When distance world records fall after remaining untouched for some time — say, ten or more years — my and most other observers’ first inclination is to speculate about someone’s chances of further improving the standard, and to wonder what the performance might translate to at other distances for the new record-holder.
But after the men’s and women’s 5,000-meter and men’s 10,000-meter records were broken recently, perhaps owing to the combination of events, I was instead led to recall that when I started running in mid-August of 1984, only one human being, David Moorcroft, had covered 5,000 meters in under 13:05.50 — exactly half the time it took Joshua Cheptegei to run his WR in Valencia, Spain. Moorcroft had pushed this record, 13:00.40, below 50 percent of Joshua Cheptegei’s new 10,000-meter record in 1982. This means that, by one crude measure, the best male distance runners in the world are twice as good as they were just 38 years ago.
With women’s running in many ways in its infancy in the mid-1980s — but not its doping infancy, the ramifications of which will soon be clear — you would expect to see the same phenomenon, but with a shorter “halving time,” or whatever this might be called. When I went for my first official distance run at 14, the women’s 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter WRs were 14:58.89 (less than a second slower than my own best) and 31:13.78. Within two years, the latter mark was already down to 30:13.33, and in 1993 fell to 29:31.78 to a runner who later admitted, almost pointlessly, that she and her Chinese teammates had been doped to the moon and back. But if you omit that mark and instead accept Almaz Ayana’s 29:17.45 from 2016 as legitimate enough, the 5,000-meter WR didn’t fall to below half of that until 1986. So, looking at things through this admittedly narrow lens, women had a “halving time” of 30 years across the same general era that the men’s “halving time” was 38 years.
Of course, the starting and ending time points I used here are historically arbitrary, especially the mid-1984 starting point. Despite the men’s 5,000 and 10,000 both falling by nontrivial amounts recently, when Kenenisa Bekele set the 10,000-meter mark that Cheptegei broke (26:17.53) in 2004, he had just covered the distance in less than twice the time it took Dick Quax to set the 5,000-meter WR (13:12.9) only 27 years earlier.
Another interesting finding is that, in this same 36-year period, both the men’s and women’s 5,000-meter records have come down so much that the paces of these records are nearly as fast as the paces of the 3,000-meter WRs circa August 1984. Henry Rono’s 7:32.1 works out to a 12:33.5 5,000 meters, while Tatyana Kazankina’s 8:22.62 translates to a 13:57.7; both new records are within shouting distance of these times. While on the surface it seems odd that the women’s per-lap 3,000-meter pace from so long ago hasn’t been bettered over 5,000 meters yet, given the comparatively greater advances in women’s running overall. But this just underscores how fantastically doped Kazankina and the other Eastern Bloc athletes of the early 1980s were, setting multiple records unlikely to be eclipsed even by modern dopers because of the difficulty in replicating the obvious androgen boost under any sort of cover. (Fun fact: Kazankina, Peter Snell, David Rudisha and Paula Radcliffe are all current and former world-record holders in distance events who share my birthday.)
Moving to longer distances and therefore to the roads, even less time elapsed between the first official sub-sixty-minute half, Moses Tanui’s 59:47 from 1993, and Eliud Kipchoge’s 1:59:40 marathon-distance run — 25 years. If you prefer the official WR of 2:01:39 from 2018, which you should, then you have to go back to 1986 to find a half-marathon WR that’s slower than half of that. So now we’re at 32 years. On the women’s side, well, this one’s a little weird, because in 2003, six years after Elana Meyer became the first woman to run a half-marathon in 1:07:58, Radcliffe ran two of them back-to-back in 1:07:12. Radcliffe’s mark was so preposterously superior and fraught with obligatory controversy that it seemed to last forever, but based on the rest of the data here, it should have taken Brigid Koskei even longer than it did to run in the 2:14’s.
Will the men’s and women’s 10,000-meter and marathon records be pushing 25:20/1:57 and 28:20/2:09 in 2050? Maybe if the first products of systematic gene doping are running by then. And for reasons that are perhaps self-evident, this trend doesn’t appear in pairings of shorter distances. The best way to summarize that finding is that it’s a hell of a lot easier to train endurance than speed.
