What was it like being a 1990s runner?

Island wrote:

These are all very interesting. Yikes no gps watches back then?

Why do you care ma'am? What's the point, besides you obviously being a moderator (you're tricking no one).

gahuga wrote:

I do have a question for some of the 90s dudes, though -- a few of you have said low-mileage was the rage, but you guys would sneak in runs at home. How did you guys know/find out that high mileage was better? Was it just (un?)common sense, or was there one lone voice in the running literature telling you that high mileage was better?

For me my dad was a college runner in the 70's so he is the one who told me more mileage was better. My HS coach didn't agree, although we did run 75 to 90 miles a week in college. So I don't think that was "low" mileage.

HS coach ran us about 25 miles a week. I did that Freshman year (first year I ran). Then with my fathers help I bumped that to 45 Sophomore, 55 Junior and 65 Senior year (with 14 miles being run every Sunday as my long run). Still not "high" mileage but almost three times more than the other kids on the team. I remember kids I ran against thought those miles were crazy for a 1,500m specialist, especially the 14 miler I ran every Sunday. But I also killed them... so it did work. Most importantly it got me ready for college miles.

Star wrote:

No GPS watches.

You guessed the distance you ran every day based on the time it took and what pace you thought you were running.

Not me I used a car or bike. Gee was I smart.

The thing about measuring which training works is you cannot know how much talent a guy has versus another guy. I think the longer long run puts the tiger in the tank because it prepares you for everything else. But it requires a recovery day...

So does true sprint speed work...

But speed endurance is and always will be #1 in distances short of a 10K.

Socks for Gloves wrote:

Star wrote:

No GPS watches.

You guessed the distance you ran every day based on the time it took and what pace you thought you were running.

I was just thinking about this recently.

I did the same thing but eventually measured my regular routes by car to get an accurate distance. As a result I tended to stick to the same routes day-in, day-out so that I could measure my time. I mostly ran on streets where I could drive the route later. I’d skip opportunities to run through a park or other shortcuts if I couldn't get a car through the same path. And I never improvised by adding or subtracting from a known distance.

One upside of GPS watches is now I can wander and still get the data I want.

Your guess of pace and time is probably more accurate in most cases. Car odometers are accurate to about 10%. Some quick math if you don't believe me. A 235/60/16 tire has a nominal diameter of 27.13 inches. However the tire tread has a wear depth of up to 1/2 inch (total diameter change is 1 inch) so that could be 26.6 to 27.6 inches. Calculating circumference (pi*D)= 83.5 to 86.7 inches. So tire wear alone is responsible for a 3.7% difference assuming the odometer is dead on accurate vs nominal tire circumference which may vary too. Don't count on the odometer accuracy either.

Do you see the error of your ways?

I was one of those guys estimating mileage and I was probably over estimating most of the time that I had not ridden the course on my bike (very accurate). But I also had several coaches who went by time, not distance so it did not much matter whether you ran 10mi or 9.5 in your 70 min run, you still did the prescribed 70 min run.

Without GPS watches and HR monitors, we learned to run by feel and understand what easy, moderate and hard meant. Lots of younger runners I know now do not have this skill and therefore cannot adjust based on whether they are tired or feeling great. They only know how to run a certain pace based on their watch. These are great tools we have today, but they are only as good as the user. They also have not made it so all the local road races are accurate, but people will still ignore their GPS to claim a PR on a short course while simultaneously claiming I ran inflated mileage in the 80s and 90s. Go figure.

You could estimate distance easily using a map and a ruler, assuming you had learned how in grade school. You eventually memorized the length of major segments of road and could easily add them up in your head, assuming you had learned addition too.

No GPS... instead, I had a city map pinned to my wall with nails at each intersection and turn. A string with mile markers was tied to a nail at my house. After a run, I would snake the string around the intersections to measure off my distance. It was so cool. I still have the map for posterity, alongside various newspaper clippings and snail-mailed results common of the day. Some old Mt SAC and Kinney shirts lying around as well. Ha.

Here's another one... riding in the back of a van with the luggage on the way to an overnight meet. Seatbelts? Who need em'!?

(late 80s / early 90s)

Bad Wigins wrote:

You could estimate distance easily using a map and a ruler, assuming you had learned how in grade school. You eventually memorized the length of major segments of road and could easily add them up in your head, assuming you had learned addition too.

I used a county map to do this before I was old enough to drive. There were also mile markers along the highway. Besides the mile markers there used to be smaller markers at random distances like 4.36 and 4.68. I would time myself between those and then calculate my pace to pass the time. Those smaller markers aren't there anymore but the mile markers are.

