Why don’t Non-Africans train like they used to?

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

Old School Cool wrote:

For those saying that the names I listed in my initial post wouldn’t be competitive today I guess it depends on how you define competitive. Many of those guys are sub-2:10 marathoners. That’s Top-10 in many majors. Give them Vaporflys and you’re getting into 2:07-2:08. Deek ran sub-2:08. Give him Vaporflys and he’s be right there with Rupp.

In this year's Tokyo marathon, TEN non-African guys finished under 2:08. I don't think anyone is asking why those guys don't train like Seko and Nakayama used to.

Do you know that those eight guys did not train like Seko and Nakayama, who by the way did not train idnetically, used to? Seriously, what do you know about those eight guys?

That's an interesting point. I imagine it depends on the particular athlete's development. I don't know what guys like Fauble or Ward were running in college, but they've both developed into world class marathoners. I also think of guys like Cam Levins or Ryan Vail, who have both posted solid marathon times and record pretty high weekly volumes. I wish we had the kind of culture around road racing that exists in Japan. Offer an early summer road series for collegians.

Do you know that those eight guys did not train like Seko and Nakayama, who by the way did not train idnetically, used to? Seriously, what do you know about those eight guys?

I'd love to know how Japanese training has evolved, as I lived there 30 years ago. If you know something about this, why not start a thread on it?

Why are you excluding Africans?

Interesting topic. I have a few thoughts. I was running back then, and although I was nothing to alert the media about, I did well for my age. I was a teenager during the so-called running boom and my friends and I looked up to Rodgers, Lindsey, Virgin, and a few others. I even got Salazar's autograph. This has been pointed out on the thread already, but it seemed that the US was a powerhouse at the time in the same way Kenya is now. Every single race was not won by an American, but rare was the big pro marathon or even track race in which none were competitive. So, maybe not as noticeable on the world scene as Kenya is now, but many wins of the big 3 New York, Fukuoka, and Boston. We all know this is not the case now and we actually talk about '1st American', a term not yet coined in 1984.

So what happened? Well, it seems to have been much discussed during the '90s that the big mileage common in the '70s fell out of vogue. This was the OP's point, right? There is truth to that, but there certainly WAS truth to that. We don't need to rehash the low point of American running when the US was lucky to send one athlete of each gender to the Olympic marathon. That was widely blamed on mileage (or more specifically, lack thereof), so kudos to the OP for starting this discussion. Here's what I remember from the interviews with the big guns of the day and such:

Those guys did indeed do 120-140 pretty regularly. Maybe kids like me were misled. I'll admit that. John Parker even wrote how guys would tell a reporter about that one outlier week with the implication that it was average. And keep in mind, Parker knew those guys in real life.

So here's the thing. The training that the stars did (or claimed to, although I tend to believe the big numbers they clocked) influence the masses. That includes the kids. I did 65-70 steadily early in high school, and I wasn't considered very high mileage by the standards of the day. I ramped it up for a couple years, but couldn't hold 80 without trouble. My peers and I didn't consider that groundbreaking and may have said something like "I could only average 75 mph for fall of Senior year. " The term 'only' would have been used by average teenagers of the sort the press and public had never heard of (as opposed to Jim Ryun-type outliers). So, the aspiration to do 120 was certainly there with all of us in that era, I suspect.

We also raced much longer than today's kids. Every serious distance runner on our campus had run at least 1 marathon. Several of us went to a couple with my dad driving. And it wasn't just me and those 3 guys. Others we knew at school ran other marathons. 10k was a popular event for teens at the time. It was my main event and what I primarily trained for. Keep in mind, we were influenced by Shorter, Rodgers, Meyer, and Salazar. Our age-group was crowded at these races. Going under 3 hours didn't get you into the top-3 medals. There would be more than a dozen entrants in the 17-and-under division at every race including marathons.

I know whenever I see a post or thread by high schoolers on the Board now, they all quote times at mid-D and even sprints. These guys actually have 400 PRs. I have never done a race involving starting blocks. I didn't own a spiked shoe in high school. OK, so what's the point? The outliers among us, and this doesn't include me, became the national class road racers a few years later. If you can run 80 miles a week at 16, you have a fighting chance to get to 120 by 21 and 140 by 24. If you can do that, you may well have become one of the guys we're talking about now. Just as the OP suggests, I think mileage is a big part of the story. The amount 15-year-olds through masters runners did was more once upon a time.