About the record attempts in Valencia, Alison Wade, whose Fast Women newsletter is the best of its kind (think Letsrun’s front page, which is excellent, without the 1995 styling and farrago of typos), observed:
Heading into the event, Gidey’s record attempt was overshadowed by Joshua Cheptegei’s 10,000m record attempt, and we, the sport, just need to stop treating men’s races as the main event and the women’s races as the warmups.
I’m genuinely not sure whose coverage she was referring to here; not ESPN or SI, obviously, so maybe Letsrun, Runner’s World and whatever else even exists to cover elite running in real time. But realistically, Cheptegei had just broken one deeply respected Kenenisa Bekele record and was going after another; Bekele still being active and with a 2:01:41 to his credit within the past year and a half added spice. Gidey had 5,000-meter times of 14:23, 14:29 and 14:26 in 2018, 2019 and earlier in 2020 and didn’t appear especially poised to run under 14:11 — unless, that is, you take her unlikely 44:20 over 15K from last fall into account. That’s 4:45.4 per mile, on asphalt. It is almost inconceivable that she hasn’t already run far faster than her PRs of 8:20, 14:06 and 30:21, all run within the past year-plus.
Alison also mentions the lack of attention given to Brigid Koskei’s personal story, and notes that both Kosgei and Gidey have recently joined Instagram. When Alison says “we” and says a podcast needs to be done, my immediate reaction is that she is the ideal person to do such a thing. She’s been in the running media for a long time and has access to everyone, along with a brain. I don’t know if she is a fan of being behind the mike, which I understand, but I think she’d be great, and not just because most of the competition is lacking.
The other thing that strikes me is that East African runners may not have the same desire for attention that “Western” runners do — and as I’ve mentioned, a lot of those athletes aren’t naturally inclined to seek the spotlight, either. Sometimes, contractual obligations necessitate a certain level of participation in public hijinks, but someone who makes as much money, scaled to national economies, as Koskei or Gidey may not see public relations as a necessary element in their careers at all. Seeking out athlete stories and framing them in an honorable way is about the noblest thing a running journalist can do, and that’s certainly Alison’s orientation to her work. But since writers and podcasters are often doing these things for a living, such stories are usually more necessary, for lack of a better term, to the people producing the content than they are to these stories’ subjects.
On to bullshit:
Rather than follow the installation to the U.S. Supreme Court this week of another cross-brandishing representative of the Church of the Condomless Kiddie-Diddlers, I’ve been watching a good deal of Netflix drivel, wandering around outside a lot and doing remarkably little else. I’m almost proud of my near-complete lack of motivation to address non-urgent problems, a cardinal sign of depression that I’m repurposing as an ability to seamlessly improvise or move on to things that present fewer barriers to moment-to-moment satisfaction. For example, a key on my PC361 went dead about two weeks ago, almost certainly because of dust under one of the pressure pads; I kept using it like that for a week rather than deal with the daunting process of making a couple of phone calls and driving the machine to a servicing center 15 minutes down the road. I have a variety of equipment I could easily have repaired operating at about 40 percent of max capacity, notably a small fan that blows dust around the room, including into the spaces under synthesizer keys.
I have one Podium Runner article about using three-week blocks for marathon training coming out next week and another couple of fun stories scheduled for the conclusion of the New Hampshire cross-country season, about the same time pockets of the country will be devolving into riots, but I hope people don’t mistake these occasional verbal spasms for work. One reason I so easily shit on myself, other than this serving as an oddly comforting process throughout most of my life, is that when I get to writing about anything meant to convey a personal snapshot, I immediately reach into the grab bag of the most recent failures I’m willing to talk about. I do experience periods of competence, even in interpersonal dealings, some of it no doubt imagined, as well as bouts of doing small good things for people merely because these seem to count for a lot lately and the beneficiary is unlikely to know that, at root level, I may have far gloomier ideas and expressions than those I unveil for the perambulating locals.
