Mary Cain hot take

What exactly is hard about being paid $100,000s of dollars and being told to lose weight? Really is that brutal?

Please go to any country other than the few 1st world, and explain how brutal she had it.

I can’t believe she survived. Seriously look around the world. If you get paid $100,000 or $500,000 for playing a sport I think it’s gonna be slightly challenging. I think people are going to have serious expectations. Being lean is part of the job.

Show me one chubby elite distance runner?

C0l0rado wrote:

Youngest-ever national record holder and high school star athlete are pretty far removed. Cain was literally the most promising female runner in all of America, so to argue that she "didn't have the talent" as you attempted to do was obviously a sign of remarkably stupidity. Therefore I called you an idiot.

Not many have high school phenoms have an MD for a parent, plus one that continued to manage her meds/vitamins/etc while at NOP, a program with allegations of doping. It raises the question whether she was so phenom in high school because she was already being doped at world class pro levels. How would you proactively defend against your doping coming to public knowledge when it seems your coach/program is going down for doping?

not so hot take wrote:

Alberto Salazar, with his comfort and familiarity with 5000m to Marathon did not appreciate Mary Cain's unique talent as an 800m runner. Look up elite female top 100 all-time 800m runners on I.A.A.F. Then look up elite female top 100 all-time 1500m runners. There are some on both lists but most are not. At least as a teenager until about age 21, Mary Cain should have been an 800m specialist. Cain had so much room for improvement as an 800m.

That is the huge mistake Salazar made. Running an 18 year old female 70 miles a week including 3 hard workouts so she could move to 5,000 was idiotic.

iajskjdjksj wrote:

C0l0rado wrote:

Youngest-ever national record holder and high school star athlete are pretty far removed. Cain was literally the most promising female runner in all of America, so to argue that she "didn't have the talent" as you attempted to do was obviously a sign of remarkably stupidity. Therefore I called you an idiot.

Not many have high school phenoms have an MD for a parent, plus one that continued to manage her meds/vitamins/etc while at NOP, a program with allegations of doping. It raises the question whether she was so phenom in high school because she was already being doped at world class pro levels. How would you proactively defend against your doping coming to public knowledge when it seems your coach/program is going down for doping?

This. +1

The NYT video is a PR tactic to throw off the scent. Remember all of NOP past is being investigated by WADA in light of the AS doping allegations, including Cain.

She was given diuretics and publically shamed about her weight. Not “told to lose weight”

Oh no did we trigger you?

Is it necessary for female distance runners to compete at less than their natural weight?

You must be a hobby jogger. The athletes weight is the most crucial parameter of overall physical ability.

Natural weight for a normal person is completely different thing compared to a competitive athlete. For a competitive distance runner a BMI of 18.0 is completely normal. You won't see world champions with a BMI of 21.0 in long distance running. That does not happen because this is too much weight.

I didn't follow Cain's career much.

Was it a matter of her body changing and she gaining weight as she matured and became more of a woman?

If that was the case, what is a coach supposed to do?

Was it a situation where it would have been near impossible for her to run her old times with the same type of training she was doing before because she become more of a woman from being a twiggy unisex type in high school?

Bluefish wrote:

I didn't follow Cain's career much.

Was it a matter of her body changing and she gaining weight as she matured and became more of a woman?

If that was the case, what is a coach supposed to do?

Was it a situation where it would have been near impossible for her to run her old times with the same type of training she was doing before because she become more of a woman from being a twiggy unisex type in high school?

Here is a 2018 New York Times article which refers to the female maturation process as a "cruel twist" for teenage phenoms:

Shorter Frank here wrote:

You won't see world champions with a BMI of 21.0 in long distance running. That does not happen because this is too much weight.

Bekele? Makloufi? Decastella? Gharib?

BMI wrote:

Shorter Frank here wrote:

You won't see world champions with a BMI of 21.0 in long distance running. That does not happen because this is too much weight.

Bekele? Makloufi? Decastella? Gharib?

He was talking about females. Also Makhloufi is not a long-distance runner, he is a middle-distance runner. Decastalla was 20.1 BMI (just thick legs, but very skinny otherwise) and Bekele 20.6.

i agree. to think that weight is not a big factor is incredibly naive. no coach in his/her right mind would not value athlete weight at the world class level. just look at the east africans. they are very very thin, bekele is a slight exception but he has large quads and hamstrings. he certainly looks as thin now as i have ever seen him (i watched him in many races as over the last 15 years in person). i was just barely national class but i can only guess how different it is to be a world class runner and how incredibly important it is to fine tune every possible training and coaching aspect no matter how seemingly insignificant to the rest of us.

i suspect ms. cain burned out and now feels cheated when in fact it was probably inevitable. take a look at where her and ms. hasay are now and use your brain. one switched coaches and the other didn't. hasay seems to have a much better attitude, struggled more than cain, stuck it out, and is now our best female marathoner. instead of hurling unfounded drug charges at her we should be congratulating her. running 2:20 for any human is not trivial. any women of whatever age that wants to run at that level is going to have to sacrifice a lot, have a lot of luck around injuries, have serious willpower, and great coaching. that person is unlikely to hurl innuendo at other athletes without being able to prove it.

I think there's a lot of AlSal/Nike derangement syndrome here. If they say it's black, you guys are going to say it's white, just to counter them because you hate them so darn much.

You guys KNOW that weight is a huge factor in distance running. Go to any HS meet, look at the starting line and if you HAD to bet we all know how you start picking who you think will win- thin, skinny legs, small ankles, basicly on the women's side you look for a girl that looks like a 12 year old boy.

Rare is the fully developed female that can also run well.