An poster above blames the NCAA for ruining much of today's talent. I don't disagree. I actually blame the high school system as well. Ritz claimed to have run 76 races his Senior year of high school, and much of the Board found that believable and reasonable. Not everyone involved with a school team does that and burns out like the poster who mentioned NCAA suggests. But those who don't have anything to do with a school's team pretty much don't. I didn't know any of the distance crowd at my school that joined the track team (maybe 1 guy??) Most of us ran Spring marathons.

Not saying it needs to, but that just doesn't happen today. It must be a combination of peer and parental pressure, but for whatever reasons 99% of teenagers who run today do so for the glory of the school. They nearly all end up in the NCAA, too. Not saying that's necessarily bad, but at the International level, you'll be competing against those who never did have the pressure do run 40 or 50 races a year and who always saw 42k as the target.

These are a few of the reasons I suspect the US is not churning out high-mileage marathon stars like before. Who knows, maybe there's a kid in a rural high-altitude, dirt-road-covered area in New Mexico or somewhere about to be the next Kenny Moore. As a fan, I certainly hope so!

East African nations have a culture that is obsessed with running. That's what really separates them as they have a large percentage of their people throwing themselves into becoming the best they can be. Western nations don't have this anymore. Salazar ran sub 27:30 with awful running mechanics and his body was nothing like the typical east african. There is no reason why athletes of western nations can't reach similar levels. We should at least be capable of having the depth Japan has. Body morphology inevitably always comes into the conversation but I think that factor is way overstated. It's the same with Cuba and boxing but no one ever tries to state that they have some sort of inherent advantage. They're just obsessed with boxing.

eurodonkey wrote:

Do you know that those eight guys did not train like Seko and Nakayama, who by the way did not train idnetically, used to? Seriously, what do you know about those eight guys?

I'd love to know how Japanese training has evolved, as I lived there 30 years ago. If you know something about this, why not start a thread on it?

I don't really know. A guy like Jo Fukuda seems like he's doing stuff pretty much like what Seko, the Sohs, etc. were doing. Obviously Kawauchi was doing something different. Nakayama ran a lot but not as much as Seko seems to have done. But I don't know much beyond that. That's why I asked if the guy who I responded to knew what the non Africans were doing.

PS

Also,when you're talking about those times from Tokyo and wanting to compare them with anyone from more than maybe a year ago or even less you cannot discount the affect of shoes.

"effect" of the shoes.

trying to be HRE again wrote:

"effect" of the shoes.

you should e-mail the brojos and ask them to see why you can't post as you normally do. Someone probably hijacked your name and registered it.

Thanks for posting this! I always wondered what it was like for HS age kids in that era. Did you all do frequent road races like the top guys (Rodgers, Meyer, etc)? How was cross country back then? Did the meets have more depth than today?

I think it’s worth noting that the guys I listed in my original post seemed to be able to sustain high mileage for longer periods of time as well. Look at the 5,000m list that was posted a few pages back. Solinsky, Ritz, Teg, Kennedy, Jager, Centro, True, Hill, Goucher all of these guys have broken down from high mileage after a relatively short period of time. Many of them tried to do more or tried to string together more weeks of that mileage and broke. Same thing with Meb. Ryan Hall’s career ended due to chronic fatigue. Hall had a glimmer of hope when he was briefly coached my Matt Dixon and was running less but he resumed coaching himself and broke again. On that 5,000m list Woody Kincaid was able to run as fast as he did because he reduced the volume significantly. Now, that’s at 5,000 and not the marathon. But even our top 5,000 guys are trending towards more moderate to low volumes of 70-90 miles per week with a few at 100+. Perhaps that’s why only Chelimo and Lomong are competitive on the world stage as both run 100+ miles per week.

