Why were amateur marathonners so fast 30-35 years ago?

1. I had video games in 1980....the Atari 2600 was released in 1977 and I bought a Coleco vision in 1982 from Fred Meyer in Bellingham, WA. I also rented videos like a fiend.

2. Maybe true if you lived in the middle of nowhere but most fast marathoners of the day lived in the city...Boston, etc. There were definitely a LOT of cars and it could be argued it was way more dangerous to be out running in short shorts in 1980! Beer can to the head anyone?

3. I don't think blaming wages or inflation are a good justification for slower running times. Unless you can point to a study that correlates wages with endurance performance....in fact, I think higher wages = slower performances. Think about 50+ year old tri guys who dump 10s of thousands of dollars on bikes and gear and can barely run 4 hours in the marathon.

4. There were TONS of hobby joggers. Do you not recall the RUNNING BOOM of the 70s? Not everyone was running 2:10.

5. I'm not even going to go there. Next thing you'll be blaming flat earth.

Just Another LRC Idiot wrote:

YUKI MF KAWUACHI FTW!!!!! wrote:

Probably the main reason why Yuki Kawuachi gets so much love. Trains hard, works hard and races like a animal.

You mean, that low mileage guy who does not run doubles? LOL!

And has a marathon pr over a minute faster than bill rodgers dispite only running 80-100 mile weeks, with occasionally running 120 mile weeks in singles.

As asserted......we ran MUCH more. High schoolers often did 75-100 miles weeks certainly by their senior year. Most of us rank recreational marathoners saw 3:00 as the holy grail NOT sub 4:00 that now seems more like a haughty goal.

I was running 80 miles a week in my first year of semi-serious training for my FIRST marathon. Breaking 3 hours after three more years of evolving a schedule that worked for me took me to 6-10 mile tempo runs/races frequently on tired legs and weekly mileage in excess of 110 miles.

My first sub-3 was all the way down to a 2:52 (Avenue of the Giants), and about 2 years later broke 2:50, but in THOSE DAYS it took a sub 2:50 to qualify for Boston as an "open male runner."

From age 34 to 40 I regularly averaged over 5200 miles/year and ran marathons at least 1/month. I have even broken 3 hours TWICE in the same week (Monday and Sunday). My petite wife has broken 3 hours TWICE in the same week on each COAST (Boston and Big Sur) on about 80 miles/week.

We simply...trained more and did regular "tempo runs" of race pace at 6-12 miles and frequent "big negative" split long runs of 16-22 miles.

Less indoors entertainment. Not as many spoiled brats growing into marathoners that spent a large portion of their lazy lives, sitting on a couch playing video games. Therefore, in the 60's 70's and 80's if you wanted to get to your friends house when you were 12, you rode your bike or walked, or maybe even jogged. Mommy didn't drive you to the end of the driveway, and wait with you for the bus, so you would not get a chill..

And, school's coaches were allowed to make you run laps if you were late, or talked back, or goofed off. Now a large portion of HS students have "excuses" to not take PE.

One is a recipe for fitter young men and women, growing into their 20's and 30's, and venturing out to try to master the daunted 26.2 With a larger number of people trying something, the odds are that you will have a larger number of people being good at it.

Bottom line; Obesity is accepted in America. Not so, in most Asian and European countries. outdoor activities are more common , with families and schools. The Netherlands have a network of groomed bike paths that connect towns and provide an excellent option for travel to school and work. We do not.

Asian countries are typically very crowded, so their mass transit systems are very good, and this requires people to walk to transit stops and walk to work from their stop.

This country is becoming fatter and fatter. And we are becoming more accepting.

It's perfectly fine to make fun of the skinny kid. But not ok to make fun of the fat kid.

There are more people running now but less people training hard.

People look at diet strength training gear anything but going runnng every day.

Of course some buck the trend.

ukathleticscoach wrote:

There are more people running now but less people training hard.

People look at diet strength training gear anything but going runnng every day.

Of course some buck the trend.

As for less distractions ttsrs rubbish. We definitely we my down the pub more that kids nowadays that's why half the pubs are shutting

...and there is no bigger distraction than the opposite sex plus you're spend a lot more time chasing it not just click in your phone.

Hard training pure and simple. Everyone reads some book is an instant expert and feels obsessed with following some plan on their own. You improve more doing a rubbish workout with a team/group than the best one on your own.

Hate the finishers medals wrote:

If the RD’s could figure out a way to chop the entry fees in exchange for no t-shirt and no stupid finisher’s medal, then I think the real runners would race more often.

I agree with you on that one.

Gather once a week for workout Wednesday or whatever, and race. It's not that hard.

Then race on the weekend if you want, but the real fun is on Wednesdays. Far from the running world, it's cyclocross season, and all over the country this happens. There are races both days, every weekend, but nearly every community has a midweek race thing going on. Pick a place, show and go.

The reason road racing has been homogenized and taken over by the charity companies is because you let it. You had the above with parkruns, I guess, but it doesn't look like that took off. Too bad.

Good ideas.

Common theme: put together races that are cheap, no shirt, no hoopla, no charity, and more real runners will show up and participate.