My neighbors see me walking or running past their houses no fewer than a half-dozen times every day, which in itself is perhaps unremarkable even for a grim fucker warding off the specter of society collapsing around his gamely shuffling self, especially in this natural-experimental nuthouse community of 100,000 people trying to solve galactic personal problems using fart-yoga and excessive exercise. (Seriously, think about this. All of these high-metabolism people living on swamp matter and gathering in closed rooms to spread their legs and asses wide. This whole scheme needs a better logistics division.) What might surprise them is that I spend much of the time they can’t see me finding runners and runner-groupies on the Internet to insult and repeatedly playing out my love-hate relationship with the sport over a period of years for the benefit of a few dozen beloved hangers-on and a small coterie of hateful cranks, a balance I always aimed to achieve when first learning how to transmit thoughts to others from home, or better yet, someplace else. They may see me occasionally parting the blinds to release great billowing green clouds of pot-smoke into the front yard; if so, this may serve as a confounding variable in my apparent wellness habit, assuming I didn’t make all of this up.
I also laugh at myself when I consider my observations of the local hammerheads and their bluster about rampaging bums, or the plaintive yakking of people who can’t afford to live here insisting that someone change things about Boulder so that they can. Here is a good candidate for eventually living in this 24-square-mile patch of land: Someone who centers his life, sometimes unwillingly, around running; is politically liberal, but annoys most younger liberals; has a physical science degree and an uncompleted graduate education; doesn’t have any particular good or bad life plan; manages to get by at fifty in a pricey environment while seeming to be fucking around outside all day with a dog like a twelve-year old; and has a now-dormant history of rampant substance abuse. I check pretty much every box other than dragging down the per capita income by a few deltas.
I have an post about masks and running that, as it grows, is helplessly veering from an on-topic, letter-to-the-editor-style tsk-tsk-ing into a full-blown verbal holocaust, so that one will probably go only to subscribers. I also have a somewhat related one about a phenomenon I have come to call roving cleavage, which may result in all of my advertisers withdrawing their support even though it’s more harmless than it sounds.
The top two boys’ cross-country teams in New Hampshire, Concord High and Coe-Brown Academy, have now faced off three times on Coe-Brown’s tough home course in this modified season. Division-2 Coe-Brown finished last season ranked by Milesplit within the top 25 in the nation, and graduated only one runner, so any team that can even get a few sticks into their top seven is doing well. The three meet scores, all favoring Coe-Brown, have been 20-40, 22-37 and 24-33. The divisional state championship meets are scheduled for Oct. 31 in Manchester, and D-1 Concord will face Coe-Brown again at the Meet of Champions one week later on a flat layout in Nashua. You can see videos and follow the entire season virtually at NewHampshireCrossCountry.com.
I’m encouraged that most readers understood that my nonchalant and even boisterous descriptions of using a gun to remove critical portions of my thinking apparatus are nothing more than an amplified version of the old “If I reach a point where I can’t control my sphincters, shoot me” that I expect most folks have heard from an aging or deceased friend or relative. Or maybe a self-guided DNR without the need to involve lawyers. A lot of people who value their lives a great deal, which is most of you, find those of us who vacillate between bland acceptance of being alive and active resentment of the experience to be jarring and unwelcome curiosities. If I were someone who had always a good reason to defend their existence, I might be unable to see the sincerity in someone else’s shrugging resignation to just making the nap permanent when the amusements clearly outweigh the banalities. Conservatives among you should be proud that I never plan to make use of a dime of Social Security or Medicare, or whatever is left of them when 2035 arrives. I remain in a manageable enough mental cycle of pseudo-loneliness, wanting to embrace the loneliness in full, and recognizing that I’ll forever be in some sort of conflict if I choose to keep all the variables the same. This gives me something to do besides run and write, so I’ll probably be around a while yet, and besides, it would be wrong to screw all of my subscribers by pulling a disappearing act like that.