EyeTest wrote:

I think there's a lot of AlSal/Nike derangement syndrome here. If they say it's black, you guys are going to say it's white, just to counter them because you hate them so darn much.

You guys KNOW that weight is a huge factor in distance running. Go to any HS meet, look at the starting line and if you HAD to bet we all know how you start picking who you think will win- thin, skinny legs, small ankles, basicly on the women's side you look for a girl that looks like a 12 year old boy.

Rare is the fully developed female that can also run well.

Funny how often the back of the pack is a bunch of rail thin girls with no muscles at all.

And some of the top runners who are rail thin, are often home with broken bones....

At least in my state most of the top runners who were successful after high school had more normal weight (obviously on the thin side, but not rails). The girls suffering from RED-s usually ended their careers in college after lots of injuries...

The best is obviously toeing the line of too thin, but having sufficient essential fat for their body to function, and thus avoid broken bones and other unnecessary injuries.

How many races has Hasay dropped out of, verses run? IMO if she gained 2-4 pounds, she would be better off in the long run...

I guess it depends if running one great race, between several broken bones, is better than running consistently good races and getting a great race in there too.

Funny how great runners who are healthy like Touhy are criticized here for weighing too much, while she destroys records set by anorexic girls of the past... these are clearly the talents that have the strength and natural ability to run well into adulthood.

The same for Cain, she looked thin-normal when she was setting national records....obviously it was not holding her back to weigh ever so slightly more than what AlSal thought was "ideal" and obviously forcing her to get to that ideal did way more damage than just training the athlete that was there already, succeeding...

No, I was a serious runner, but why would that make me knowledgeable about the effects of weight loss on female distance runners? I never heard of any male runners dieting to lose weight and some lifted weights to put on a few pounds. When I was running 100 mpw, dieting would have been impossible. Frank Shorter said it was impossible for him to gain weight.

Some posters have noted that world class female runners are generally skinny, but we don't know if they are dieting to maintain a lower weight.

This article is about the effects of low weight on female distance runners and it includes missed periods and stress fractures:

Mary ran well without dieting in HS. Maybe her body later changed resulting in weight gain that effectively ended her chances of becoming a world class runner. Based on the article, trying to have Mary try to diet below her natural weight was predictably destructive.

northeast female runner wrote:

The same for Cain, she looked thin-normal when she was setting national records....obviously it was not holding her back to weigh ever so slightly more than what AlSal thought was "ideal" and obviously forcing her to get to that ideal did way more damage than just training the athlete that was there already, succeeding...

I wouldn't be shocked if Salazar's athletes become "fat" as soon as he feels they aren't progressing they way he expects they should. It couldn't be his techniques, it had to be something else, like their weight. In other words, he couldn't comprehend that the problem was his techniques (even if just for a particular athlete), someone else had to be at fault. You see this a lot in successful people. I saw it earlier this week with a partner at work. We upgraded our systems over the weekend. He didn't bother reading the emails explaining that his email would be down for his phone, but providing him with a website and password to access his email. It was the IT folks' fault he couldn't access the website even though they did everything to provide him with access.

Exactly!

I read this as a previous HS/College CC female athlete than professional coach and I wonder where Mary's personal responsibility for her own health and well being are in her statement.

She takes NO personal responsibility for her choices to train at that level at her age and to forgo college. Where are her parents in this? How did they need pull her or her pull herself when the training was becoming detrimental to her well being and health.

As a coach, I can see many others coaches that always don't take individual athletes well being and health into concern during training. Many top HS and College coaches have a win only mentality. i observe other coaches obviously overtaining their athletes for short sighted season wins. Many do not take into account long term development and I see it. Super unfortunate to watch really excellent runners at young ages get trashed by coaches. But what can you do it is up to the parents and individual to look out for their best interests.

Mary and her parents did not look out or care for her best interests and now that the dust has settled and her dreams are done - she is bitter and looking for blame. The finger she needs to point is at herself. She made rash, short sighted decisions with the ego's dream of glory never fulfilled and she is left with bitterness and resentment.

Both of these emotional states are when we are personally responsible but insist others are to blame.

She can point at coaching and Nike all she wants but she is the one who made decision do to this (train professional too young) and not withdraw herself when the coaching was not compatible to her well being/health.

Her decision to stay is on her.

Athletes and people in general need to understand at the end of the day that they are always personal responsibility for everything we choose for ourselves . Choosing is staying when you know something is not good for you.

"I wonder where Mary's personal responsibility for her own health and well being are in her statement."

"Where are her parents in this?"

So it was pretty much everybody else's fault except Nike's and Salazar's?

I think we can agree that most professional runners train so hard that they are on the ragged edge between winning and getting injured most of the time. Runners are used to punishing their bodies to improve. Remember "our sport is your sport's punishment?"

You are criticizing an 18yr old living 3,000 miles from home for continuing to follow the most famous running coach in America and the biggest, best funded running program EVER. They were hyper-focused on her weight, but failed to have a certified sports psychologist or nutritionist on staff. I am guessing she talked with her parent's regularly, but they deferred to her judgement because she was 18 and it was her career decision.

Mary suffered from the same psychological conflict as battered wives -“I was the victim of an abusive system, an abusive man. I was constantly tormented by the conflict of wanting to be free from him and wanting to go back to the way things used to be, when I was his favorite.” If she quit earlier, would it have derailed her career? Was the grass greener with another sponsor? I think problem isn't just Nike, but the way most shoe sponsor's treat their women athletes - lower pay, penalties for maternity leave, etc.

You are blaming the victim for continuing to have faith in her coach and program and not quit sooner. It is easy to take pot shots after the fact, but difficult to quit when you have never quit before. Wait until you have teenage children and you will come back and delete this post.

+1.