Well, they have such a thing here in Seattle. It is called the Winter Grand Prix 2-mile series: a series of six races each winter with a 2-mile race held about every 2 weeks. It is put on by the local running club, and the whole series costs about $40 or $7 per race. The races consist of various formats including road, x-ctry, track, and a handicapped race in reverse standing order, There are even t-shirts, record keeping and age group awards, photographs, etc.

This has been going on for years and my club has participated for years as have I. It was originally started as a way to keep high school runners in practice between X-Country and Track seasons.

The same club also puts on 5k/10K/15K races in the same park about every couple of months over the summer, but those tend to be more community runners. They are also dirt cheap and well organized.

So, just a little positive news. Good things happen, too. The Winter Grand Prix 2 mile series is really well attended by several serious running club/teams and lots of the better runners.

2 words.....participation trophy. If you lost, you lost. You missed the medals and would fight harder next time. When you got outkicked, you didnt get a hug from the coach telling you ‘I know you did your best, its ok’.

Frank Shorter here wrote:

Hate the finishers medals wrote:

If the RD’s could figure out a way to chop the entry fees in exchange for no t-shirt and no stupid finisher’s medal, then I think the real runners would race more often.

I agree with you on that one.

TW shirts and medals are what like 3 bucks? You aren't saving much.

In the end the big difference is that back then, races were races and not events. Somewhere along the line finishing became the goal rather than running fast.

TheBoom wrote:

I don't feel like wading through every response so here's my take: the runners of the Running Boom got swept into a SPORT that'd been a matter of training & performance orientation.

+1

There was no such thing as running a marathon just to finish and ticking it off a to-do list. You didn't even consider running a marathon unless you could run under 3:30 as there were only a handful of runners slower than that. As someone said earlier, you raced a lot in shorter events from track races to 10 miles in the main. Training was done with the idea of performing well in races and there was no interest in just seeing how far you could run.

90sFast wrote:

I do not understand considering that the training wasn't too different; all the amateurs races seemed to be much faster and your hobby jogger would also be much faster.

I noticed it first when Bryan Cranston talked about doing his first marathon; he just ran for 6 months-a year and did 3h15 for his first marathon in NYC.

Second, I checked the race results of a local marathon of 1993.

1500 runners

Winner in 2h15

First woman in 2h53

25 people under 2h30

150 people under 3h00

750 people (so half) under 3h34

Only 355 people above 4h00

6 people above 5h00

What were they eating back then?

They weren’t ruined by the jack Daniels formula and “v02max” intervals.

The Seattle club/semi competitive running scene is a joke

There used to be a FREE low key 2.8 mile race around Greenlake every week in the winter.

My friend and I went to the last of them one year, there were only four of us total, and Bill Rowe who directed them

said, "well I see that three of you have already run in the low 14s so this should be a fast race." My training partner,

the only one who hadn't run that fast, took off from the start and left the rest of us in the dust - as I knew he would. : )

Dghhnnn wrote:

Amongst many other factors discussed corporate culture matters.

My dad was an AT&T employee in the 70s and 80s. He said it was normal for folks to be at the office for 10-12 hours, but also normal for folks to take 2 hour punches. Gave him plenty of time to train.

I dare say that any employee in a large corporation would not be allowed to vanish for 2 hours a day, regardless of their overall productivity. Exceptions to this rule, I suspect, are as rare as hens teeth.

This all makes sense, but it was true for men, not women. Now a man has to go home and help take care of the kids and house and has a lot less leisure time than men did when their wives did all that.

tupacsiachump wrote:

Dghhnnn wrote:

Amongst many other factors discussed corporate culture matters.

My dad was an AT&T employee in the 70s and 80s. He said it was normal for folks to be at the office for 10-12 hours, but also normal for folks to take 2 hour punches. Gave him plenty of time to train.

I dare say that any employee in a large corporation would not be allowed to vanish for 2 hours a day, regardless of their overall productivity. Exceptions to this rule, I suspect, are as rare as hens teeth.

This all makes sense, but it was true for men, not women. Now a man has to go home and help take care of the kids and house and has a lot less leisure time than men did when their wives did all that.

That's true if you're talking about guys a few years into adulthood. But your fastest times usually come from guys in their twenties, just finished with college racing but still wanting to improve, i.e. guys who are mostly single or if married still without kids. That describes all but one of the faster guys in my old club. These are the people that the sport had many of decades earlier who were the source of the depth in times then and who actually are pretty rare these days. It seems like most recent college grads either leave the sport or become pretty casual about their training and racing unless they manage to hook up with a program or get a shoe deal.

I think being a distance runner from the 60's through the mid 70's was an act of rebellion.

Nobody was doing it for social approval.

I remember people driving cars close to scare runners and yelling insults as they drove past.

It all made me want to run more and harder.

Initially, it seemed like running lots of miles was a way to sort out feelings of rage.

I agree with what other have posted. Basically, more active childhood.

My dad says they played outside with the neighbors on the street every spare minute of their child. Football, basketball, baseball, all year long. All the neighbors, playing all day. If they weren't in school, or doing chores (that were usually manual labor), they were playing sports with the other kids on the street.

Also, less sugar in their diet.