigue.

wakeup wrote:

They all had big careers with great YEARS. Sorry they're not running 3:48 or 2:06 at age 40.

Except they are 33..

Well, you showed me! Dang, those five examples sure did disprove my hypothesis! Good thing you pointed out that Webb, Hall, and Salazar were exceptions to the rule.

Oh, and Alan Webb has NOT been putting up decent results in triathlon. He is getting smoked at anything over the continental level.

I agree with the other posts; it is mostly attributed to adrenal gland failure. They work too hard, stress the adrenal gland too much, and can't recover as well as they used to.

Also; there seems to be a strong momentum component to success from both a mental and physical standpoint. My hypothesis is that people go on a competitive tear for a few years, then they over stress their body, get injured, and the momentum stops. I don't have scientific background for this, because this is my own personal hypothesis. I have never claimed it to be more than that.

I have always thought that Solinsky and Mottram fit this rather well, besides webb, hall, and salazar

From what I recall, Noakes' "Lore of Running" discussed this topic. It was hypothesized that After a certain point, too much intensity and/or volume causes a muscular breakdown at a cellular and metabolic level.

When Noakes analyzed careers of runners and marathoners, which included Salazar in the second edition, he believed that a runner only has a certain number of high level marathons in him. The fastest burn out the quickest; those a touch below the top times or world record times may have extended careers.

He also believed that those who lasted the longest weren't always focused on the marathon. They would at least alternate between track and XC racing and marathon training.

I tend to agree with his conclusions.

Slopenguinrunner wrote:

From what I recall, Noakes' "Lore of Running" discussed this topic. It was hypothesized that After a certain point, too much intensity and/or volume causes a muscular breakdown at a cellular and metabolic level.

When Noakes analyzed careers of runners and marathoners, which included Salazar in the second edition, he believed that a runner only has a certain number of high level marathons in him. The fastest burn out the quickest; those a touch below the top times or world record times may have extended careers.

He also believed that those who lasted the longest weren't always focused on the marathon. They would at least alternate between track and XC racing and marathon training.

I tend to agree with his conclusions.

Wow. Didn't think I'd have Noakes on my side for this one, lol

Good question--

I too have read the accounts of Salazar and thought about the same parallels. I remember back that Alberto took prozac for a while and that seemed to help his fatigue and it was controversial at the time.

I suspect that they have "burned out" their hormonal/endocrine system and that it is a consequence of the accumulation of years of hard training. In Alberto's case, many thought his heat stroke in the Boston Marathon contributed, too.

Its interesting that these athletes never seemed to suffer musculo-skeletal injuries and seemed able to push themselves so hard in training without getting hurt. Ritz, on the other hand, has always have MS injuries that prevented him from doing as much training, and he has had to adjust accordingly. He, however, isn't suffering the same fate at Hall et al.

edward teach wrote:

You have to change stimuli over time, give the human body new training to adapt to, then go back to previous training after a while and try to do it faster. There is periodization and longer term cycles of multiple competition cycles, but the human body doesn't wear out. This is bunk science like doctors saying mankind had a limited number of heart beats.

+1