HRE wrote:
Ancient mariner wrote:
This "we were TOUGH back in the old days, and now runners are wimps" caca is a bad joke. Guess what, people? Then and now, there were/are grit-their-teeth grinders who would have run/do run through a tornado to get any run in, and there were/are runners who rolled/roll over in bed for that extra hour of warm shut-eye instead of keeping on schedule by putting in the 10 miler in the icy cold outside.
You're absolutely right about there always having been tough guys and wussies. But the sport has changed in ways that can make it seem like people in the old days were tougher. You hear today about how tough it is for runners to earn a living. In the amateur era you couldn't do it from running so you found a job and trained around it and got in the kind of miles Rodgers did when he was a hospital aid or special ed teacher. I see posts here from people "needing" to find a nice trail or park with a soft surface to run on. In the old days we loved those things too but if there wasn't one handy we'd run on sidewalks or roads. I knew a guy who used to run on the DC Beltway.
There's a cautiousness that's entered the sport today that wasn't as evident in BR's prime that can look like less toughness. We rarely worried about being overtrained and I do not recall that avoiding injuries was much of a conversation topic. You kind of expected to get one now and again, you'd have some down time, and it would go away. There was not the emphasis on having distinct hard and easy days. You knew not to hammer for days on end but the mantra of running really, really, slowly, on easy days was well in the future.
I'm not saying either way is better or worse, just that things seem different in a way that does feed the "we were tougher back then" story line. I'm sure there are plenty of really tough modern runners. But you really don't see stories much anymore like the one where Shorter taped an ice bag to an injured hip so he could run despite the injury.
The difference is that the sport opened up a lot more to a wider variety of people (namely, women) in the second running boom, it became far more inclusive. It was no longer the province of chiefly skinny guys in tiny shorts, Oprah and her minions were now venturing to enter and finish marathons. So it brought with it a higher proportion of dilettantes with lesser degrees of dedication and drive. It's simply a natural consequence, it's neither good nor bad in and of itself. The sport is probably healthier for the sport, ultimately.