Did many people use walkmans back then? Did people even use gps watches? Who was the top hs miler of that time period? Please share any links or videos.

good thread-i was HS in the '80s and University in early/mid '90s. Timex triathlon watch was the bomb at the time-lap and reset function. I had one for 6 years-when the strap wore out -velcro bands were the thing to replace it with! before that in the '80's I used my mom's oven clock to track run times.

-a map and ruler did fine for checking run distances-if you went on trails where you couldn't check the distance on the car odometer. Race results for cross were stickers on a board-better hope that you saw them after the race or have your coach write 'em down! as mentioned, you'd go to the running shop to pick up race flyers and mail in your check.. I still remember talking to my buddies on the phone "hey did you get the results yet?" sometimes it took 3 or 4 weeks to get your results by snail mail. Discmans sucked for running-they skipped too much as previous posters mentioned;

If I did use music-I would roll with the '80s Sports Walkman-clunky but durable with 45 minutes of Van Halen on tape -it would last 6 or 7 miles -you would rarely run farther anyway;

Road races were fewer but much more competitive in nature-I would have to run 34 minutes or faster for 10 km as a junior to be top 3 in that age group-maybe be top 20 overall--10 years later the same time would often win the race!

I remember lot of hard running on the roads and track; Singletrack trail running was something you would do for kicks a few times a year in the fall. I would use a notebook/log for rough milage estimates and key track workouts; Half of the splits I would forget since I would be too tired by the time I wrote them down. I never trained by heart rate-rather by feel.

Runner's World was actually decent then. major source of race info prior to the 'net getting popular in the late '90s//

Good times and memories-ain't nothing wrong with delayed gratification!

Doping wasn’t very well known which made a lot of “Olympians” sneak away with world records.

Island wrote:

Please Explain in every detail what it was like running back in the 90s. Simpler? Harder? Smarter? What was average qualifying times in the olympics and how about high school events? Tell me everything you remember from the past 😀.

$32 went a lot further in the 90s.....you could take your whole crew out for tea and still have some left over for beers.....it was a simpler time

Biggest thing about running in the 90's, as a 1994 graduate was that nearly everything in the state was hand timed - Big invites, Districts, Regionals. Most runners had no idea there was any other kind of timing. State meet usually had automatic since it was at Ohio State.

Today, its pretty infrequent to find a big meet that is not automatic timing in Ohio

Island wrote:

Did many people use walkmans back then? Did people even use gps watches? Who was the top hs miler of that time period? Please share any links or videos.

Walkman: Hobby Joggers

GPS watches: Not invented yet.......well definitely not in general use. May have had GPS in the late 90's but not in watch form.

Top Miler: Noureddine Morceli set the WR in the mile in 1993. Hicham El Guerrouj set the current WR in 1999 running 3:43.13

Not sure! I was a competitor in the late 70's to mid 80's. By the time the 90's arrived I was just a runner that ran for fitness. Ran my last race, a10K in October 2000, posting a time of 35 something off of 25-30 miles a week of training.

Anonymous by choice again wrote:

Shorts were shorter.

Surely we will get smart again and short shorts for men will come back.

Maybe an NCAA team will shorten their shorts down and win the title. That would definitely do it.

It can't be best for everyone to wear the slimy long "spants," they wear now.[/quote]

My friend (in the -70s, but the shorts were short!) had too big penis for the short shorts, it kept slipping out, also there were some scandals in european football where the sausage got to be admired by everyone unvoluntarily. Guess that was a gamechanger.

slow decade wrote:

Everybody ran VO2max intervals and they all sucked.

Haha amazing someone beat me to this comment.

8. We would use the old track & field boards to make fun of racewalkers.

I graduated high school in 1992, so this was my era.

I was the top middle distance/long distance runner in my area. We looked at the 1970's almost like a mythic age where the top runners of that time were untouchable. I was low mileage I believe, but I didn't even count my miles. I didn't think about diet at all (a lot of greasy home-cooked food), I never did any kind of lifting, I never even heard of indoor track season, and I played sports all year around -- XC, basketball, track and field. During track and field season, I also did long jump and triple jump (and once on a whim the coach put me in shot put) and people called me grasshopper. At the time, I didn't think this was very odd; the idea that long distance running would interfere with my power/speed didn't really occur to me until I did a tiny bit of reading later. The football coach all throughout high school was telling me I shouldn't be a distance runner (apparently because of my jumping ability), but I had loyalty to my XC/track distance coach, who was also my PE teacher in junior high.