FLASH UPDATE: That was the most memorable distance race ever run at a New Hampshire indoor state championship
Gleiser vs. Lano T-shirts should be on sale shortly. And while fast times are lovely, their tsunami-like character isn't easy to process
In a rare foray into “This just happened” spazz-posting:
I was right about the boys’ 1,000-meter races at today’s 2024 New Hampshire High-School Indoor State Championships guaranteeing catastrophic levels of drama, intrigue, and primal screaming. But most monkeys could have called that much, and in my forecast, I remained completely oblivious to one of the event’s major players.
Having both negative-split sub-2:28 efforts today in the D-2 1,000 meters, Lucian Gleiser of Hanover and Jamie Lano of Coe-Brown are now #2 and #3 in the country pending the results of other meets this weekend as well the outcome of the D-1 New Hampshire State Championship race later today. That contest will feature a kid who woke up today ranked #4 in the country with a 2:28.91 (Jacob Redman of Bedford) and now stands at #6.
Lano had won the 3,000 meters as easily as he could less than an hour earlier in 8:48. He went into the race ranked #8 in the U.S. with a 2:29.72. While Glesier may be rightfully accused of having committed an upset—and of growing a faint beard to facilitate this attack—his best time of 2:39 and change this season heading into the championships was deceiving, as last March he placed second at the 2023 New England Indoor Championships with a 2:31.62 (Lano was 15th in that race). The 2023 New Englands were at "the Reggie," or the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center in Boston. (Reggie Lewis was a Boston Celtics guard and a generous man who donated a lot of money to the community before dying of a quasi-mysterious cardiac ailment.)
The Reggie has a banked track, unlike Leverone Field House. To again adopt trite but useful language, Gleiser and Lano assembled an immediate and everlasting classic.
[4:08 p.m. EST FLASH EDIT to FLASH UPDATE: Having noted that Gleiser and Lano both negative-split a fast 1,000-meter race—a genuine, certified, one-off, highly unusual unicorn—I should have included the splits themselves and a link to the event results.
Gleiser averaged 29.52 per 200 meters, Lano 29.54 per 200 meters. Assuming the same final times for each, a more typical progression would be represented by simply swapping both runners’ opening laps for their closing laps. Regardless, most seasoned pros lack this kind of discipline under pressure.
Coaching, anyone?]
This is only tangentially related, but sheer number and frequency of superior performances in track and road running has, for me, watered down the excitement because I seem unable to recalibrate the meaning of “world-class performance” despite being exquisitely focused on the transparent and basic arithmetic of the sport.
In an endless competition for sports fans' eyeballs, new records are smashed practically every weekend in what seems like a nonstop parade of events, with major indoor races now staged even before the holiday break. The result often feels more like a simulation than a sport, not necessarily unwelcome but a little noisy.
Does anyone else find the dizzying number of really fast times hard to process? I don't mean suspicious per se; I mean purely mathematically weird, at least for anyone over 50 or even 40.
In the 2009-2010 indoor season (the first one TFRRS archived), 22 D-1 men broke 4:00.00. Thirteen of these men achieved the NCAA automatic qualifying standard of 3:59.00.
After the results of yesterday's Boston University David Hemery Valentine meet, 89 D-1 men have already run under four minutes in the 2023-2024 season. Were the option of automatic qualification still in play and the required time still 3:59.00, 60 of these men would have punched their tickets to the 2023-2024 NCAA Indoor Nationals, still four weeks away.
(Note: The TFRRS lists include altitude-converted times, so some of these miles were not actual sub-fours. But it's been their method from the outset.)
Also, 35 men have already bested the fastest time 2009-2010 in the NCAA (13:39.32). This season's leader, Nico Young, would have easily lapped that runner, David McNeill (also of Northern Arizona), on a 200-meter track with his 12:57.14, as would have a few others.
In the city of Boston alone this weekend, (at least!) fifty men, including non-collegians, broke four minutes. An amazing 43 men did so at BU Valentine, while seven more did so at Boston College's meet at the new(ish) New Balance track.
It was once a big deal—and by "once" I mean in the current century—to see a handful of guys dip under four minutes at the BU Terrier Classic. at the end of January. In 2000, three men did it; this year, it was a ho-hum feat as 20 runners accomplished it.
Yes, the shoes have made a massive difference, but even if every 2023-2024 runner is penalized one full second per 400 meters of racing, today's crew is far better. I imagine that most of this is owed to a combination of a greater number of foreign athletes in the NCAA, better tracks, more racing opportunities, and a slightly larger worldwide pool of humans from which to draw.
But the recent travails of Kenyan 800-meter star Michael Saruni cast uncomfortable light on another possibility everyone in the sport silently acknowledges without ever talking about. Saruni threw down his best performances over five years ago as a collegian at the University of Texas in El Paso. The idea that someone who is now indisputably a drug cheat in his late twenties and was at his best as an NCAA athlete is not dispositive of anything, but it’s a reality that wise and properly cynical people shouldn’t ignore, either. Especially now that unreal performances can now be handily attributed to supershoes, extra years of eligibility, and other helpful factors alone.