Big Red wrote:
Didn't Villanova use to have an indoor 11 lap track, set up outdoors? Sounds weird. It's stuck in memory.
Marty Liquori trained on it, outdoors, in winter.
"used to"
hundreds of guys trained on it.
Big Red wrote:
Didn't Villanova use to have an indoor 11 lap track, set up outdoors? Sounds weird. It's stuck in memory.
Marty Liquori trained on it, outdoors, in winter.
"used to"
hundreds of guys trained on it.
Liquori did train on an outdoor track. In the 1950s and 60s few colleges had indoor facilities in the Northeast. In those days there was a series of indoor meets at Madison Square Garden, plus other meets in Boston and Philly. Many colleges had banked wooden tracks 11 laps to the mile. After football season the sections were taken out from within the stadiums and assembled. When it snowed the tracks were shoveled off. I can recall training on one in a corner of Central Park, not too far away from Columbia University. Later Columbia put a bubble over one in upper Manhattan.
In the Midwest at the land grant state universities they had flat 220 yd. tracks with a hard dirt surface. Some still existed when I went to college in the mid 1960s.
The best high schools kids in the Northeast train outdoors all winter. If their tracks are snow covered they train in parking lots, on streets, and in the halls of their schools. Though matter how bad the winter is they get their work in. When looking at the results of their state meets from year to year one cannot see any that bad weather had marred their performances.
I work at a small college not far from Philly with no indoor track. Other years training outside all winter may have been impressive, but this year the kids were outside all winter with hardly any discomfort. I'm a real wimp about cold weather and I ran outside just about every day this winter.
Winter didn't start here in Philly until about 10 days ago. January and February were great. I was out in shorts and a t-shirt a number of times in February. Jan-Feb were like March-April here. Now, March is like January.
It was an 11 lap to a mile board track similar to the one used in the Garden for the Millrose games. Marty suffered an injury on that track that compromised his chances for the 72 Olympic Games. It truly was blood on the tracks for those boards in 1966 unheralded Dick Buerkle crushed highly touted Steve Gentry in a time trial. Dick went on to a world record and steve never could match his HS times though he finally did run a faster mile in his last race for his new school PSU.
Villanova,LaSalle,Temple trained outside every winter,you will miss a few days from snow but sub 25 degrees weather is rare.
Norge wrote:
Villanova,LaSalle,Temple trained outside every winter,you will miss a few days from snow but sub 25 degrees weather is rare.
re: "sub 25 degrees weather is rare"
Perhaps nowadays, but back in the day, Jan/Feb averaged close to 25. In reference to Lipsey & Wilson, they are not high school or NCAA athletes; world class 800m runners generally don't train all winter outdoors. Speed work in the cold is not easy and potentially dangerous.
Yes.. that's a hoary old chestnut, the unsubstantiated claims of Drew McMaster, a one-time "rival" of Wells'...who admitted using PEDs and wanted to drag Wells down. But even if you think he was using PEDs that doesn't eliminate the fanatical dedication to training you see in the vids. Sprinter-type PEDs enable harder training and faster recovery, they don't magically improve cadence with no extra input.
In NJ, just 4-6 yrs ago the winters were very brutal. It hit 0 sometimes and always was in the teens.