Not to discredit the results achieved by the great runners of the 70s, but knowing that runners have a tendency to "round up" the distance of a regular route, and that proper measurement really wasn't possible at that time, I think we have to treat these accounts of weekly mileage as a little inflated. Other than a bike path with mile markers or a route on the road you measured with the odometer in your car, there wasn't really a way to get accurate distance of running routes. When an old timer tells you how many "miles per week" they ran in the 70s, just nod politely, and remind yourself that it was probably 10-15% less than what they actually think it was.

eurodonkey wrote:

Do you know that those eight guys did not train like Seko and Nakayama, who by the way did not train idnetically, used to? Seriously, what do you know about those eight guys?

I'd love to know how Japanese training has evolved, as I lived there 30 years ago. If you know something about this, why not start a thread on it?

I took your question to my Japanese source last night. He said there's really not much different now than there was thirty years ago. The corporate system is the same. People run really big volumes, a lot of it but not all slowly. He said Osaka is a bit different but really not that much. The big difference is that because he was with Salazar he does more sprinting than is common among Japanese runners but other wise what he does is similar. He said the big difference between Osaka and other Japanese runners is that Osaka lands towards his forefoot. Historically landing on your heels was pretty much dogma there.

sheeplechase wrote:

Not to discredit the results achieved by the great runners of the 70s, but knowing that runners have a tendency to "round up" the distance of a regular route, and that proper measurement really wasn't possible at that time, I think we have to treat these accounts of weekly mileage as a little inflated. Other than a bike path with mile markers or a route on the road you measured with the odometer in your car, there wasn't really a way to get accurate distance of running routes. When an old timer tells you how many "miles per week" they ran in the 70s, just nod politely, and remind yourself that it was probably 10-15% less than what they actually think it was.

Why are you assuming every runner rounded-up? Or that they didn’t measure courses? Even if we adjust for this assumption they’re still running more. 115-125 or so.

Sorry but that's just silly. There were maps. I knew guys who got local maps and measured their courses very precisely. And we all knew that car odometers tended to measure a bit long so if we'd measure, say, a ten mile course with a car we'd make the course read as something like 10.2 miles. Or you'd simply run somewhere that had a known distance, e.g., Bill Rodgers doing all his laps around Jamaica Pond which is 1.6 miles.

True, some people were pretty casual about knowing the exact length of their runs and others were very meticulous. That's no different than today but humans have been able to measure precise distances long before there were GPS watches. And when you guys who get into this thing about inaccurate measurements in the past you always assume the inaccuracy will be on the side of giving a short course. It's as possible that the inaccuracy will result in a long course. The London Marathon began as the Highgate Marathon and the first time they ran it the course was 28 miles long. Twice I raced on courses later found to be inaccurate. One was a short "five" miles and the other was a ten mile race that turned out to be 10.2.

And we're talking big numbers here. Someone may have been optimistic about his courses and not gotten quite to the 150 miles a week he thought he was doing. But he'd likely have been above 140, not at 100, and as I mentioned above, may have been closing in on 160.

all eyez on me wrote:

trying to be HRE again wrote:

"effect" of the shoes.

you should e-mail the brojos and ask them to see why you can't post as you normally do. Someone probably hijacked your name and registered it.

It seems that now if you post from one computer with a name and then try to post on the same thread with that same name it won't let you. I've got three computers in different parts of the house so if I'm on a different one that my first post was on I have to change names.

sheeplechase wrote:

Not to discredit the results achieved by the great runners of the 70s, but knowing that runners have a tendency to "round up" the distance of a regular route, and that proper measurement really wasn't possible at that time, I think we have to treat these accounts of weekly mileage as a little inflated. Other than a bike path with mile markers or a route on the road you measured with the odometer in your car, there wasn't really a way to get accurate distance of running routes. When an old timer tells you how many "miles per week" they ran in the 70s, just nod politely, and remind yourself that it was probably 10-15% less than what they actually think it was.

Um, yea, keep telling yourself that running less works.

You actually think guys were off by 10-15%, gimme a break. Heck, Rodgers ran a ton around Jamaica Pond, do you think he didn't know how far it was around that little pond.

I would say those guys had a pretty good idea of what pace they were running and weren't looking for shortcuts. Remember, those were the days of more was better.

Back then, 120/week would get you to 2:09/2:10 shape, and that would win plenty of mid distance road races and even big marathons. Now, 120 /week still gets you to the same place, but you probably don't finish in top 10 of most important races. So why bother? You're better off creating content for YouTube or Quibi.